Joseph Beuys, Gerry Schum (realization of
the video):
Identifications /
Filz-TV, 1970 ©Photo: Staatliche Museen Kassel
His two programs "Land Art"
and "Identifications," which were broadcast by the channel
ARD in 1969 and 1970, were based on the idea of producing works of art
conceived and realized expressly for a TV public. The first program
presented land art projects by, among others,
Richard Long, Robert Smithson
, Dennis
Oppenheim,
Michael Heizer, and
Barry Flanagan; it was their media exhibition that initially called the
art public's attention to these artistic interventions, which were being
realized in highly remote landscapes.
Barry Flanagan: Loch Ness, 1976, Deutsche Bank Collection
In "Identifications," it was chiefly a matter of an artistic investigation or
identification with a chosen object or material. Actions by Joseph Beuys,
Gilbert & George,
Mario Merz,
Klaus Rinke,
Richard Serra,
Keith Sonnier,
Lawrence Weiner, and others were shown.
Lawrence Weiner: Untitled, 2000
Deutsche Bank Collection
In the late sixties,
the Westdeutsche
Rundfunk in Cologne became a pioneer when it started cooperating with
artists to produce art works for its Channel Three - for instance Black
Gate Cologne (1968) by Otto Piene and
Aldo Tambellini or
Jan Dibbet's TV as Fireplace (1969), a filmed fire at the hearth to
mark the end of the day's broadcasting - more than 20 years before the
train rides and aquarium images on the late-night programs.
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In the years that followed, there were similar projects
again and again - from the first experimental satellite broadcasts on the
occasion of the so-called
"Media Documenta" in 1977 to the ambitious satellite project
Good Morning Mr. Orwell that was simultaneously broadcast in New York,
Paris, Seoul, and Cologne on New Year's Eve 1984.
In a mixture of
Pop and Avant-garde and including prominent artists such as
Laurie Anderson, Joseph Beuys,
John Cage, Philip Glass,
Charlotte Moorman, Merce
Cunningham, and
Yves Montand, the fear of total media surveillance on the eve of the
Orwellian year was countered by the utopian vision of a future interchange
of data that would be free to cross all borders within the "
global village."
Laurie Anderson in "Godd Morning Mr. Orwell, 1984
©Photo: Intermix Media Arts
In contrast to
German television and its state monopoly of the time, the US, particularly
due to the fact that its media landscape was structured in an entirely
different way, offered artists multiple opportunities for working with
television. Already in the 1960s, American private channels - in
particular WNET in New
York and WGBH in Boston - regularly
invited artists to participate in experimental workshops. This involvement
was not, of course, due to a selfless pleasure in art, but rather pursued
its own egotistical goals; in return, the television editors expected
innovative impulses in form and content from the cooperation. Conversely,
the collaboration with commercial broadcasting stations offered artists a
unique chance to work together with highly professional equipment.
At the beginning of the 1980s, parallel to the emergence of private
television, the VHS system began to spread widely, giving further rise to
alternatives for existing TV programming. Video was implemented as a
medium for an alternative political public. This was the great age of the "
open channels," in which artists' groups, private video collectives, and
citizens' initiatives were closely involved. Ulrike Rosenbach, Klaus vom
Bruch, and
Marcel Odenbach, for instance, not only produced artistic commentaries on
current political events, such as Klaus vom Bruch's Schleyer Tape
from 1977, which recycled television images into a brilliant collage
feature on the German Autumn; they also founded the first pirate
broadcaster
ATV (Alternative TV) in Cologne, which broadcast their programs in a
radius of a few hundred meters. From the very beginning, the slogan "We're
making our own television" pointed to the new utopia of being both
broadcaster and receiver at one and the same time.
Paper Tiger TV Collective:
Deep Dish
TV (Produktionsfoto), 1988
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