Anticipating such subculturally sanctioned avatars of excrementality as John Waters or G.G.Allin, the Viennese art collective known as the Actionists enlarged the boundaries of tastelessness to a degree that can still shock and offend.

The Actionist canon is currently the subject of major surveys by two New York galleries.

Posted at the entrance to Baron/Boisante Editions [50 West 57th Street; 212.581.9191] is the following disclaimer: "Notice: The Viennese Actionists often attacked taboos and repression through their performances; accordingly, some of the films and photos in this exhibition are explicitly sexual, gory, or scatological. Omitting material which might be offensive would compromise the integrity of any exhibition representing the work..."

Inside, the generically titled Actionism Gunter Brus, Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch, Rudolf Schwarzkogler films and photos of the 1960's actions actualizes Otto Muehl's 1962 declaration that "the aesthetics of the dungheap are the moral means against conformism, materialism and stupidity". On display are cinematic and photographic artifacts demonstrating how the Actionists created the conduit through which elements including urine showers, coprophila [shit-worship], bestiality, and animal sacrifice were introduced into art's lexicon.

The program of films, approximately three hours in length, revisits Actionism's challenge to the accumulated dogmas of church, family, and state.

For the spectator visually immersed in these real-time relics�of what Gunter Brus called "cesspool aesthetics"�the experience offers the ocular equivalent of skin-diving....in someone else's skin.

"All agony and lust", Hermann Nitsch theorized in 1962, "mixed to a single state of intoxication, will penetrate me and therefore you."

The ritualized meat-play of Nitsch's Orgy-Mystery Theatre unfolds amid blood- and-viscera-slathered scenes of Dionysian rapture and anti-Christic blasphemy.

[An installation by the hugely accomplished, extravagantly profilic Nitsch is included in the current Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary art --MOCA-- exhibit Out of Actions: Between Performance and The Object, 1949-1979.]

In Otto Muehl's filmed Actions, the human body is depersonalized into a foodstuff-like prop, garnished by Muehl with syrups, powders and pigments or composed into meticulously obscene tableaux vivants . In the 1968 filmed action With Verve into the New Year , Gunter Brus's wife Anni fellates Otto Muehl ; in Kind Regard for Mother's Day From Otto Muehl [1968], Anni Brus sits at a table holding her baby, while in the foreground, the ever-enigmatic Schwarzkogler operates a suction-pump gizmo attached to Muehl's penis. Further essentializing Muehl's actions were the "golden showers" of Country Rider's Club [1969], the diarrheic "hot lunches" of Scheiss-Kerl [1969] [the latter featuring a lapsed, enema-friendly Dior model]--and 1970's onscreen decapitation of a live goose [listed in the credits as "eine Gans"], which was then thrust into a comely young [human] vagina.

More dead poultry appears in a photo-montage from Schwarzkogler's Sixth and final action, performed once only in the doomed artist's Vienna apartment in Spring, 1966. These clinically monochromatic compositions, centering on the bandaged-wrapped Schwarzkloger engaged in a tortuous rite intelligible only to the artist�exist in stark and clinical contradistinction to the gaping aperatures and sticky wet-work of his fellow Actionists. [In the three years following this Action, Schwarzkloger grew gradually more depressed and despondent, and finally suffered a fatal fall from his apartment window on June 20, 1969].

Images of Brus's brutely fetishistic S&M fantasy Breaking Point the artist's own words, describing why this Action was his last: "The actor is aggressive against himself and against surrounding objects, as a result of which appropriate reactions are set free: self-injury, rattling sounds in the throat, strangulation, flogging, spastic behavior and so forth. Shock-like impulses should be emitted....". Lest he, too, be driven to a Schwarzkoglerian fate, Brus abandoned performance and turned to painting.

Not surprisingly, the Actionists' adherance to their own doctrine of unregenerate psycho-physicality and blunt visual trauma would place them at constant contretemps with the law.

According to a Baron/Boisante press release, in 1968, while performing at Vienna University, "Brus undressed, cut himself with a razor, urinated in a glass and drank his urine, smeared his body with feces and sang the Austian national anthem while masturbating (for which he was arrested for degrading state symbols and sentenced to six months detention.)" [Otto Muehl's role in this public action earned him one month behind bars for the crime of "inflicting light bodily injury".]

Muehl, who in the early Seventies established the polygamous Actions-Analytic Commune a/k/a AA Kommune, was in 1991 imprisoned for child abuse. Art-world insiders say Muehl was framed--the fall-guy in a factional dispute within the quirky community.

