On Otto Mühl and the question of when artist and work can no longer be separated
On 10 September, the Vienna Actionism Museum will open an exhibition devoted to Otto Mühl. That alone is enough to bring up the question that has almost become a reflex whenever an artist with a deeply problematic biography is discussed: are we still allowed to show the art of an offender?
Of course we are.
More than that: a museum should be capable of doing so. A museum is not a hall of fame reserved for people who have been awarded a posthumous certificate of moral impeccability. If we began sorting art history according to the personal character of its creators, we would probably first have to build several new storage facilities and then spend the rest of our time arguing about who is still just respectable enough to remain on display.
Caravaggio would make a fine candidate for such a purge. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was not merely a difficult contemporary but a notoriously violent man. He carried weapons illegally, was repeatedly involved in violent confrontations and, in 1606, killed Ranuccio Tomassoni. He subsequently fled Rome. Nor did he manage to maintain the appearance of a peace-loving citizen for very long in Malta: another serious altercation ended with imprisonment, escape and expulsion from the Order of Malta. Yet hardly anyone would seriously suggest taking down The Calling of Saint Matthew because of this.
And rightly so.
Ranuccio Tomassoni did not have to die for Caravaggio to paint that picture. He was neither the material nor a participant in the work. Caravaggio’s violence belongs to his biography and may influence the way we perceive his paintings. With a painter whose work is filled with beheadings, martyrdom, blood and violence, it would in fact be rather peculiar to exclude his biography entirely. In David with the Head of Goliath, the severed head probably even bears Caravaggio’s own features. Life and work speak to one another, but they are not identical.
With Otto Mühl, precisely this dividing line becomes blurred. The so-called commune at Friedrichshof was not simply the private life of an artist who made pictures in the morning and happened to run an authoritarian system after working hours. According to numerous former members, artistic production, self-presentation, sexuality, hierarchy, economic interests and power over other people were closely intertwined. In 1991, Mühl was sentenced to several years in prison for offences including the sexual abuse of minors and rape. People, including children, lived within a system marked by psychological and physical violence. At this point, the familiar question “Can we separate the artist from the work?” no longer takes us very far.
A bad person can, of course, make good art. Artistic talent is not distributed according to moral suitability. It would be convenient if aesthetic ability automatically came with kindness, generosity and impeccably filed tax returns, but cultural history provides only limited evidence for such a connection. Conversely, a wonderful human being can produce utterly unbearable art. Morality and artistic quality are different categories.
The problem begins when wrongdoing does not merely occur somewhere in the artist’s life but reaches into the creation of the art itself. If the person in front of the camera, in the image or taking part in an action is not simply a model or performer but part of a power structure within which the artist exercises control over them, then the problematic context is no longer somewhere outside the frame. It is inside the work itself.
This becomes particularly clear in the current discussion surrounding Mühl’s 1986 work Erdbeben 2: Judith und Dieter (Unfälle im Haushalt), which is being used as the exhibition’s poster image. According to the press material cited by the Austrian newspaper DER STANDARD, no works showing victims of abuse are to be exhibited, and consent has reportedly been obtained for identifiable persons. According to the newspaper’s reporting, however, no consent from the daughter or widow of the now deceased Dieter has been obtained, while the museum maintains that the necessary permissions are in place. What is legally decisive here is best left to those who are paid to read legal texts voluntarily.
I am more interested in the question that comes before it: what does consent mean within a system in which people may not genuinely have been free to say no? Because this is precisely where the difference from an ordinary artistic collaboration lies. I also work with people in front of the camera. I find many of my models through platforms where they offer their services, often explicitly including nude work. We discuss the project, the model can accept or decline, and there is a contractual agreement governing the use of the resulting photographs. Naturally, life can change twenty years later. A new partner may exert considerable pressure because he dislikes the fact that nude photographs of his partner exist in books, exhibitions or collections. That may be deeply uncomfortable for the model, but it does not alter the fact that the original decision was made freely and that an agreed use must remain reliable.
