The Theory, Theater, Performance program of the University of Indiana Bloomington has invited Prof. Schopp to give a keynote lecture at their Second Annual Graduate Student Conference, Afterlives and Otherlives: Performance, Passivity, and Possibility in the Time of Catastrophe. Schopp’s lecture, “Disinclination: Viennese Actionism and the Figure of Anna Brus,” will introduce her forthcoming book, In-action: Viennese Actionism and the Passivities of Performance Art, due out imminently with University of Chicago Press. 

Decentering the traditional focus on the male protagonists of Viennese Actionism—Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler—In-action draws attention to women who performed with them, including Anna Brus, Hanel Koeck, and Ingrid Wiener. Doing so brings into view how performances best known for their graphic violence indeed scrutinize intimate relationships like marriages, partnerships, and friendships, as well as the conventions of traditional artistic media such as painting and tapestry.

In a recent interview with performance artist Florentina Holzinger, “Performing Aftercare” (Texte zur Kunst), Schopp revisits some of these concerns. Together with Holzinger, whose work has been seen as an extension of the spectacle of Viennese Actionism, Schopp thinks about the continuities of fin-de-siècle iconographies of misogyny in the present.