Rudolf Frieling
«VT ≠ TV – The Beginnings of Video Art»

«Someday artists will work with capacitors, resistors & semi-conductors as they work today with brushes, violins & junk.»
Nam June Paik, «Electronic Video Recorder» (1)


The German press missed the birth of Video Art in Wuppertal in 1963, when Nam June Paik produced the first autonomous television pictures. Artists still relied on film, however, to document these processes. Even if Wolf Vostell's «Sun in Your Head» – a «de-coll/age» of TV pictures made the same year – did foreshadow a specific video aesthetic, it was shot on film. Paik was the first to use the «Electronic Video Recorder» in presenting to the public in New York's «Café Au GoGo» in 1965 pictures he had recorded earlier the same day. A space of «instant art» with moving pictures suddenly opened up in the gap between Duchamp's Readymades and the separation between recording and reception wrought by the film development process. From TV to VT: the videotape advanced Paik's utopian visions of time-based art, and most of these visions have become reality.(2)
Each new technical standard brought with it not only hopes for more artistic freedom, therefore, but also a revolutionization of the production means. The 1960s were no different from today in that each advance in the field of electronics was launched on the Japanese and US markets first, meaning the American artists were always a few lengths ahead of their European counterparts. Detailed evidence of this competitive edge is furnished in Siegfried Zielinski's «History of the Video Recorder». The Paik/Abe Synthesizer strikingly demonstrates that video history is technological history, but this history also contains a number of myths. Although the beginning of the art videotape can be dated at 1965, for decades it has been associated with the launch of the legendary Portapak, Sony's first portable half-inch unit. Zielinski has proved that the appliance in fact became available in Japan and the USA only in 1967, meaning Paik must have used another early, meanwhile forgotten, half-inch video format in 1965.(3) German artists meanwhile had to wait until 1969 for Philips and Grundig to launch their half-inch appliances – although Grundig had created a prototype back in 1965! The German industry had again failed to recognize the sign of the times, just as in the 1920s it let slip from its hands the patent for sound film. In the USA, the broadcasters WGBH in Boston and WNET 13 in New York gave Paik not only access to technology but also the freedom he needed to connect 2-inch high-tech with his own low-tech attitude. He followed up the live 4-hour «Video Commune» broadcast with «Global Groove», 1973, a first, brilliant, highpoint of the art videotape.
Not only did television broadcasters possess the advanced technology inaccessible to (or not wanted by) most artists, but their monopolistic position allowed them to define with the term «broadcastability» a measure that separated in terms of programming the (television) image from «amateur video». The sharp-edged, high-definition, low-noise picture endorsed by television demanded prohibitively expensive equipment, and was a standard unable to be met by the «agreeably slovenly technical state of contemporary Video Art», as David Antin noted in 1976 still.(4) At the same time, it was not in the artists» interest to flawlessly reproduce the slick TV aesthetic. Their antidote was the inexpensive half-inch technology with «open reels»that often conveyed the impression of being faulty, for instance due to signal breakdown during editing. Every video image could be observed slowly stabilizing after an interruption, and for a long time all aspirations towards an image-accurate editing remained futile. Much more important, however, was the artistic independence granted by the inexpensive technology. Friederike Pezold, for one, decided at the beginning of the 1970s that finally the time had come to shake off the cameraman and autonomously and directly control the playback of recorded images. The low-contrast, greyish black-and-white pictures that made the most dazzling TV star look faded were, as a reversal of the brilliancy of the TV aesthetic, part of this independence. Similarly, the extreme duration and lacking dramatic structure of the unedited tapes corresponded to a conceptual mode of work aiming not to satisfy viewing expectations but to find a different mode of perception – even, in some cases, going as far as to deliberately bore the viewer.