At Friedrichshof, the situation is fundamentally different. There we first have to ask whether a spoken “yes” was ever the expression of an autonomous decision. People living within an authoritarian system do not make decisions under the same conditions as two independent adults collaborating on a photographic project. If a community is shaped by hierarchy, psychological pressure, manipulation, dependency and the authority of a central figure, the formal possibility of saying no may still exist while the actual possibility has long since disappeared.
You do not have to hold a gun to someone’s head in order to compel consent. Social exclusion, humiliation, loss of recognition, group pressure and years of conditioning are less spectacular, but no less effective. It is therefore not enough simply to say, “The person agreed.” The crucial question is: Did that yes have a genuinely available no as an alternative? Could someone say: No, I do not want to participate in this action. No, I do not want to be photographed. No, I do not want this image to be published. And could that person then simply continue living there without punishment, humiliation, psychological pressure or loss of status within the community?
Only when that possibility exists does consent acquire the meaning we normally attribute to it. A contract does not automatically make consent free. A signature, too, can be produced under circumstances in which saying no has effectively been abolished. This is precisely why today’s debate about the rights of those depicted leads directly back to the conditions under which these images were created. Perhaps this is even the decisive difference from Caravaggio: in his case, we know of an offender whose crimes lay outside the concrete creation of many of his works. With Mühl, we have to ask whether the power structure itself extended into the production of the images. If it did, the problematic context is no longer behind the work. It is inscribed within it.
There is another issue. A museum in 2026 does not simply take historical documents out of a box and place them neutrally on a wall. Making an exhibition is itself an act. Selection is an act. Contextualisation is an act. Turning an image into the exhibition poster is certainly an act. We are therefore not only in 1986. We are very much in 2026. The museum decides today which work represents the exhibition, which image is used to advertise it, which words accompany it and which story is told.
This is where the exhibition title Kunst am Abgrund — Art on the Brink — begins to leave an unpleasant aftertaste. It sounds elegant, slightly dangerous, slightly forbidden, almost sexy. The brink, after all, is a wonderful place as long as you are standing in front of it with a glass of wine and a sufficient safety distance. The problem is that other people apparently did not live on the brink. They were inside it. If former members are right in saying that art formed part of a system of self-presentation and domination, it would be rather cheap to turn that very context once again into the exciting aura of an exhibition. Real suffering would become the little dose of darkness that makes an advertising campaign more interesting.
That would indeed be perfidious. Not because Mühl’s art should not be shown, but because the scandal would once again belong to the artist: his transgression, his radicalism, his abyss. And the people on whom that abyss had concrete consequences would remain supporting characters in his grand artistic narrative. Perhaps this is precisely where the responsibility of a museum lies: not in making problematic art disappear, but in refusing to allow it the comfort of its own legend.
We should show Otto Mühl. We should show Caravaggio. We should show art made by people whose biographies make us uncomfortable, who failed morally or even committed crimes. Art history must not become a collection of posthumous certificates of good conduct. A museum does not have to be a moral laundrette. But neither should it become a rehabilitation centre in which the passing of enough decades transforms an offender back into a comfortably radical artist.
Showing is not the same as venerating. Contextualising is not the same as excusing. And moral criticism is not automatically censorship. Sometimes artist and work can indeed be separated, perhaps more often than current debates suggest. Not every wrongdoing committed by a person thereby becomes part of their oeuvre. But the possibility of separation diminishes the closer the wrongdoing comes to the creation of the work.
And at some point the boundary disappears entirely. Not because the artist was an offender, but because the person over whom he exercised power became part of the image itself. Then the crucial question is no longer whether we are allowed to show the art of an offender. Of course we are.
The far more uncomfortable question is: Can we show it without once again adopting exclusively the offender’s point of view? And perhaps there is another question as well: Who actually owns the story this image tells? Once the victim remains in the picture, the artist should no longer be the only person allowed to provide the answer.