Exhibitions

At the end of 1967, Hermann Nitsch received a postcard from his friend Peter Kubelka, who was working at the UN film archive in New York at the time and was a member of the board of the Film Makers' Cooperative founded by Jonas Mekas. Kubelka wrote that he could arrange for Nitsch to be invited to America to perform two performances of the Orgien Mysterien Theater. Nitsch packed his bags and traveled to New York at the beginning of 1968. Within a few weeks, he was able to realize a total of four performances in America. This trip was a great success for Hermann Nitsch and also marked the beginning of a lifelong friendship with the filmmaker, author and artist Jonas Mekas.

Jonas Mekas was born in Lithuania in 1922 and emigrated to the United States in 1949. Shortly after his arrival in New York, he began to record his life in a diary with a cine camera. He soon became involved in the American avant-garde film movement and founded the magazine “Film Culture” with his brother Adolfas Mekas in 1954. In 1958 Jonas Mekas became the first full-time film critic for the weekly newspaper Village Voice, in 1962 he founded the Film-Makers' Cooperative and in 1964 the Film-Makers' Cinematheque, which eventually became the Anthology Film Archives, one of the world's largest and most important collections of avant-garde film to this day.

As a filmmaker, Jonas Mekas accompanied renowned artists such as Andy Warhol, Nico, George Maciunas, Yoko Ono, John Lennon and Salvador Dalí with his camera. His works have been shown at the Biennale di Venezia, documenta 14 in Kassel, the Tate Modern in London, the Center Pompidou in Paris and the MoMA in New York, among others. His work has influenced generations of filmmakers and artists such as Jim Jarmusch, John Waters and Chantal Akerman. Jonas Mekas died in Brooklyn in 2019 at the age of 96.

“Scenes from the Life of Hermann Nitsch” is an informal, personal film portrait created over the course of several decades. Beginning with excerpts from the earliest actions of 1968 in New York and Cincinnati, the camera accompanies Hermann Nitsch through Prinzendorf, Vienna, New York and Naples until 1995. Jonas Mekas filmed all but a few scenes himself and shows Nitsch together with his friends Peter Kubelka, Raimund Abraham, Günter Brus, George Maciunas, Giuseppe Morra and many others.

The nitsch museum would like to thank Sebastian Mekas and Rita Nitsch for their kind support.

“Scenes from the Life of Hermann Nitsch” (60 min., video). Filmed 1968-1995. edited 2010