Syndicate: Review of 'Media Art Action'

[Inke Arns <inke@berlin.snafu.de>]

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.



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