In the Same Box: Unhinging Audiovisual Media in the 1960S and 1970S

All in the Same Box: Unhinging Audiovisual Media in the 1960s and 1970s

A DISSERTATION

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA

Kalani Bianca Michell

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS

FOR THE DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Professor Rembert Hüser, Advisor

August 2018

Kalani Michell

2018

Abstract

All in the Same Box: Unhinging Audiovisual Media in the 1960s and 1970s

This project examines problems in media theory in contemporary art and visual culture, specifically by arguing that there should be more of it in the visual arts. If one wants to rigorously engage with objects that don’t correspond to disciplinary boundaries and ‘high’ and ‘low’ aesthetic categories, as is the case with several multimedial artistic projects of the 1960s and 1970s, then one must accept that theories of photography, television, painting, print culture and sound objects can no longer be considered apart from one another. These kinds of projects cannot be deemed part of art history and then analyzed with a bit of Marshall McLuhan. Nor can they be claimed by film studies and peppered with Rosalind Krauss. These are projects that take relocation, or their unhinging from standard sites of production and exhibition, as their point of departure, and thus they force, in my readings, central intermedial concerns to the foreground, from questions of medium specificity to problems of storage and containment. Three such case studies structure my dissertation: 1) an exhibition of a collective ‘performance’ including Joseph

Beuys on live television in West Germany in 1964 that was saved only in the form of photographs, resulting in controversial copyright cases over the last decade reaching the

Bundesgerichtshof; 2) boxed magazines of the 1960s that, in their unbound forms, combined numerous medial objects, suggesting, similarly to unboxing videos on

YouTube, non-linear theories of order and storage; and 3) a film by Hellmuth Costard

i from 1978 documenting, over several years, experiments with Super 8, video and television in his work and on the production sets of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Hark

Bohm and Jean-Luc Godard, thematizing structural problems of institutions in making these cross-medial endeavors possible. Studying these projects from a single disciplinary viewpoint has led to a highly reductive reading of their medial practices, the constellation of media involved in their production, distribution and exhibition. Rather than nostalgically romanticizing these projects as failed historical attempts to democratize art and culture, my work finds in them continuities with the present era, a time when the rhetoric of democracy (access) and the proliferation of material and information entailed in medial expansion (excess) result in important and often irreconcilable aesthetic, cultural and political tensions.

Table of Contents

List of Figures………………………………………………………………………..v-xv.

List of Media Files………………………………………………………..………xvi-xvii.

Einstieg………………………………………………………….………….……...... 1-17.

Chapter One: Taking Down Pictures

Access and Excess………………………………………………………..………….18-35.

Transmitting..……..…………………………………………………………..……...35-49.

Storing……………………………………………………………………….………50-63.

Processing ………………………………………...……..…………………….….…64-71.

Chapter Two: Orders of Expansion

Unboxing………………………………………………………………………….…72-93.

Aspen……………………………………….………………………………………93-126.

S.M.S. ……………………………………….…………………………………….127-145.

Reboxing…………………………………………………….……….…….…..…145-152.

Chapter Three: Antragsfilme – Film Pitches

Revolting Formats…………………………………………………………..….…153-166.

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Der kleine Godard………………………………………………………...………166-203.

Der ‘große’ Godard……………………………….………………………...….…203-228.

Afterwork……………………………….……….…………….…………………229-242.

Bibliography …………………………………………….…….…………………243-306.

List of Figures

Fig. 1. Joseph Beuys. Das Schweigen von Marcel Duchamp wird überbewertet (1964).

On exhibition at the Museum Schloss Moyland (with Bettina Paust). Photo: dpa.

Fig. 2. Manfred Tischer. Photograph of collective Fluxus performance with Joseph

Beuys, Bazon Brock and Wolf Vostell. On exhibition at the Museum Schloss Moyland in

2009 and in 2014.

Fig. 3. Reproduction of decision by the Landgericht Düsseldorf on September 29,

2010. Aktenzeichen 12 O 255/09. Graphic indication added (KM).

Fig. 4. Reproduction of decision by the Landgericht Düsseldorf on September 29,

2010. Aktenzeichen 12 O 255/09. Graphic indication added (KM).

Fig. 5. Reproduction of decision by the Landgericht Düsseldorf on September 29, 2010.

Aktenzeichen 12 O 255/09. Graphic indication added (KM).

