The work of the Actionists developed concurrently with—but largely independently from—other avant garde movements of the era that shared an interest in rejecting object-based or otherwise commodifiable art practices.
Often, brief jail terms were served by participants for violations of decency laws, and their works were targets of moral outrage.
In June 1968 Günter Brus began serving a six-month prison sentence for the crime of "degrading symbols of the state" after an action in Vienna at which he simultaneously masturbated, covered his body with his own faeces and sang the Austrian national anthem, and later fled the country to avoid a second arrest.
Hermann Nitsch served a two-week prison term in 1965 after his participation with Rudolf Schwarzkogler in the Festival of Psycho-Physical Naturalism.
"[3] While the nature and content of each artist's work differed, there are distinct aesthetic and thematic threads connecting the Actions of Brus, Mühl, Nitsch, and Schwarzkogler.
Use of the body as both surface and site of art-making seems to have been a common point of origin for the Actionists in their earliest departures from conventional painting practices in the late '50s and early '60s.
The Austrian filmmaker Kurt Kren participated in the documentation of Actions as early as 1964, producing a body of Actionist related works that stand as historic avant-garde films in their own right for their use of rapid editing.