In order to explore the potential of the video medium now at last within their grasp, artists from the start reflected upon its media-specific aspects – whether in the utopian visions of Paik's aphorisms, or from an epistemological viewpoint. This reflexivity is impressively documented by the theoretical discourses of Peter Weibel, who was the first European to explore the media-specific and communicative possibilities, both in technical and aesthetic terms, and systematically consider the ephemeral video medium's inherent attributes. In his essay «On the Philosophy of VT and VTR» he listed these attributes as follows: 1. Synthetics – the entire range of electronic image manipulation, 2. Transformation – the «psychedelic» shift from concrete, interpretable images to abstract shapes, 3. Self-reference, 4. Instant time – the components of a two-way communications system (closed-circuit, video feedback), and 5. Box – the monitor deployed by TV and VTR and representing for Weibel the switch to a machine system as opposed to the projection system used by cinema. This initial view of the monitor as a media-specific essential of video art has not unconditionally survived up to the present day. While Paik enthusiastically saw his dream of an electronic Sistine Chapel approaching realization when the first video projectors were launched, both Wulf Herzogenrath and Peter Weibel emphatically assigned the «box» (the TV set or monitor) to the grammar of video, or «videology».(5) By way of generalization, however, Weibel etymologically revealed the inherent notion of art in video technology: «video art is always epistemic, the Greek «techne» means «artefact, art». from ‹eidos› (image) to ‹idos› (idea), even to ‹idein›. from eidology to idology and to ideology. idotechne (the art of the image) is video technique is video art, that is the art of seeing and knowing.»(6)
Analogously with his theoretical basis, Weibel's works from the first explored the medium's potential for critique and exposure of communication structures as opposed to exploiting the linear videotape and screen as a field for filmic-associative experimentation with new modes of poetic narrative. His media-specific investigation of spatial aspects began in this way. Weibel's first video installation «Audience Exhibited», created in Vienna in 1969, employed both instant playback through a closed-circuit system (with all its connotations of surveillance system) as well as delayed playback through a VTR (videotape recorder) in order to confront a gallery audience with its own image. In the same year he made his «Endless Sandwich» videotape, which provoked activity by the viewer and showed the video feedback of a TV viewer whose TV picture is suddenly disrupted.(7) Later works by Weibel, Valie Export and Richard Kriesche were intended less as independent videotapes than as disruptions of the «codified system» of television.
«Projection X» by Wolf (IMI) Knoebel, was made under a similar premise in 1972. Produced by Gerry Schum, the videotape showed a nocturnal journey by car through a city whose silhouette is visible only through the projection onto its buildings of an X shape formed by light of varying intensity, and included the long streaking typical of the tube video camera when recording moving light. Yet Schum was convinced that «not the system, but what is shown with this system, brings about the revolution».(8) In contrast to film with its fixed time of beginning, the video object as defined by Schum permitted the free and individual reception of art, and had to emancipate itself from the television context in spatial terms likewise. He moved the TV set away from private domestic surroundings into a neutral gallery space or public domain, making it a monitor that showed art in an endless loop. Used mainly conceptually, the piece of art thus evoked a different, more cursory perception. In contrast to the lack of interest in videographic approaches on the part of visual artists in Germany, Paik and the Vasulkas were involved in basic research and the development of special synthesizers and image processors in the USA.
Let down by television, the German artists initially placed not unjustified hopes in the institutions they were familiar with. The «Project 71 – Projection» show in Düsseldorf offered a setting for videotapes and films by fine artists (at the same time separating this work from experimental film in a somewhat problematic manner). Schum, disillusioned by the response to his «TV Gallery», went on to open Germany's first «Video Gallery» and marketed art videotapes at major exhibitions in the early 1970s, at the same time encouraging museums, as at the «documenta 5» in 1972, to commit themselves in the form of technical assistance and guarantees for the art-works.(9) Schum initially co-operated with the Folkwang-Museum in Essen when it began to draw up plans for an artists» video studio in 1972. However, the various parties could not agree on how the studio should be used. The studio was set up only after Schum's death, but was never used for a production of note. Even there, scepticism about the possibility of producing consequential art through media ultimately predominated. Editions with hand-signed videotapes for collectors, by contrast, failed due to the fundamental reservations on the part of buyers with regard to the volatile medium deficient in aura. Before his premature death at the age of 35 in 1973, Schum had been alone in his endeavours to connect video with the commercial art market, and for a long time no successor was in sight. The only lasting institutional facility was the videotheque opened on the initiative of the artists Wolf Kahlen and Wolf Vostell in the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin, in 1972. It was the first collection of video art, making it the oldest one in existence in Germany today.