Fig. 6. Reproduction of decision by the Landgericht Düsseldorf on September 29, 2010.

Aktenzeichen 12 O 255/09. Graphic indication added (KM).

Fig. 7. Caroline Bachmann and Stefan Banz. Ein Eklat (Kampf und Urteil) (2010-11).

Detail (graphic indication added [KM]). Photograph (KM) taken at the exhibition of Das

Schweigen der Junggesellen, Museum Schloss Moyland, February 16-April 27, 2014.

Fig. 8. Caroline Bachmann and Stefan Banz. Ein Eklat (Kampf und Urteil) (2010-11).

Installation view. Photograph (KM) taken at the exhibition of Das Schweigen der

Junggesellen, Museum Schloss Moyland, February 16-April 27, 2014.

Fig. 9. Joseph Beuys – Unveröffentlichte Fotografien von Manfred Tischer. Installation view. Photograph (KM) taken at Das Schweigen der Junggesellen and Joseph Beuys –

Unveröffentlichte Fotografien von Manfred Tischer. Museum Schloss Moyland, February

16-April 27, 2014.

Fig. 10. Caroline Bachmann and Stefan Banz. Das Schweigen der Junggesellen.

Installation view. Photograph (KM) taken at Das Schweigen der Junggesellen and Joseph

Beuys – Unveröffentlichte Fotografien von Manfred Tischer. Museum Schloss Moyland,

February 16-April 27, 2014.

Fig. 11a. Joseph Beuys. Das Schweigen von Marcel Duchamp wird überbewertet (1964).

On exhibition at the Museum Schloss Moyland. Photo: dpa

Fig. 11b. Joseph Beuys. Das Schweigen von Marcel Duchamp wird überbewertet (1964).

On exhibition at the Museum Schloss Moyland. Photo: dpa. Graphic indication added

(KM).

Fig. 12. Manfred Tischer. Photo of Fluxus group event at the ZDF-Landesstudio,

December 11, 1964. Joseph Beuys Archiv/Stiftung Schloss Moyland, JBA 7 – 92838.

Fig. 13. Aspen 5+6. 1967. Photograph (KM) taken at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in

Marbach.

Fig. 14. S.M.S. 1. February 1968. Photograph (KM) taken at the Klingspor Museum

Archive in Offenbach.

Fig. 15. Aspen 5+6. 1967. Photograph (KM) taken at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in

Marbach.

Fig. 16. S.M.S. 1. February 1968. Photograph (KM) taken at the Klingspor Museum

Archive in Offenbach.

Fig. 17. S.M.S. 1. February 1968. Screenshot from Sensate online video documentation of

S.M.S. 1.

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Fig. 18. S.M.S. 6. December 1968. Screenshot from Sensate online video documentation of S.M.S. 1.

Fig. 19. Kornhaber Brown and Mike Rugnetta. “What’s the Deal With Unboxing

Videos?” PBS Digital Studies Idea Channel. YouTube. Screenshot.

Fig. 20. IntellivisionDude. The Wizard of OZ Ultimate Collector’s Edition 70th

Anniversary DVD Unboxing. YouTube. Screenshot.

Fig. 21. IntellivisionDude. The Wizard of OZ Ultimate Collector’s Edition 70th

Anniversary DVD Unboxing. YouTube. Screenshot.

Fig. 22. Aspen 5+6. 1967. Photograph (KM) taken at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in

Marbach.

Fig. 23. Susan Sontag. “The Aesthetics of Silence” (1967). In Aspen 5+6. 1967. Detail.

Photograph (KM) taken at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach.

Fig. 24. Tony Smith. The Maze (1967). In Aspen 5+6. 1967. Photograph (KM) taken at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach.

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Fig. 25. Advertisement for Aspen in Evergreen Review. September 1968. Photograph

(KM).

Fig. 26. Advertisement for Tupperware with vice president Bonnie Wise. 1954.

Fig. 27. Advertisement for CCA. Designed by “W.C.”

Fig. 28. Advertisement for CCA. Designed by A.M. Cassandre.

Fig. 29. Advertisement for CCA. Designed by Herbert Bayer.

Fig. 30. Advertisement for CCA. Designed by Matthew Leibowitz.

Fig. 31. Advertisement for CCA. Designed by A.M. Cassandre.

Fig. 32. Advertisement for Aspen in Evergreen Review. April 1967. Photograph (KM).

