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Rede in der Live-Satelliten-Sendung zur Eröffnung der documenta 6 (Beuys, Joseph), 1977
 
 
 

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because of their entertainment character, and their conceptual side did not subsequently lead to anything in the TV world.

VT ≠ TV

In retrospect, the failure of Schum's «Fernsehgalerie» and his withdrawal to video can be seen as symptomatic in the art context. It becomes clear that possessing autonomous production devices in the form of video cameras and players has not broken the power of television as an institution by a long shot. The habit of equating television and video, which linguistic usage still suggested around 1970, was replaced by the concept of ‹video art.› But this produces a completely new paradigm: the demand for a mass effect is dropped, and instead the private, indeed intimate and personal dimension of the video image is discovered by body art and performance art. This change can be seen very clearly in the publication «The New Television: a public / private art,» which accompanied the 1974 conference in the Museum of Modern Art. The title still refers to television, but the contributions

 

are almost all about video art.[68] This distinction was expressed very clearly indeed at documenta 6 in 1977, when the sign «VT ≠ TV» (videotape is not the same as TV) was resplendent above the entrance to the videotheque. But the opening of this media documenta was still accompanied by a live satellite broadcast, and a wideranging program of art videos was shown on television, this time not so much at the behest of the artists as of the exhibition makers, who thus achieved an instant media presence for their concept. Ulrike Rosenbach, who was closely associated with Schum, sums up the development like this: «The television set, the ‹altar› of the modern family, would make it possible for at least 60% of all fellow citizens to receive our broadcasts. Those were our theories, our dreams. We wanted to use video broadcasts to reacha breadth of dissemination for culture that no museum, no gallery and no book could have achieved. … What we overlooked was the television's position of power, its rigidity and its social ideology, which must have found our Walter Benjamin theories naïve and comical.»[69]

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