Visual Arts in Germany: Exhibitions and Artist Portraits

An exhibition in the Museum Ludwig explores the development of the two rival technologies of video and film – differences and similarities, convergences as well as divergences.

You can’t miss the exhibition, which takes up the entire basement of the Museum Ludwig, because the conspicuously huge video installation Brandenburger Tor (1992) by Nam June Paik is also the entrance to the comprehensive overview exhibition on the history of Moving Pictures in Art. After a time-consuming and scientifically-orientated overhaul and in some cases laborious restoration of the works, the film and video collection belonging to the Museum Ludwig can now be seen again for the first time in 30 years. The large-scale installations alone are 55 in number, including works by Aernout Mik, Mike Kelley and Guy Ben-Ner, a further 270 or so works can be accessed from separate video stations.

Early videos from Cologne

The fact that the first experimental films and early videos ended up in the museum collection as early as 1974 can be attributed to the remarkable situation in the Rhineland, and in Cologne particularly. This city was the melting pot in which during the 1960s and early 1970s the most diverse art trends – as well as pop and concept art this even included Happening and Fluxus, video, electronics and film – mutually stimulated one another and were significantly supported by the Mary Baumeister Studio, gallery owners such as Ingrid Oppenheim and Garry Schum with Ursula Wewers, and the Cologne Art Association under the directorship of video expert Wulf Herzogenrath and the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR; West German Broadcasting).

From 16 mm to space-creating projection

Where time of origin, size/scope, technology and content are concerned, the spectrum of the works is diverse: it ranges from what must be the smallest video installation with self-mocking experiments of his own by sculptor Georg Herold, 16 mm films by Jack Goldstein, to the grotesque large-scale 5-channel projection by Aernout Mik.

It is with pleasure that visitors embark upon the roller-coaster of the presentations. Even the uninitiated realise that some artists draw on a mixture of language and image for their time-critical opinions (Ferdinand Kriwet), whereas others tend to base their work around drawing instead (Michal Heiman), and yet others use video for the manifestation of their spectacular sculptural efforts (Gordon Matta-Clark). The room itself is incorporated into the artists’ work in various ways. As well as exclusively art-based or media-critical approaches, socio-political themes cover a large area and are timeless.

Video vs. film

But what ultimately distinguishes this event from past overview exhibitions, such as 40 Jahre Videokunst (40 years of video art), or even from presentations of private collections, is that it is the first attempt to explore and follow the development of the two rival technologies of video and film with their differences and similarities, and sometimes convergences as well as divergences, both in the context of art as well as in relation to their commercial uses in the cinema and TV. The exhibition catalogue published by curator Barbara Engelbach offers new and surprising insight on the subject.

Crossing media boundaries

It’s surely more than a coincidence that two pioneering if short-lived institutions were both founded at the same time in the context of the 2nd Cologne Art Fair in 1968: one of these was XSCREEN, the Cologne studio for independent film masterminded by Birgit and Wilhelm Hein, whose Rohfilm was exemplary in its analysis of film itself as a genre; the other was the Labor e. V. zur Erforschung akustischer und visueller Ereignisse (laboratory for the research of acoustic and visual events), initiated by Maurizio Kagel and Wolf Vostell. That makes it clear how intense the efforts were to sound out and even cross the boundaries between the art forms and media, in other words art, poetry and music, film and video, concept and process art.

The artists also branched out into everyday life and approached the non-art-loving public, for instance through Sound, Happening and Fluxus; authorship was often neglected and private and semi-public venues replaced cinemas and museums (for instance in Expanded Cinema).

Music becomes a space

John Cage and Nam June Paik were trend-setters just because of their spatialisation of music, with which Paik also continued after he moved away to New York in 1964/65. It was not least due to his Exposition of Music Electronic Television that electronics became firmly established in the art field. The construction and image cosmos of the Brandenburger Tor with its 185 monitors is evidence of the chance convergence of contrasting themes from art and everyday life.

Old material, new messages

When painting temporarily regained its supremacy in the art world in the 1970s – followed by sculpture in the mid-1980s – the genres of film and video had separated again. But the exhibition proves how creatively artists such as Bill Viola or David Zink Yi are still making use of increasingly improved technology especially in the video sector, how they reflect the media in their work (Marc Leckey or Clemens von Wedemeyer) and how they communicate new messages specifically by adapting old image and sound material: Simon Dybbroe Møller, Edgar Arceneaux and Jonathan Horowitz.

The video collectors

The list of these artists mentioned shows that the Museum Ludwig is indeed an art museum and for this reason always makes its acquisitions from the media field in connection with its other contemporary art collection focuses. When they specifically began to build up a video collection in 1986, it is particularly the foundations and prize awards that can be thanked for this annual gain: gifts and permanent loans from the Peter and Irene Ludwig Foundation (the Bruce Connor film collages from 1958 from Wolfgang Hahn’s inheritance), the Wolfgang Hahn Prize (Mike Kelley), the Art Cologne Junge Ankauf (Bojan Sarcevic) and the sponsors’ group of Art Cologne (Tony Oursler). The exhibition and catalogue certainly confirm the value of these new additions.