c 1957 - c 1976
Europe
A group of Viennese artists from the late 1950s to mid 1970s who devised thematically related "actions" -- politically charged and outside the art world, often brutally explicit, sexual, and sadomasochistic. Actionism was a reaction against the canonization of creativity in 1950s art movements such as Abstract Expressionism, and came before the performance and body art that followed in the 1960s and 1970s.
