Destruction art incurred actual legal prosecution in late-sixties London

Evidence

Nitsch, whose influences included Jung and Nietzsche, as well as Artaud, maintained that in order to confront spectators with their own existential reality, Happenings had to go deeper into “cruelty, terror, [and] ritual.” His Fifth Action, in which performers were washed in the blood of a crucified lamb, had been the scandal of the three-day Destruction in Art Symposium held fifteen months earlier at the Africa Centre in London. Making Nitsch’s name, the piece also led to the prosecution of the organizer Gustav Metzger, fined a hundred pounds for having presented an “indecent exhibition.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1187

Categorization

• XREF: The legal prosecution of a gallery organizer for ‘indecent exhibition’ connects to the CoCo (obscenity) prosecutions in the same era—useful for the reader’s argument about illegality as a material condition of avant-garde production.