Fig. 33. Advertisement for CCA. Designed by A.M. Cassandre.

Fig. 34. Advertisement for Aspen in Evergreen Review. April 1968. Photograph (KM).

Fig. 35. Advertisement for CCA. Designed by Joseph Cornell. Part of “Great Ideas of

Western Man” series, c. 1957-58.

Fig. 36. Sol LeWitt. Serial Project #1. 1966. In Aspen 5+6. 1967. Photograph (KM) taken at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach.

Fig. 37. Brian O’Doherty. Structural Play #3. In Aspen 5+6. 1967. Photograph (KM) taken at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach.

Fig. 38. S.M.S. 2. 1968. Cover: Marcel Duchamp. Recording of Contrepetrie. Remove to play. Photograph (KM) taken at the Klingspor Museum Archive in Offenbach.

Fig. 39. Paul Bergtold. Concept Bergtold. In S.M.S. 4. 1968. Photograph (KM) taken at the Klingspor Museum Archive in Offenbach.

Fig. 40. Paul Bergtold. Concept Bergtold. In S.M.S. 4. 1968. Photograph (KM) taken at the Klingspor Museum Archive in Offenbach.

Fig. 41. Paul Bergtold. Concept Bergtold. In S.M.S. 4. 1968. Photograph (KM) taken at the Klingspor Museum Archive in Offenbach.

Fig. 42. Kasper König. My Country ‘Tis of Thee - West Germany, 1968 (Four Views). In

S.M.S. 1. 1968. Screenshot from Sensate online documentation of S.M.S. 1.

Fig. 43. Kasper König. My Country ‘Tis of Thee - West Germany, 1968 (Four Views). In

S.M.S. 1. 1968. Screenshot from Sensate online documentation of S.M.S. 1.

Fig. 44. Kasper König. My Country ‘Tis of Thee - West Germany, 1968 (Four Views). In

S.M.S. 1. 1968. Screenshot from Sensate online documentation of S.M.S. 1.

Fig. 45. Kasper König. My Country ‘Tis of Thee - West Germany, 1968 (Four Views). In

S.M.S. 1. 1968. Screenshot from Sensate online documentation of S.M.S. 1.

Fig. 46. William Copley. The Barber Shop. In S.M.S. 5. 1968. Photograph (KM) taken at the Klingspor Museum Archive in Offenbach.

Fig. 47. William Copley. The Barber Shop. In S.M.S. 5. 1968. Photograph (KM) taken at the Klingspor Museum Archive in Offenbach.

Fig. 48. Kasper König. My Country ‘Tis of Thee - West Germany, 1968 (Four Views).

1968. In S.M.S. 1. 1968. Screenshot from Sensate online documentation of S.M.S. 1.

Fig. 49. Kasper König. My Country ‘Tis of Thee - West Germany, 1968 (Four Views).

1968. In S.M.S. 1. 1968. Photograph (KM) taken at the Klingspor Museum Archive in

Offenbach.

Fig. 50. S.M.S. 1. February 1968. Photograph (KM) taken at the Klingspor Museum

Archive in Offenbach.

Fig. 51. Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver. “Schematic Diagram of a General

Communication System.” In The Mathematical Theory of Communication. 1948/1949.

Fig. 52. Hellmuth Costard. Der kleine Godard: An das Kuratorium Junger Deutscher

Film (1978). Screenshot.

Fig. 53. Hellmuth Costard. Der kleine Godard: An das Kuratorium Junger Deutscher

Film (1978). Screenshot.

Fig. 54. Hellmuth Costard. Der kleine Godard: An das Kuratorium Junger Deutscher

Film (1978). Screenshot.

Fig. 55. Hellmuth Costard. Der kleine Godard: An das Kuratorium Junger Deutscher

Film (1978). Screenshot.

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Fig. 56. Hellmuth Costard. Der kleine Godard: An das Kuratorium Junger Deutscher

Film (1978). Screenshot.

Fig. 57. David Dortort and Fred Hamilton. Bonanza (1959-1973). Screenshot.

Fig. 58. Hellmuth Costard. Der kleine Godard: An das Kuratorium Junger Deutscher

Film (1978). Screenshot.

Fig. 59. Hellmuth Costard. Der kleine Godard: An das Kuratorium Junger Deutscher

Film (1978). Screenshot.

Fig. 60. Hellmuth Costard. Der kleine Godard: An das Kuratorium Junger Deutscher

Film (1978). Screenshot.