The conspicuous absence of collection means the history of media art must be documented primarily on the basis of the major exhibitions. Among the exhibits presented under the title «audiovisual messages» at the «Trigon» exhibition in Graz, Austria, 1973, were the first «interactive video installations» – Valie Export's «Autohypnosis» and Peter Weibel's «Crucifixion of the Identity». With the exhibition «Prospekt 74», the Koelnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, staged Germany's first major introduction to the very different aspects of European and American video art, including performance, and followed it two years later in 1976 with the first Paik retrospective. During the «documenta 5» in 1972, the «telewissen» group led by Herbert Schuchmacher demonstrated the idea of alternative public information – literally outside the doors of the galleries.(10) The group positioned a transporter with video monitor and camera in front of the exhibition hall in order to produce communicative situations and «micro television» through direct feedback with the passers-by.(11) People stopped in their tracks – in the early 1970s it was still unusual to see your own picture on TV. The «founding years» of video art culminated in the «media documenta» of 1977, where even a special video studio was set up to document the process of the exhibition. This «documenta 6», with a video section curated by Wulf Herzogenrath, the mentor of video art in Germany, represented the point of crystallization for video art as a genre: alternative media activities and documentary works were on show alongside concept art, performances alongside installations – categorized here as sculptures, objects, and installations. For the first time, moreover, a representative videotheque with tapes primarily from the USA and Germany was accessible to visitors under the motto «TV ≠ VT».
Researchers into the electronic image would unfortunately be denied the success of the propagators of electronic music in the 1950s, who were able to establish inside the radio system a laboratory for their own experimental research in the context of exploring the specific acoustics of radio plays. Museums and art academies alike were unwilling to shoulder substantial aid of financial or technical nature.(12) Germany did not offer facilities for elaborate electronic image processing of the kind displayed by Paik in «Global Groove» in 1973. Artists of the first hour like Vostell or Kahlen, who used moving images for conceptual experiments, worked first with film and then video in order to document ideas and processes, but not to investigate the medium. Jochen Gerz, by contrast, realized from 1972 to 1975 his «Six Pieces on Language», which used the medium precisely in order to reveal its limitations and set up fatiguing images as counterweight to the seductive lure of the electronic image. Ulrike Rosenbach, inspired by «Project 71» and Schum's ideas, was the first female artist to take up the medium, and from 1972 modelled new ways of placing in scene the self and the body. She made a name with feminist videotapes and performances: «Don't Believe I'm an Amazon», 1976, was one of the first masterpieces in the history of video art in Germany. The video catalogue – the first of its kind – produced for the «Prospekt 74» show documented the eminent importance of performance for video art. For these artists, video was essentially about recording and controlling what took place in front of the camera; usage of a mixer to superimpose images was one of the few technical tricks available. The painter Nan Hoover discovered the painter's tool video in 1975 – «video as a pencil,» declared John Baldessari – and in front of a camera in her studio embarked on first suggestive experiments, using only light and the contours of the body, in very simple electronic painting with no effects or image processing.
No camera at all was required to critically and ironically appropriate foreign material with a video recorder. The notion of «found footage» illustrates how essential serendipity – the faculty of making happy chance finds – is to the creation of «second-hand» videographic art.(13) In the context of video art, the processing of visual material «found» in archives primarily signified that artists critically take possession of television as a constant source of images of diverse origin. Montage and collage were used as a means to relentlessly offset the public hysteria surrounding terrorism that pervaded in Germany in the autumn of 1977. Examples are the early videotapes «Keeping One's Chin Up», 1975, by Marcel Odenbach and «The Schleyer Tape», 1977, by Klaus vom Bruch.(14) Both artists» linkage of art and political action was effective still. Together with Ulrike Rosenbach under the name ATV («Alternative Television»), they illegally and offensively broadcast a self-produced TV programme a few hundred metres into the neighbourhood of their studio-cum-transmitter station in Cologne. «Micro television»: pitted against the still existent state monopoly and an act of anti-authoritarian TV piracy by «video rebels», as they called themselves once, wholly in the spirit of an alternative source of media information which was also being practised at the time by many private radio stations. Analysis of video as a media system was joined by critique of the system of power, of which the electronic image was made a component through TV and advertising.(15)
Despite their political commitment, however, vom Bruch, Odenbach and Rosenbach remained conscious of their determination to act and be noticed in the context of art. Museums and galleries remained the addressees of their tapes, performances and installations. Their protest, ironically packed in a videotape, against the «Westkunst» show organized by Kasper König in Cologne in 1981, which ignored media art in its entirety, therefore marked the end of the hopes and utopias of the 1970s. Two years earlier, financial considerations had obliged Ingrid Oppenheim to close down her gallery in which she had promoted, more patron than dealer, the new video and performance genres.(16) The «Videowochen Essen» exhibition of the same year was already unable to impart any further-going impulses. The euphorically received paintings of the «Neue Wilden» in Germany, which would dominate the art market for some years to come, began to supplant the brittle aesthetic of the concept artists and discursive media artists. The founding age of video art had come to an end without the medium becoming established in the institutional or private sectors. Although media art would now have to wait almost a decade for its breakthrough, in the late 1970s both Weibel and Paik immediately recognized the future of the time-based art video as lying in its relation to space: «The best part of Cage's work is his electronic music LIVE, which is a complete TIME-SPACE art that can never be pressed on an audio or video disk. High video art will take the form of the video installation, and a form of notation will be developed to ‹pass on› certain works of art».(17)

Ill.: Advertisement by SONY for the «Portapak» video equipment.