The Soft Toy Department has learned that Otto Muehl was released from prison last year--an event that, until now,has passed unnoticed in the English-language press.

A more specialized exploration of the Actionists is on view at Janos Gat Gallery [1100 Madison Avenue; 212.327.0441]: KURT KREN--Film Photography Viennese Actionism / Actions of Otto Muehl and Guenther [sic]Brus. Kren, who himself figures as a prop in various Actions--and whose cine documents are also part of the Los Angeles MOCA exhibit-- is the definitive chronicler of Muehl and Brus. .... Notes gallerist Janos Gat: "Kurt Kren's films were not mere documentation, but an innovative artform..." Kren's lenswork lovingly probes the Actionist influx and outflux of puckered female vulvae, slimy unguents, and winking assholes--a swampy, grainy cacaphony of images that range from the xenoid to the penoid as Kren imposes his own vision on Muehl's schmutzy, polymorphous orgies and Brus's tortured self-sculpture.

Also featured by Janos Gat are two photographs from Schwarzkogler's mythical Third Aktion -- featuring the pallid flesh, the stark composition, and the suggestively bandaged penis of ectomorphic Actionist model Heinz Cibulka.

Not even the Soft Toy Department could overstate the Actionists' contribution to the look and feel of these times.....

To the same degreee that the Aktionists's mangled sexualism anticipated a world in which life and lowlife would become indistinguishable, artist Joe Coleman exists as a shamanistic voice of America's preterite -- channeling an apocalyptic mythos of loserism that posits humanity as Disease, and violent death as Cure. In rendering such essences as the libidinal and the limbic, the sacred and the profane, Coleman's paintings are grisly narratives that track the inhabitants of his personal cosmology as they seek -- and fail to find -- redemption through the flesh.

Rest in Pieces: A Portrait of Joe Coleman is a feature-length, low-budget documentary by 33-year-old Transylvanian director Robert Pejo -- funded, curiously, by the Austrian Film Commission and Austrian Television (ORF). R.I.P. explores the processes through which Coleman -- known to be Charles Manson's favorite artist -- deifies such murder stylists as Ed Gein, Richard Speck and Carl Panzram. Also explicated are the live geek-shows and publicly detonated explosions that also define Coleman's one-of-a-kind niche in American life.

R.I.P., in addition to offering a warm tribute to the veiny, carbuncular verisimilitude of Coleman's paintings, anatomizes the artist's life as he works and soliloquizes amid his collection of medical specimens and other oddities in his Coney Island studio and as he schmoozes with such cronies as director Jim Jarmusch, author Manuel DeLanda and rockabilly legend Hasil Adkins [who performs R.I.P.'s soundtrack]. The film goes on location with Coleman as he haunts the tenderloin districts of Budapest, Hungary, where Coleman enjoys a fanatical following. Among his most ardent Hungarian fans, in fact, is the local medical examiner, who gives Coleman--and the film crew--a V.I.P.'s access to the municipal dissecting facilities, including a complimentary cadaver. Operating a bonesaw with a skill and savoir-faire that an Actionist would envy, Coleman is shown popping open a cranial cavity to reveal its whorled contents, and otherwise discorporating the cadaver as though she were Satan's Sunday dinner.

Another dangerous Brooklynite--if only to himself--is gonzo zinemeister Gene Suicide, publisher of the film-zine Sex and Guts. From his hideaway in the toxic wilds of Williamsburg, the aptly named Mr. Suicide wages xerographic warfare on the entertainment-industrial state and all who feed at its trough. Even by the hyperactive grading curve of zinedom, Suicide's beery ruminations on life, love and the dark side of town are an urgent reminder that high talent and low self-esteem make for stimulating bedfellows. He exerts a kamikaze's editorial acumen in invasive Q&A's with exponents of "Cut-Throat Cinema" ranging from Nick Zedd and Lydia Lunch to Sex Pistols/ Johnny Thunders documentarian Lech Kowalski to....The Soft Toy Department's very own Mark Kramer--in an exclusive profile titled "Fear and Loathing in Joe Christ's Pants".

Sex and Guts. Don't leave hell without it.

Joe Coleman fotos by Mark Kramer. Muehl foto courtesy of Baron/Boisante Editions. Otto Muehl: "the horny woman", from a 1970 Action. Gene Suicide foto by Solange Monnier.