Fig. 61. Hellmuth Costard. Der kleine Godard: An das Kuratorium Junger Deutscher

Film (1978). Screenshot.

Fig. 62. Hellmuth Costard. Der kleine Godard: An das Kuratorium Junger Deutscher

Film (1978). Screenshot.

Fig. 63. Walter De Maria. Chicago Project, 1968, in S.M.S. # 1. Photograph (KM) taken at the Klingspor Museum Archive in Offenbach.

xiii

Fig. 64. Walter De Maria. Chicago Project, 1968, in S.M.S. # 1. Photograph (KM) taken at the Klingspor Museum Archive in Offenbach.

Fig. 65. Hellmuth Costard. Der kleine Godard: An das Kuratorium Junger Deutscher

Film (1978). Screenshot.

Fig. 66. Hellmuth Costard. Der kleine Godard: An das Kuratorium Junger Deutscher

Film (1978). Screenshot.

Fig. 67. Hellmuth Costard. Der kleine Godard: An das Kuratorium Junger Deutscher

Film (1978). Screenshot.

Fig. 68. Hellmuth Costard. Der kleine Godard: An das Kuratorium Junger Deutscher

Film (1978). Screenshot.

Fig. 69. Hellmuth Costard. Der kleine Godard: An das Kuratorium Junger Deutscher

Film (1978). Screenshot.

Fig. 70. Hellmuth Costard. Der kleine Godard: An das Kuratorium Junger Deutscher

Film (1978). Screenshot.

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Fig. 71. Hellmuth Costard. Der kleine Godard: An das Kuratorium Junger Deutscher

Film (1978). Screenshot.

Fig. 72. Anne-Marie Miéville and Jean-Luc Godard. Numéro deux (1975). Screenshot.

Fig. 73. Jean-Luc Godard. Moi Je (1973).

Fig. 74. Jean-Luc Godard. Moi Je (1973).

Fig. 75. Jean-Luc Godard. Moi Je (1973).

Fig. 76. Serielle Formationen. Exhibition at the Studiogalerie at the Goethe-Universität

Frankfurt, May 22-June 30, 1967. Bartels, Siegfried, Peter Roehr, and Paul Maenz, eds.

Serielle Formationen. Frankfurt am Main: Stiftung Studentenhaus, 1967. N. pag. Print.

Fig. 77. Star Trek. Code created by Mike Mayfield. 1971. Screenshot.

Fig. 78. Star Trek. Code created by Mike Mayfield. 1971. Screenshot.

List of Media Files

Media file 1. Hans Richter. Rhythm 21 (1921). 3 mins. 36 secs. Photograph (KM) taken at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach.

Media file 2. William Burroughs. Nova Express (1964). 4 mins. 20 secs. Recorded by the

English Bookshop, Paris, 1965. In Aspen 5+6. 1967. Photograph (KM) taken at the

Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach.

Media file 3. Samuel Beckett. Text for Nothing #8 (1958). Read by Jack MacGowran. 12 mins. 45 secs. Recorded by Aspen Magazine, November 1967. In Aspen 5+6. 1967.

Media file 4. The Realistic Manifesto (1920). Read by Naum Gabo. 17 mins. 24 secs.

Recorded by Aspen Magazine, November 1967. In Aspen 5+6. 1967.

Media file 5. John Cage. Fontana Mix. 1958. Realized by Max Neuhaus. Nov. 6, 1967. 9 mins. 57 secs. In Aspen 5+6. 1967.

Media file 6. Merce Cunningham. “Further Thoughts,” Interview. 9 mins. 22 secs.

Recorded by Aspen Magazine, November 1967. In Aspen 5+6. 1967.

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Media file 7. Marcel Duchamp. Seven minute recording of contrapetrie, a surrealist word game. In S.M.S. 2. 1968.

