Here’s an except from an article in News August, 30, 2007 titled “Yes, we wanted to kill!” Three Styrian youths planned to murder a woman. They wanted to hear death cries, so they set bird chicks on fire. Nineteen-year-old Karlheinz recalls that Daniel told him how “terrific” it is to kill animals. “We got right down to it.” says Daniel, “I took a cigarette lighter and tried to set the animals alight, but they didn’t burn very well. So I went to a garbage bin and took some newspaper.” The fifteen-year-old placed it under the nest and set it alight. “There was a small fireworks. Three chicks burned to ash, but two were still alive. “We tossed one up and kicked it with our feet. We took the other and placed it on the sidewalk.” Then Daniel and Karlheinz took sharp stones and alternated in hitting the bird until its head was severed. “After that, we took photos of the dead bird with our cell phones.”
from Violence under the Guise of Art
or Third Reich Recycling
by Herbert Kuhner
In 1973 the news media reported that Valie Export had poured boiling wax over live birds. Recently Export has claimed that the birds were dead before she poured the wax over them.
This version was “confimed” by the late Kristian Sotriffer, an art critic: “The birds were of course not ‘preserved’ in wax while they were alive ….The report in the yellow press was fictitious and was designed to cause an uproar among petit bourgeois readers.”
In 1977 Valie Export was brought to trial for having engaged in cruelty to animals and found guilty of having tied a canary to a perch. However the scalding of the birds with boiling wax, which had been filmed, came under the statute of limitations. This “art object” was on view as part of the Export Exhibition, introduced by Jelinek, in the Museum of the Twentieth Century in Vienna in March of 1997. On March 17, 1997, in Treffpunkt Kultur, a program devoted to culture on ORF, Austrian State TV, films by Export were broadcast. In one scene Export uses a bloody kitchen knife to slice the neck of a turtle, a mouse and a parrot, but the actual decapitations are deleted by film cutting.
Valie Export “herself”: “A bird is tied to a rostrum with thin cord. I kneel in front of the bird on the rostrum and pour hot liquid wax on it. Then I pour wax on my feet and my left hand; the wax container is knocked over and the bird’s head is covered with wax. I free myself by cutting the cord with a knife which I lifted from the rostrum with my mouth and use it. The rostrum is encircled by nails.”
(During the Third Reich children were taught to kill birds in a camp called Kinderland, which translates as “Children’s Land.”)
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