1 See text in this volume.
2 Especially worthy of mention is Paik's early vision of the electronic data highway, whose central passage is included as the epilogue to this volume.
3 Siegfried Zielinski, «Zur Geschichte des Videorecorders», Berlin, 1986, p. 155
4 David Antin, «Die wesentlichen Charakteristika des Mediums» (1976), in: Bettina Gruber/Maria Vedder, «Kunst und Video. Internationale Entwicklung und Künstler», Cologne, 1983, p. 33; originally published as: . Antin estimated at $ 100,000 the cost of equipment for flawless editing with half-inch technology!
5 Cf. Nam June Paik, «Elektronische Sixtinische Kapelle» (1976), in: ibid., «Niederschriften eines Nomaden», op. cit., p. 141 et seq.; at the Venice Biennale in 1993, Paik finally realized this dream.
6 Peter Weibel, «An Annotated Videography», Innsbruck, 1977, back cover.
7 Premiered in London in 1970, and first TV broadcasting in 1972 on ORF (Austrian Broadcasting Corporation) during «Impulse» magazine.
8 Gerry Schum in an interview with Karl Otto Blase (1972) in: catalogue «documenta 6», Kassel, 1977, p. 40; nevertheless, Schum implicitly accepted a changed situation in the economics of art distribution when in summer of 1972 videotape cassettes with the U-matic standard were finally launched on the German market, thus opening up new possibilities for producing video objects as editions. Relevant in the same context were of course the much-quoted theses of Walter Benjamin in relation to the loss of the aura and the reproducibility of art.
9 «Save for a few exceptions, all our videotapes are sold in unlimited editions. Each video object is authorized by the artists through a signed and numbered certificate. In the interest of the artists we will not issue tapes on loan, but only sell them. The artist always retains the copyright (...). Under a type of guarantee service, the tapes will be swapped for new tapes and, where applicable, for new systems on submission of the certificate. » Gerry Schum, «Vertriebssystem von Videotapes», flyer, 1971, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Archiv Sohm, unnumbered.
10 For more information about counterculture and alternative media activities, see text by Gerd Roscher in this volume.
11 René Berger distinguished between macro (national TV for the masses), meso (regionally restricted ranges), and micro (produced by one individual for another individual) television.
12 The Düsseldorf Academy of Art did have a film class taught by the Dane Ole John in the early 1970s, but Beuys» verdict that media like photography or video could have a merely documentary function had a lastingly negative effect. When Nam June Paik was appointed the first Professor of Media Art at the same institution in 1978, he used his position to procure the basic equipment.
13 «Cybernetic Serendipity» was the title of a trailblazing exhibition of computer art in London in 1968.
14 Hanns-Martin Schleyer, the president of the German Employers» Association, was abducted and murdered by RAF terrorists in 1977. – Editor’s note.
15 As noted with regret in the foreword, no records exist of significant media art in the German Democratic Republic. However, it should at least be mentioned that in the late 1970s Schweinebraden's gallery staged two performances with media artists Wolf Kahlen and Marcel Odenbach.
16 The Oppenheim Collection was donated to the Kunstmuseum, Bonn, at the beginning of the 1980s, and is permanently on display in a room of its own.
17 Nam June Paik (1993), op. cit., p. 152; cf. Peter Weibel, «Video als Raumkunst», Basel, 1977, reprinted in: «Video - Apparat/Medium, Kunst, Kultur. Ein internationaler Reader», Siegfried Zielinski (ed.), Frankfurt a. M./Bern/New York/Paris, 1992, pp. 125-133.


Source: Rudolf Frieling, Dieter Daniels, Medien Kunst Interaktion – die 60er und 70er Jahre in Deutschland, Vienna 1997, p. 122–129.