Media file 8. Marcel Duchamp. Anemic Cinema. Excerpt. 1926.

xvii

Einstieg

Less than a year after Primary Structures, the monumental minimalist art exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York that helped popularize artist-names such as Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Carl Andre, the students in Frankfurt decided it was already time to break this structure down. From May 22 to June 30, 1967, the

Studiogalerie, the student gallery of the university, presented a different model for collecting and accessing objects normally exhibited in the museum. Not outside of the institution, but within it. Not an institution of art, but of education. This exhibition, Serielle Formationen, gathered the artists from New York – Judd, Flavin,

Andre, as well as Sol LeWitt, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol – and put them together with Charlotte Posenenske from Wiesbaden, Konrad Lueg from Düsseldorf and Günther

Uecker from Mecklenburg.1 The big names associated with the emerging scene of minimalism would have been more than enough for a successful exhibition in this modest, student-run space in 1967. But instead of this, the show placed the names we know and the names we don’t know next to one another, Victor Vasarely with Henk

Peters, Agnes Martin with Klaus Staudt, Hans Haacke with May Fasnacht, bringing together over 60 works by 48 artists, several of which had never been exhibited in the same context, let alone in this location. “While some American artists like

Warhol were already known in West Germany, some – Flavin and Judd, for example

1 For a list of all the artists who took part in Serielle Formationen, and to see what they listed as their

“home cities,” see Bartels et al.

– had never been exhibited in the country. For Andre, LeWitt, [Larry] Poons, and

Agnes Martin, it was their first European show. Although this first exhibition of

Postminimal and Conceptual art in Western Europe did not have broad repercussions, it was important, because it gave young Europeans like Konrad Fischer-Lueg, Gerry

Schum, and Jan Dibbets access to the works of these American artists.” 2 This was a show that acknowledged the progression of transatlantic exchange, the cultural imports and exports between the U.S. and Western Europe that were becoming more

2 Dossin, The Rise and Fall of American Art 197. See also Dossin, Stories of the Western Artworld and

Mehring. “Serielle Formationen was the first exhibition of Land and Conceptual art in Western

Europe as well as the first exhibition of many of the two movements’ artists on that side of the

Atlantic” (Stories of the Western Artworld 187). Mehring elaborates on the importance of the theme of accessibility for Posenenske in particular, viewing this exhibition as crucial to her developing interest in seriality as a more accessible, more democratic mode of production: “For Posenenske, a democratic art was necessarily an art of openness. By 1967, she had come to believe that art should be easily accessible, participatory, and public. […] From that point forward, everything she made was to be structured and planned in ‘series’ – the Series A through C reliefs, the Series D and DW ‘Ducts,’ the

Series E ‘Turning Leaves’ – that were programmatically unlimited and, as she pointedly put it, ‘not originals for individuals’ (‘nicht Einzelstucke [sic] fur Einzelne’). […] Posenenske’s closest friends and interlocutors in the art world – the brilliant yet little-known Minimalist-cum-Pop artist Peter

Roehr and his partner, graphic designer and soon-to-be-dealer Paul Maenz – put a finger on this international development [of the ‘logic of the multiple’ and ‘serially-structured’ works] in ‘Serielle

Formationen’ (Serial Formations), a landmark exhibition that opened in the Studio Galerie of

Frankfurt’s Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität in May 1967. (This was more than a year before

John Coplans’s better-known ‘Serial Imagery’ show at the Pasadena Art Museum in California.)”

(274-276).

2 normalized, therein disrupting essentialist notions of a wholly insular “West

German” or “U.S.-American” art scene.

It dealt with media in a similar way. While it included several artist-names that now stand in for the minimalist scene itself, Serielle Formationen was an exhibition based not on examining a specific movement or medium, but on thematically exploring the relationships between medial forms. “Wir halten es für erforderlich, sich darauf zu besinnen, daß z.B. ‘seriell’ auch eine Bewegung in der

Musik beschreibt und man sich deshalb erklären lassen sollte, wie diese musikalischen Formen aussehen. Das geschieht nicht, um Differenzen zwischen

Musik und bildender Kunst zu kaschieren, sondern soll deutlich werden lassen, wie unter dem gleichen Begriff mit teilweise analogen Mitteln Kunstformen entstehen, die was vor allem ihre Rolle in der Gesellschaft anbelangt, in einigen Dimensionen sich sehr verschieden, ja gegensätzlich darstellen.”3 It was an exhibition about art, but not just art. There was something happening between media at this time, between music, performance, literature and architecture, and Serielle Formationen took this as an opportunity, not to demonstrate that a certain trend was evident in all these forms, but that they were each approaching something, through different strategies, which was in the air. They were grappling with a problem that nobody could really pin down or fully explain, but that the word “serial” could approach. Rather than try to posit an argument that just added one more “-ism” to the list, this show was an

Einstieg, a means of approaching or accessing a theme that was working its way through a number of fields and that could be found in various medial objects. The

3 Bartels.

3 students didn’t trust the museums to address this topic. In their view, such institutions didn’t have the interest or conceptual capacity to do so given their rejection of new art forms, a remainder of National Socialist aesthetic ideology, and their privileging of artist-names and ‘high’ art.4 But this was a theme that couldn’t be understood as completely separate from institutional logic and structures, so the students took their university affiliation as an obligation to think about the topic from within such structures.

