Performance artist Marco Antonio Ettedgui interviews Austrian artist Alfred Wenemoser (who has been residing in Venezuela since 1980). After introducing him in a brief summary, he asks him to explain “his own way of conceptualizing art.” Both artists center the conversation on the installation Transfiguraciones, shown by Wenemoser at the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna. As he analyzes his work, he explains the fundamental intention of his art, the alteration of the spectator’s sensory perception. The goal is to create a new reality in both a physical and psychological sense. Wenemoser refers to the themes of art and life, and political and social content that arose in Vienna in the 1960s and 1970s, and his own way of connecting art and life through perception.

Austrian conceptual artist Alfred Wenemoser (b. 1954) settled in Caracas in February 1980. The interview conducted in August of that same year by journalist, actor, and performance artist Marco Antonio Ettdgui (1958–81) was one of the first published documents on Wenemoser in Venezuela. The documentary interest of this text stems from the fact that it was written by Ettedgui, who was also an artist well versed in Conceptual art, and especially, on contemporary action art. It is one of the first testimonials by a foreign artist (based in Venezuela), but it also possesses historical value: as it concerns an artist from Austria where, in the 1980s, the action art that arose in the 1960s was still being practiced, which was characterized by Expressionism and ritualism that was, at times, brutal. In the interview, Ettedgui mentions (although he does not describe the works) some highly controversial Austrian artists that dominated the contemporary scene during the era in which Wenemoser was gaining recognition in his country: Günther Brus, Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler, founders of the Wiener Aktionismus [Viennese Action, 1964]. Bloody and sadomasochistic, their ritual themes were presented as art connected to life (although understood as a form of criticism of society, morality, and bourgeois values). In the interview in Caracas, as Wenemoser speaks about his art, he states that it has to do with the Gestalt mechanism, emphasizing the relationship between art and life, which, in his work, plays out as a function of perception.

Beginning in 1980, Wenemoser was based in Venezuela, becoming part of the artistic scene along with the group of artists from his generation, whose work was consolidated in the 1970s. Intellectual affinity and friendship would link him to Roberto Obregón, Héctor Fuenmayor, Sigfredo Chacón, Eugenio Espinoza, Claudio Perna, Miguel von Dangel, and Álvaro Sotillo. Without a doubt, the Austrian artist imparted the experience and aesthetic knowledge of the Austrian tradition, at the time one of the most intense and complex in modern art. And for his part, in 1980s Venezuela, Wenemoser found a scene that was calmer, although possessed of immense possibilities for the development of his project: “My work is a configuration of real situations. Not a situation in social reality, but in a reality that I modify through perception.”