More Utopia than Ever Before: Media Art and the Public
Image from Nam June Paik's "Participation TV" to the Big Brother Shows
Richard Hamilton: Just what was it that made Yesterday's Homes...,
1991, Deutsche Bank Collection
When art
discovered television in the nineteen-sixties, the mass medium's cultural
revolution was yet to come. Artists the likes of Nam June Paik or Valie
Export created television performances that blurred the boundaries of the
private sphere; although they were the pioneers of video art in the years
between the onslaught of "global village" thinking and Reality TV, their
influence has nearly been forgotten. Did their concepts provide the models
for today's talkshow exhibitionism? Anja Osswald on media art as
self-reflection, political platform, and technological spectacle.
At the beginning of video art
was the death of television. In the framework of the 1963 Yam Fluxus Festival
in New Brunswick, New Jersey. initiated by
Robert Watts and
George Brecht,
Wolf Vostell buried a running television set into the ground. His TV
Burial, decorated with barbed wire, turkey schnitzel, and music
stands, was an ironic and polemic attack against the power apparatus of
television; it was a symbolic act in fine
Fluxus manner.
|
Günther Uecker: TV, 1963
©Günther Uecker
|
Wolf Kahlen: TV-Mirror, 1963/1969
©Wolf Kahlen
|
|
Other works from those years also addressed the
transformation of the image-generating machine into a mute and patient
object: Joseph Beuys'
Felt TV turned the information carrier into a typical Beuysian energy
carrier;
Günther Uecker's TV presented a television set and table half
covered in nails; Wolf Kahlen's
TV Mirror replaced the television image with the viewer's own reflection.
These attacks, both polemic and poetic in nature, heralded the approach of
what is today known by the term
"media art." Whether it's a matter of
single-track video or room-sized multiple monitor installations,
interactive net art or computer-generated images: media art has long since
become emancipated from its exotic existence on the outskirts of art
history, installing itself as a real force in the international art
establishment. There's hardly an exhibition of contemporary art that can
get along without a monitor these days, hardly an art academy whose
curriculum can do without the image-enhancing factor the "new media"
guarantee. At the very latest, the fact that media art has become socially
acceptable was proven in 1997, at the opening of the
Center for Art and Media Technology (ZKM) in Karlsruhe; as well as
running its own museum, the center conducts interdisciplinary research in
its various technological laboratories in the field of digital (image)
media.
Over the years, throughout the course of the development of
media art, or rather the media arts, the professional title "video artist"
has acquired a certain patina. From today's perspective, it seems out of
date, even anachronistic. That wasn't always the case, however; on the
contrary, when the first video art generation emerged in the late
nineteen-sixties, the label "video" signalized change and revolt, not only
in an aesthetic sense, but also, and particularly, in a social sense.
Wolf Vostell: Untitled, from "Weekend", 1972,
Deutsche Bank Collection
In view of the rapid
spread of the communication and media industries into nearly all areas of
life, artistic interest became concentrated on a "different" application
of the available technologies. Supported by the media-critical theories of
various advocates such as
Hans Magnus Enzensberger,
Umberto Eco, and of course the visionary
Marshall McLuhan, criticism became directed at television's one-way
broadcaster/receiver structure, which relegated the recipient to the role
of passive consumer.
[1]
[2]
[3]
[4]
|