This exhibition that took place at the university at which I’m currently writing is an early example of engaging with problems of excess – in this case, the serial production of goods in art and commerce – and of access, or how to think about problems of accessibility to art and culture, specifically to the means of production and platforms for exhibition, from within a structure that reflects on the interconnectedness of media and disciplines. If it became more widely recognized at this time that one could no longer think of aesthetic medial forms – art, music, television, photography, film, poetry, architecture – as completely separate from one another, then it makes sense that the projects themselves sought modes of production and exhibition that worked within and critically engaged with this intermedial

4 “Beständen in dieser Stadt jedoch ausreichende Informationsmöglichkeiten, könnte sich die

Studentenschaft ihr Geld sparen. Sie könnte es auch sparen, wenn sich die Universität bemühen würde, dem Tabula rasa an Bewußtsein von der modernen Kunst – was wohl zum großen Teil als

Erbe des Nationalsozialismus in uns eifrigst weiterexistiert – von sich aus zu begegnen. Die

Studentenschaft erfüllt eine Verpflichtung gegenüber unserer demokratisch gewollten

Gesellschaftsordnung, wenn sie ihren geistigen Horizont dort erweitert, wo die bestehenden

Autoritätsverhältnisse es als überflüssig erscheinen lassen” (ibid.).

4 reality. Serielle Formationen was thinking about the problem of excess and access as interrelated. While acknowledging that more and more ‘things’ were being produced at this time, one could call them ‘art objects,’ ‘data’ or ‘products,’ this exhibition was seeking an organizational form that could critically reflect on this situation, acknowledging perhaps the increase of Wissen or Wissensformen that this excess produces, while remembering that this, in and of itself, is not something to be celebrated.5 Instead, it addressed the question of how all of this excess is being processed (organized, categorized), transmitted and stored (exhibited and/or made accessible) for posterity. It critically examined the accessibility to a rich public culture that is often presumed to immediately follow an excess of the production of, or the expansion of exhibition contexts for, artistic and cultural objects. The serial mode of production served as the selection and organizational principle in the exhibition, stemming from the observation that this was a mode of production found in a range of terms that were being used to describe developments across media, from television to print culture, from radio to visual art.6 “Trotz rasch wechselnder

Tendenzen, Stile und kurzlebig blühender Ismen, trotz der von Fall zu Fall unterschiedlichen Probleme und Konzepte findet man mühelos eine Gemeinsamkeit in vielen dieser Werke: serielle Formationen der Bildmittel. Ungeachtet der jeweiligen Thematik ist mit vergleichbaren Methoden des Bildaufbaus gearbeitet worden. […] Unter dem Begriff ‘Serielle Formationen’ haben wir verschiedene

5 “Entwicklungs-, Material-, Produktions- und Vertriebskosten sinken mit steigendem Absatz. Quantität und Qualität geraten in engen Zusammenhang und bedingen einander” (Maenz and Roehr).

6 For a perspective on the exhibition itself as a critical medial form, see Voorhies 10-16.

Bildordnungen zusammengefaßt, z.B. Reihungen, Ansammlungen, Wiederholungen,

Kombinationen, Variationen, Permutationen, usw.”7

Since the exhibition was taking seriality as its point of departure, a phenomenon in Western culture imported from the U.S. in some cases, but for which there was a definite Western European response and subsequent transatlantic exchange, the students had a unique opportunity to bring works and ideas together that usually remain isolated from one another. They wanted to make clear that while

Judd, Flavin, Andre were featured in the exhibition, seriality was not a problem of art history alone. “Natürlich lassen sich solche Probleme auch kunsthistorisch beschreiben und chronologisch belegen. Aber daß in einer Umwelt, wo Existenz und

