Inke Arns on Sun, 12 Apr 1998 18:40:38 +0100 |
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Syndicate: Review of 'Media Art Action' |
Dear all, this is my review of the book and the CD-ROM "Media Art Action. The 1960s and 1970s in Germany", by Rudolf Frieling and Dieter Daniels, eds: Goethe-Institut and ZKM Zentrum fuer Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe (Vienna / New York: Springer, 1997). It will be published in vol. 4, issue 2 of Convergence (Summer 1998) which I guest-edited. I will also ask the other authors to send their contributions to the Syndicate list. The list of contents of this issue of Convergence will follow soon. Stay tuned. Best, Inke --------------------- Pioneers Revisited: Documenting Aspects of the First Two Decades of Media Art in Germany Inke Arns Rudolf Frieling and Dieter Daniels, Media Art Action. The 1960s and 1970s in Germany, Goethe-Institut and ZKM * Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe (Vienna / New York: Springer, 1997), 251 pp. (German and English) and CD-ROM (German, English, French, Spanish), ISBN 3-211-82996-2 CD-ROM system requirements: IBM-compatible PC, Pentium recommended, 16 MB RAM, min. 256-colour S-VGA graphics, CD-ROM drive min. double speed, min. Windows 95 or Apple Macintosh Computer, Power PC suggested, 14'' colour monitor, 640 x 480 pixel, min. 256-colour S-VGA graphics, 6 MB available RAM, CD-ROM drive min. double speed, Mac OC version 7 or higher. ___________________________ Instead of repeating the myth of media art being merely a shadow of informational and technological revolution - as most of the (technologically oriented) German media theory is tirelessly emphasizing (1) -, Dieter Daniels and Rudolf Frieling in their new publication Media Art Action. The 1960s and 1970s in Germany, give a refreshing angle on the early beginnings of ?intermedia art?. Quoting John Cage, who, back in 1958, while searching new ways for assembling sound material, wrote that ?it is a striking coincidence that just now the technical means to provide such a free-ranging music are available," (2) Daniels and Frieling open up the spectrum of a rich creative and visionary potential of a past (but very important) period. So far, as the authors notice in their foreword, ?only individual aspects of Media Art have been examined [...]. While media festivals obviously need to focus on contemporary production, historical representations are either personalized and in consequence restricted to major names, or else confined to partial aspects [...]." (p. 10) There exists no comprehensive written history of media art yet. This is one of the reasons why this publication, which is documenting the media art of the 1960s and 1970s in Germany, may be called crucial. From New Music, Fluxus and Happening to concept art, performance, TV experiments and video, a range of positions emerge that have ?particular significance for the multimedia and non-linear narrative modes of the 1990s." (p. 10) Precisely for this reason, to enable us to discern parallels and differences in contemporary artistic strategies, it is so important to re-consider the history of early media art. For obvious reasons, Dieter Daniels (professor at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig) and Rudolf Frieling (ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe) chose to combine the print medium - for a collection of longer essays - with the possibility of presenting the actual material in vision, sound and words on CD-ROM; the two being complementary elements of Media Art Action. At first sight, any attempt to describe the genre of ?media art? within national boundaries might seem quite inappropriate, because from the beginning onwards, intermedia art forms have been international per se. However, the focus on Germany is less rigorous than the topic might suggest, as Frieling and Daniels write in their foreword: "At all events, the Federal Republic of Germany was in the 1960s and 1970s the site of key events in the international development of media art. [...] Non-German artists, by contrast, left behind important traces in West Germany; they include the Korean-born Nam June Paik, who commuted between the FRG and the USA, the American Nan Hoover, and the Austrian film experimentalists and media artists Valie Export and Peter Weibel. Thus, the selected materials shown by Media Art Action in Germany were produced in a country which acted as the nodal point in an international network of important events." (p. 11) The book Media Art Action places a focus on historical writings by artists. Most of the artists? texts are derived from rare or out-of-print publications. To convey an impression of the diversity of the discourse of the period with all its connotations, it is divided into several thematic chapters, each one supplemented with an introduction by one of the curators, attempting ?to place the relevant subject as far as possible in the context of the period and art-historical perspective." (p. 11). (Re-)reading the texts by e.g. Ulrike Rosenbach, Joseph Beuys, Valie Export, Wolf Vostell, Klaus vom Bruch - and, of course - Nam June Paik, one cannot help wondering about the visionary qualities contained in these documents, which still today seem so very up-to-date. The CD-ROM archive contains more than 330 individual art works, consisting of stills, video clips and short descriptions of the works by the editors or the artists themselves. There are three possible ways of accessing the documents: either by the name of the artist, the year, or through terms like e.g. ?aggression?, ?closed circuit?, ?body? or ?alternative media?. This proves to be a very stimulating way of accessing the works, and there are some extremely interesting and rare materials to be found here (e.g. a film recording of a performance Nam June Paik did in the Ramsbott home in 1961). Unfortunately, the interface design of the CD-ROM does not prove to be very user-friendly. The user has to ?catch? the artists? names, the year and the terms contained in two horizontal and one vertical navigating bars - most of the attempts just fail. An interface which is perfect for an artistic CD-ROM (the interface design for Media Art Action was done by the same programmer who developed the interfaces for Bill Seaman?s CD-ROMs), here, puts itself much too much in the foreground, and this is running counter to the idea of an archive. Nevertheless, the fact that Media Art Action is a combined publication of texts and audiovisual material, as well as the wealth of the documents contained in the book and the CD-ROM, makes it a very important publication - also because it reminds the reader of the utopian and visionary aspects of the early beginnings of ?media art?. In 1974, working as a consultant for the Art Program of the Rockefeller Foundation, Nam June Paik in his visionary paper ?Media Planning for the Postindustrial Society - The 21st Century is Now Only 26 Years Away? proposed the building of ?Electronic Super Highways" - twenty years before this topic was made a political issue by the Clinton administration. Back in 1974, of course, Paik saw these highways as a ?basic social structure" (Bateson/Ruesch), and not merely as channels for e-commerce. Notes: (1) A good example would be the media theorist Friedrich Kittler, who argues that concerning the establishment of norms, ?those self-proclaimed artists, who, on the radio, promise radio art and, using the computer, promise computer art, are always late." (p. 98, my translation) Friedrich Kittler, ?Gleichschaltungen?, in: Fritz Balthaus, exhibition catalogue, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin 1994, pp. 95-103. (2) John Cage, Silence, Middletown, Connecticut, 1961, p. 8; quoted in Media Art Action, p. 21. At that time, recording tape was the most important of these new means. i n k e . a r n s _____________________________________ 49.(0)30.3136678 | inke@berlin.snafu.de |new URL soon to come