Unsurprisingly, such artists received a great deal of attention, something that West very much wanted for himself. There is nothing to catch people’s eye like pissing in public and drinking your urine, shitting while singing the national anthem (again publicly), and covering your body with shit while masturbating-all of which Günter Brus did. Key to West’s development was his reaction to Vienna’s best-known avant-garde group, the Actionists-Günter Brus, Hermann Nitsch, Otto Muehl, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, and others. He hung in there, and by the 1980s found his work increasingly exhibited, both in Austria and abroad. West, however, was charming, inspired, and possessed of a real-if unorthodox and complicated-talent for friendship (attested to in the catalogue by the recollections of numerous friends and collaborators). 1 An odd duck who at first sold his work in the street, he took drugs and drank heavily, got beaten up and thrown out of bars, and seemed to many just a satellite of his flamboyant older half-brother, performance artist Otto Kobalek. West, largely self-taught, was strongly attracted to the new art scene, but in his early days he was clearly a peripheral character. It ultimately opened things up and provided space for a radical, anti-establishment art in a city that was set in its artistic ways.
Those postwar years in Austria were grim, but the general air of disorder and breakdown had positive aspects. West was born in Vienna in 1947, the son of a Communist coal merchant of Serbian origin, Ferdinand Zokan, with whom he did not get along at all, and Emilie West, a cultivated, warm, artistic Jewish dentist, whom he greatly loved (and whose name he took).
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