Caroline Lillian Schopp's new book *In-action: Viennese Actionism and the Passivities of Performance Art* (2025) offers a revisionist history of Viennese Actionism, a movement retroactively named in 1970 by Peter Weibel and Valie Export. Schopp introduces the term "in-action" to describe a politics of artistic action that emphasizes intimacy, hesitation, and vulnerability rather than the violent or liberatory extremes typically associated with the movement. She expands the canon to include women artists such as Anna Brus, Hanel Koeck, and Ingrid Wiener, and reexamines the work of Rudolf Schwarzkogler, whose death was mythologized as a suicide by self-castration but was actually a fall from a window. Through close readings of photographs, Schopp argues that Schwarzkogler's performances were characterized by passivity and "in-sincerity," challenging the dominant narrative of actionism as aggressive or heroic.
This matters because Schopp's book makes a significant historiographical intervention in the study of performance art, questioning the assumption that "action" is the organizing principle of the genre. By foregrounding passivity, dependency, and vulnerability, she offers a new framework for understanding not only Viennese Actionism but also broader questions about the politics of artistic and political action. The book also recovers the contributions of women artists who have been marginalized in the actionist canon, and it challenges the sensationalized mythology surrounding figures like Schwarzkogler. For scholars and curators of performance art, this work provides a nuanced alternative to established narratives, potentially reshaping how the movement is taught and exhibited.