Sacrificial animal-carcass performance art debuted in America through a film programming network

Evidence

The night after Kusama put polka dots on Jesus, a flayed lamb was nailed to the cross on Wooster Street. Beside a Village Voice ad for Self-Obliteration (and a larger one offering the 16mm film) was a notice worthy of Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf. … The venue for this sinister sounding Gesamtkunstwerk—the American debut of a twenty-nine-year-old Viennese action artist already notorious in Europe—was the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque. … The Austrian filmmaker Peter Kubelka had apprised Jonas Mekas of Nitsch, a painter who graduated from tachisme abstraction to sacramental performances that typically involved disemboweled animal cadavers. Learning that the artist was invited to participate in the Destruction in Art Symposium that Jon Hendricks and Ralph Ortiz were organizing at Judson Church, Mekas booked him into the Cinematheque for two performances. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1186

Categorization

• XREF: The routing of Nitsch through a film curator into a venue shows the same cross-medium institutional mediation that characterizes the whole chapter and the shelf’s claims about art’s infrastructure.