17 Facts About Otto Muehl

In 1943, Muehl had to serve in the German Wehrmacht.

Otto Muehl was promoted to lieutenant, and in 1944 he took part in infantry battles in the course of the Ardennes Offensive.

Otto Muehl was released in 1997, after serving six and a half years, and set up a smaller commune in Portugal.

Otto Muehl made rhizomatic structures with scrap iron, but soon proceeded to the "Aktion" in the vein of the New York Happenings.

Otto Muehl regarded the "happening as a bourgeois art form, mere art".

When, on top of that, Otto Muehl was arrested and imprisoned in 1991, the commune fell apart.

In 1998, Otto Muehl moved to Faro, Portugal to live in a new commune experiment.

For example, Otto Muehl did not expose himself to the rituals of the Aktionsanalyse.

Otto Muehl created a "structure", in which all community members were placed in a hierarchical pecking order by numbering them.

Otto Muehl established a "first wife" and prepared his son to become his successor.

Paradoxically, in the hierarchical level right below Otto Muehl was a strong matriarchal element of rival women, according to Schlothauer.

Otto Muehl became a painter in the expressionist style, and held regular lessons on painting for his communards in his Friedrichshof commune.

Otto Muehl directed several short movies there, such as the "Friedrichshofer Kinderfilme", which starred the children born within the commune.

In spite of his Parkinson's disease, Otto Muehl continued to be artistically active into old age.

Between 1998 and his death Otto Muehl had two major solo exhibitions at the Vienna Museum for applied art.

In 2010 Otto Muehl celebrated his 85th birthday, on this occasion the Leopold Museum in Vienna showed an extensive exhibition of his late work.

In 2010 Otto Muehl issued a public apology regarding the role he played in the Friedrichshof Commune.