Das Theater ist auf der Straße - Die Happenings von Wolf Vostell

Wolf Vostell
Wolf Vostell während des Happenings Die Brotvermessung an der Kölner Oper
15.3.1969


Das Theater ist auf der Straße - Die Happenings von Wolf Vostell

Museum Morsbroich - Germany

06. Juni 2010 - 15. August 2010
Eröffnung: Sonntag, den 6. Juni 2010, um 12 Uhr

Wolf Vostell (Leverkusen 1932–1998 Berlin) gelang es durch seine herausragende Innovationsfähigkeit und sein ausgeprägtes Kommunikationstalent Bildende Künstler, Schriftsteller und Musiker aus aller Welt zu vernetzen und in kollektive Aktionen einzubinden. Zwischen 1954 und 1988 realisierte er über 50 Happenings. Vostells bahnbrechender Schritt aus dem Atelier hinaus auf die Straße ebnete den Weg für Ereignisse (Happenings), die seine Mitmenschen in den künstlerischen Prozess einbezogen, um sie zu kreativem Handeln in der Gesellschaft zu bewegen.

Die Ausstellung ist eine Kooperation mit dem spanischen Consorcio Museo Vostell Malpartida im Rahmen der Projektreihe Europäische Partnerschaften der Kunststiftung NRW und des Goethe-Instituts.

Sie präsentiert als große Überblicksschau Vostells collageartig komponierte Happenings, die in ihrer Multimedialität eine Verbindung von bildkünstlerischen, musikalischen und theatralischen Ausdrucksformen schaffen. Vostells Skizzen und Happening-Partituren, Manifeste, Foto-, Film- und Tondokumente aus Vostells Happening-Archiv in Malpartida treffen in der Ausstellung auf eine Vielzahl weiterer hochkarätiger Leihgaben: Happening-Relikte, im Kontext der Happenings entstandene Objektbilder und Skulpturen sowie größere Environments. Sie zeigen Wolf Vostell als allseits treibende Kraft und Getriebenen des ganzheitlichen Projekts einer Verbindung von Kunst und Leben.

Die Ausstellung wird kuratiert von Fritz Emslander (Museum Morsbroich) und José Antonio Agúndez Garcia (Consorcio Museo Vostell Malpartida).

Es erscheint ein Katalog in deutscher und spanischer Sprache.

Unter dem Titel Wolf Vostell - Reise nach Italien präsentiert im zeitlichen Vorfeld der Austellung das Goethe-Institut Mailand in Zusammenarbeit mit der Fondazione Mudima und dem Museo Vostell Malpartida eine Retrospektive des 1998 verstorbenen Wolf Vostell. Die Ausstellung ist vom 28. April bis 28. Mai 2010 in der Fondazione Mudima in Mailand zu sehen.

Weitere Informationen:

Museo Vostell Malpartida: http://www.museovostell.org/

Goethe-Institut Mailand: http://www.goethe.de/ins/it/mai/kue/de5589521.htm

Fondazione Mudima: http://www.mudima.net/

STATEMENT ON INTERMEDIA

Art is one of the ways that people communicate. It is difficult for me to imagine a serious person attacking any means of communication per se. Our real enemies are the ones who send us to die in pointless wars or to live lives which are reduced to drudgery, not the people who use other means of communication from those which we find most appropriate to the present situation. When these are attacked, a diversion has been established which only serves the interests of our real enemies.

However, due to the spread of mass literacy, to television and the transistor radio, our sensitivities have changed. The very complexity of this impact gives us a taste for simplicity, for an art which is based on the underlying images that an artist has always used to make his point. As with the cubists, we are asking for a new way of looking at things, but more totally, since we are more impatient and more anxious to go to the basic images. This explains the impact of Happenings, event pieces, mixed media films. We do not ask any more to speak magnificently of taking arms against a sea of troubles, we want to see it done. The art which most directly does this is the one which allows this immediacy, with a minimum of distractions.

Goodness only knows how the spread of psychedelic means, tastes, and insights will speed up this process. My own conjecture is that it will not change anything, only intensify a trend which is already there.

For the last ten years or so, artists have changed their media to suit this situation, to the point where the media have broken down in their traditional forms, and have become merely puristic points of reference. The idea has arisen, as if by spontaneous combustion throughout the entire world, that these points are arbitrary and only useful as critical tools, in saying that such-and-such a work is basically musical, but also poetry. This is the intermedial approach, to emphasize the dialectic between the media. A composer is a dead man unless he composes for all the media and for his world.

Does it not stand to reason, therefore, that having discovered the intermedia (which was, perhaps, only possible through approaching them by formal, even abstract means), the central problem is now not only the new formal one of learning to use them, but the new and more social one of what to use them for? Having discovered tools with an immediate impact, for what are we going to use them? If we assume, unlike McLuhan and others who have shed some light on the problem up until now, that there are dangerous forces at work in our world, isn´t it appropriate to ally ourselves against these, and to use what we really care about and love or hate as the new subject matter in our work? Could it be that the central problem of the next ten years or so, for all artists in all possible forms, is going to be less the still further discovery of new media and intermedia, but of the new discovery of ways to use what we care about both appropriately and explicitly? The old adage was never so true as now, that saying a thing is so don´t make it so. Simply talking about Viet Nam or the crisis in our Labor movements is no guarantee against sterility. We must find the ways to say what has to be said in the light of our new means of communicating. For this we will need new rostrums, organizations, criteria, sources of information. There is a great deal for us to do, perhaps more than ever. But we must now take the first steps.

Dick Higgins
New York
August 3, 1966

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Published in:
Wolf Vostell (ed.): Dé-coll/age (décollage) * 6, Typos Verlag, Frankfurt - Something Else Press, New York, July 1967

A WOLF and a 'KAMIN'

Wolf Vostell:
"Arc de Triomphe N° 1", 1993
Acryl, Blei
und elektrischer Kamin
auf Fotoleinwand
215 x 130 x 7,5 cm
source : http://www.vostell.de