The Vienna Aktion Group formed the most provocative, insurgent and challenging of all the worldwide art movements of the 1960s. Their sexually-charged and anti-social actions exacted a profound and irreparable upheaval in the way in which art was conceived. Using their own bodies as raw material, the Aktion Group undertook experiments in cruelty that disassembled the human body and its acts into compacted gestures of blood, meat and excreta. The films of the Vienna Aktion Group - made both by the group themselves, and by collaborators such as Kurt Kren - form the essential residue, debris and evidence of their performances. Film forms the sensitized medium - as unique and ferocious in its impact as the corporeal material upon which the Aktion Group worked - that allied itself most intimately to their experiments. For the first time, this book focuses on those films as fully revealing the obsessions, ambitions and outrages of the Aktion Group. The iconoclastic work of the Vienna Aktion Group is now more contemporary than ever before, and THE ART OF DESTRUCTION provides a comprehensive introduction to that work in both film and performance. Fully illustrated and annotated, this is a book of compelling interest to all students of film, art and performance, and for all readers engaged with questioning social and corporate cultures.

スティーヴン・バーバーは、ウィーン・アクショニズムの破壊衝動を芸術として解剖します。肉体を物質へ還元する彼らの営みは、醜聞を超え生の本質を抉る探求です。著者の峻烈な筆致は、既成の美学を瓦解させる狂気を情熱的に浮き彫りにします。 本書の白眉は、映像を記録以上の残留物と定義し、その意義を解く点です。行為が映像に刻まれるとき、暴力は永劫の表現へと昇華されます。テキストの深い洞察と映像の剥き出しの衝撃。その交錯に、読者は既存の価値観が根底から覆される戦慄を覚えるはずです。