Qualität lebensnotwendiger Erzeugnisse davon abhängen, ob sie in hohen Auflagen, in Serien produziert werden, Künstler gegensätzlichster Denkungsart plötzlich und oft unabhängig von einander sich serieller Formationen bedienen, ist mit Gewißheit nicht ausschließlich ästhetisch erklärbar.”8 While seriality is undoubtedly related to industrial models of production outside of the art world, the students argued that the emergent medial forms found in visual and moving image art of this time could not be understood as a mere reflection of this. “In der bildenden Kunst bezeichnet seriell eine Machart, der man sich in verschiedenen Kunstrichtungen bedient. Die

Studentenschaft […] erhält so die Gelegenheit, sich unverhältnismäßig umfassend

über Erscheinungsformen zu informieren, die heute den Anspruch erheben, Kunst zu sein. Der Gesichtspunkt, unter dem unseres Wissens zum ersten Mal eine

7 Maenz and Roehr.

8 Ibid.

Ausstellung zusammengetragen wurde, ist klar erkennbar und bietet einen

Anhaltspunkt für Zusammenhänge, die sonst für Außenstehende uneinsichtig bleiben.”9 Emergent and converging forms of media were not symptomatic of industrial seriality, but presented a unique opportunity to explore this problem, as they affected and were affected by seriality in and outside the art world, potentially bringing together positions on the problem from a wide range of disciplines.

My project began with an article that addressed the excess or expansion of cinema from the 1960s/1970s, film from this time relocated and reanimated in other media.10 It began with looking at writing in the rain. In 1969, Marcel Broodthaers experimented in his Belgian backyard with inscribing ink on paper, and recording this experiment on 16mm film, while water poured over him and his project. Nearly forty years later, a South Korean, Berlin-based artist, Haegue Yang, imagined finding La Pluie (Projet pour un texte) – not the rather inaccessible film itself, but what was discarded in its making. In 2010, I saw Yang’s imaginary collection of the leftovers of La Pluie at the Walker Art Center: the ink-stained pages, 18 in total, sometimes with supplementary text and photos, mounted on a gallery wall like strips of a silent film. What is writing versus image, how to separate issues of historicity from fictionality, to what extent reanimation helps or harms historical preservation – these are some of the questions that are raised in Quasi MB – in the middle of its story. While looking at Yang’s additional material online, one learns that she wasn’t alone in her fascination with this film from the 1960s. Others had been re-performing

9 Ibid.

10 Michell, “Drei (und mehr) Arten, Tinte ans Laufen zu kriegen.”

Broodthaers’s writing experiment on YouTube based on its photographic documentation, or on video for a different textual project, or used its film stills as a point of departure for something else. My first publication explored the appeal of writing in the rain for these quasi-reanimations, which, in order to find the original work, first had to relocate it in another medium. My subsequent research projects began to think about “expanded cinema” without “cinema” by looking at the circulation of the Mona Lisa in the set design of pornographic productions, at a computer game that restages waiting for a performance by Marina Abramović and at the influence of the comics storyboard on films by Christian Petzold, for example. 11

In the course of my research, it became clear that film was just one of the many medial forms that was negotiating issues of excess, expansion and accessibility around this time. While it can be argued that medial relocation and reconfiguration have always been occurring, and therefore it’s futile to try to demarcate an exclusive moment or era or medium from which one can begin to write a history of this expansion, it is noticeable that, in several projects of the 1960s and 1970s in the U.S. and Western Europe, materials of visual and moving art were reflecting on their convergence with and challenge from the presence of other media. The places in which one might expect to find performance, photography, sound and visual art, television and film were becoming less certain.

The case studies presented here further explore this occurrence by looking at a selection of projects that, in their intermedial forms and operations, position access and excess as frequent themes, problems and potentials that accompany the migration

11 Michell, “I Know It When I See It,” “Anstehen mit Foucault” and “Comic Storyboardkonstruktionen.”

8 of art, film and other audiovisual media outside of their conventional production and exhibition contexts. Miwon Kwon calls this a processing of “unhinging,” and while she doesn’t go into detail about her choice of this term, it’s appropriate here because it signals an anchor, a framing of sorts, that remains with the work after it relocates to a different medial context.12 In the case studies to come, various media – performance, television, photography, painting, records, film, literature, video – appear in a single frame of production and/or exhibition and, as a result, their presumed properties, their old anchors, are reconfigured. Photography and performance are organized for the idiot box and the white cube in the first chapter; literal boxes of sculpture, film strips, records and print culture are presented in the second chapter; and experimental moving image formats, such as video, television and Super 8, on production sets and cinema screens are the focus of the third. Placing these different medial forms in the same ‘box,’ the same space of production or exhibition, doesn’t presume, in the cases presented here, that all media are now equal, that disciplinary frameworks and standards suddenly disappear in times of relocation or that new medial forms afford, as a mere result of their inter-

