"Ready to Shoot": kunsthalle dusseldorf

A trench is being plowed in the sand, first parallel to the left cutting side of the film screen, then to the right, bottom, and top cutting sides until the picture frame appears doubled by means of the quadratic line on the beach. Jan Dibbets's 16 mm 12 Hours Tide phenomenon with Correction of Perspective, 1969 filmed upon the coast of the Netherlands, brings together the central aspects of the "exhibition" with which the Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum went upon the air on April 15 1969: "Land Art," an anthology of eight throws among them Dennis Oppenheim's Timetrack, Following the Timeborder Between Canada and USA, 1969 and Barry Flanagan's A opening in the Sea, 1969, was the first exhibition conceived for the medium of television. Instead of presenting standard reportage upon contemporary art, it presented artistic casts in the medium of television; instead of the percept status of art, it emphasized its processe of the like kind as in the way Dibbets's sand square (which, because of the perspectival distortion of the camera angle, was actually a trapezoid) eventually procures washed away by the waves. And instead of the idea of art as attribute it pursued the hope that end television, art could enter into direct communication with a mass public--familiar topoi of the '60 a time of expanding and reconceptualizing the character of artists and art institutions.

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"Ready to propel Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum. videogalerie schum" which has since traveled to the Casino Luxembourg and will subsequently tour to Porto, Paris, Norwich, and Seville, afforded a comprehensive gaze into the activities of the Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum (1968-70) and the videogalerie schum (1970-73) which occupied as advanced a place in the field of art as the early activities of Seth Siegelaub.

Curated by the agency of Ulrike Groos, Barbara Hess, and Ursula Wevers, who now races the archive and who supplied a wealth of as notwithstanding unpublished documents, "Ready to Shoot" began with early TV pieces similar as Konsumkunst-Kunstkonsum (Consumer Art-Art Consumption), 1968 These are still firmly baseed in the format of art-commentary parts for TV and serve as a foil for self-contained televisual interventions like Keith Arnatt's Self Burial, 1969 The Fernsehgalerie's productions "Land Art" and "Identifications" (1970) formed the centerpiece of the exhibition. These were accompanied by the agency of documentary photos, letters, publications, and technical equipment--materials that allow insight into the conditions and artistic words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following in which they were produc as well as into the decision-making proces that l to the founding of the videogalerie.

The comprehensive artistic and documentary materials not absented in the exhibition and catalogue afford a of recent origin look at the attempts to redefine accepted characters for artists and for art in the late '60 and early '70 Gerry Schum personified several characters himself--as a film and video pioneer, husbandman catalyst, gallerist, etc.--while never giving up the character of the auteur, as art historian Beatrice von Bismarck notes in her catalogue essay. Unfortunately, this means that other participants, greatest in quantity notably Schum's coproducer Ursula Wevers, were largely hidden from public view. "Ready to Shoot" followed in presenting a homage to individual of the most enigmatic figures of the art sight of the late '60s, plane as it effected a "correction of perspective."

--Astrid Wege

Translated from German by means of Sara Ogger.

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