The following year he left graphic arts without a degree and worked in the summer as a student trainee for C. F. Boehringer und Soehne GmbH in Mannheim.
He worked as a graphic artist and took part in campaigns by Viennese actionists such as Otto Muehl and Hermann Nitsch.
His first and most famous action was performed on February 6, 1965, titled "Wedding": Schwarzkogler shows a private ritual with religious, shamanistic and alchemical elements at a table covered with a white tablecloth, on which there are dead fish, a dead chicken, various animal organs, eggs, colored liquids, a knife and scissors.
“He was interested in eating, drinking and fasting, he prescribed himself obscure cures and ablutions and other very simple physical experiences; it was not about fitness, but about purity.
The castration theme in some of them — for example, in Aktion 2 he posed with a sliced open fish covering his groin — have additionally fueled this myth.
Additionally, the protagonist of the Aktion in which the cutting of a penis was simulated was not Schwarzkogler himself, but his friend and model, the renowned photographer Heinz Cibulka.