The German government has invested around 900,000 euros to prevent forty years of video-art history in Germany turning into just »static on the screen«. This was the dismal, but accurate forecast that Wulf Herzogenrath, director of the Kunsthalle Bremen, laid before the newly founded German Federal Cultural Foundation in 2002. The result, »40jahrevideokunst.de – Digital Heritage: Video Art in Germany from 1963 to the Present«, is now there: a carefully handpicked selection of 59 historically important one-channel videos in a study edition, documented in book form with video excerpts on DVD, as well as five simultaneous exhibitions that could have acted as transmission belts for this expensive and significant rescue operation, but have only done so to a limited extent.
The fact that the existential endangerment of video art gravely changes its aesthetic manifestations, and that this cultural asset epitomises the logic of permanent renewal that is dictated by the media industry’s high rate of innovation and thus demands a completely different treatment and different critical perception than conventional artistic media were all things that should have been articulated more clearly as a central message. Instead, this belated national endeavour – apart from the videos from the study edition that were shown at all five venues – has been presented to the public in the form of five different exhibitions of widely varying quality. What is more, their respective emphases are not reflected by the accompanying publication, which is particularly regrettable in the case of the little-known, unofficial video works from the East Germany of the eighties focusing on Leipzig.
Herzogenrath is the only person who contributed his own, slim catalogue to his exhibition. He put on an illuminating exhibition in which the first experimental phase of media art in the sixties was presented once more, and even offered a rediscovery that is barely known here in Germany: Karl Gerstner´s early Berlin action with television, »Auto Vision« of 1963/1964, which later only received attention in Switzerland, could be seen for the first time after some costly restoration work. In it, there are nine Perspex sheets set up in front of the same television programme, which is transformed into nine alienated, sometimes abstract programmes by the differently shaped Perspex lenses. Gerstner wrote in 2005 that he had not been concerned with »the transmission of programmes« but with »the production of programmes«.
This almost humorous, pop-art-inspired »disruption« of what all-powerful stations unleash upon their viewers is – as a gesture – no less radical than the physical interventions that the young Nam June Paik, gently and with a friendly smile, carried out on TV sets in the Wuppertal Galerie Parnass in March 1963. What can be seen of this already historic embodiment of the work is the page-long handwritten concept – with Paik’s polite preliminary piece of information, not in the least intended as an apology, that his TV was not always interesting, but not always uninteresting either -, a photographic documentation of the Parnass event as well as the reconstruction of Paik’s collection of equipment for the Musée d’art contemporain in Lyons (1995).
Herzogenrath´s restaging of Paik’s reconstructed video works for the Wuppertal exhibition »Exposition of Music – Electronic Television« shows vividly the kind of changes to which installations in particular are subject in the course of time and how important it is to have a good documentation of the original realisation. What is also very nice here is the new presentation of Wolf Vostell`s installation »TV-dé-coll/age«,, also reconstructed for Lyons in 1995, which he made for the Smolin Gallery in New York in 1963 and which is displayed opposite from Paik´s work. Whereas Paik followed a humorous, playful and extremely experimental approach, taking technology ad absurdum and using it to create new aesthetic forms, Vostell developed painterly sequences on the monitor that function at a very visual level and have their aesthetic roots in the »art informel« of the fifties.
The presentation at the K21Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf displayed a similar degree of effort. It focused on various approaches to video art in West Germany in the eighties, a decade in which the move from monitor presentation to installation began. However, the exhibition was concerned with a technologically up-to-date presentation of the video works and doing justice to their content, not a reconstruction of their historical modes of presentation. Those who still remember dismal monitor presentations are surprised at how sometimes the artists themselves have changed the appearance of their works using alternative procedures and formats of visualisation or different exhibition contexts, so close to the time the works were originally created. The presentation on a monitor is only one among many options for making an image visible, and this fact could be studied with great enjoyment at the maturely conceived exhibition at the K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf. There is a special section appropriately equipped with TV monitors and comfortable armchairs for the works that manifest a particular relationship between video art and television. They include Klaus von Bruch’s alternative report on the Schleyer murder and Hanno Baethe’s shattering artistic documentation on the death by AIDS of the actor Kurt Raab.
One shortcoming of the project 40jahrevideokunst.de is that the exhibition, at least, does not make it clear enough how changeable the »work status« of this medium is, and what consequences the preservation measures that will be necessary within a decade, such as copying or digitisation, will have for the appearance of a work. The Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe (ZKM), where all the tapes were conserved using the latest methods and around 14 tapes were restored, and where there has been a »laboratory for antiquated video systems« for some years, missed this chance and limited itself instead largely to exhibiting archaic-looking devices. What does the »model-like restoration of the electronic information«, which was after all the main research emphasis of the project, mean? What technology, what model, what measure was chosen from among which possibilities? What new paths are emerging for the preservation of videos? These could all be essential questions for the planned second part of 40jahrevideokunst.de.
40jahrevideokunst.de, Part 1 – Digitales Erbe: Videokunst in Deutschland von 1963 bis heute; 25 March to 21 May 2006; Kunsthalle Bremen: The 60s; K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf: The 80s; Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich: Update 06; Museum der Bildenden Künste, Leipzig: Revision.GDR; ZKM, Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe: Revision.ZKM.
The catalogue with excerpts from the 59 video works on DVD was published by Hatje Cantz Verlag.
http://www.40jahrevideokunst.de
Translated by Timothy Jones