/multimediality, a level of democratic access that we should be celebrating. Rather, these projects present an opportunity to examine the disciplinary influences and limitations that are, often without our awareness, repeatedly inscribed into our analyses, as they become more noticeable in moments of media emergence and convergence. If one wants to rigorously engage with objects that don’t correspond to disciplinary boundaries and ‘high’ and ‘low’ aesthetic categories, as is the case with

12 See Kwon 30-31.

9 several multimedial artistic projects of the 1960s and 1970s, then one must accept that theories of photography, television, painting, print culture and sound objects can no longer be considered apart from one another. These kinds of projects cannot be deemed part of art history and then analyzed with a bit of Marshall McLuhan.13 Nor can they be claimed by film studies and peppered with Rosalind Krauss. 14 These are projects that take relocation, or their unhinging from standard sites of exhibition, as their point of departure, and thus they force, in my readings, central intermedial concerns to the foreground, from questions of medium specificity to problems of storage and containment.

Three such case studies structure my project: 1) an exhibition of a collective performance by Joseph Beuys, Bazon Brock und Wolf Vostell on live television in

West Germany in 1964 saved only in the form of photographs that were first exhibited in 2009, resulting in controversial copyright cases over the last decade reaching the Bundesgerichtshof; 2) boxed magazines from the late 1960s, namely

Aspen and S.M.S., that, in their unbound forms, combined numerous medial objects, suggesting, similarly to unboxing videos on YouTube, non-linear theories of access, order and storage; and 3) a film by Hellmuth Costard documenting, between 1976 and 1978, experiments with Super 8, video and television in his work and on the production sets of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Hark Bohm and Jean-Luc Godard,

13 See G. Allen 47-48 as well as Aspen No. 4. This is further discussed in chapter two (Orders of

Expansion).

14 See Uroskie 9 as well as Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.” This is further discussed in Orders of Expansion and in the conclusion (Afterwork).

10 thematizing structural problems of institutions in making these cross-medial endeavors possible. Studying these projects from a single disciplinary viewpoint – from art history, German studies or film studies – has led to a highly reductive reading of their medial practices, the constellation of media involved in their production, distribution and exhibition.15

15 The problems in the secondary literature concerning these case studies are explored in more depth in each chapter, thus a selection: The major contributions to the literature on this performance by Beuys, Das

Schweigen von Marcel Duchamp wird überbewertet (1964), have been published by scholars in art history

(Buchloh and von Graevenitz) and German studies (Mieszkowski; for a media studies perspective on

Beuys, cf. Hüser, “Gerücht kam in die Küche”); the key study of multimedial magazines such as Aspen

(1965-1971) and S.M.S. (1968) has been undertaken in art history (G. Allen, see also Ballmer; Cohen; Cork

[ed., “Survey of Contemporary Art Magazines”]; Gagnon; Phillpot; Pindell; Simpson; Wallis; and Walsh), and the most recent text on “avant-garde” print culture in the 1960s and 1970s has been written from the perspective of design studies and American studies (see Schnapp as well as Schnapp and Michaels); and the few texts on this film by Costard, Der kleine Godard: An das Kuratorium Junger Deutscher Film

(1976-1978), have been written from the perspective of film studies and film criticism (Dawson, Harris as well as Prinzler). Theoretical frameworks that could be used to analyze expanded media works, such as moving image and mixed media installations, have been dominated by film studies scholars. Since scholarship on “expanded,” “relocated,” “para-,” “quasi-” and/or “ex-” cinema has been so prolific over the last decade, and since this a problem explored in more detail in these case studies, here is a selection:

Åkervall; Casetti; Hagener, “Wo ist Film (heute)?”; Hagener et al. (ed., The State of Post-Cinema); Lippit;

Strauven, “Expanded Cinema Studies”; Uroskie; and Walley, “‘Expanded’ / ‘Cinema’” and “The Material of Film and the Idea of Cinema.” While all claim to deal with intermediality, specifically the mixing of cinema with other arts, all seek to ultimately define (and re-anchor) “cinema” as the primary medium within the situations they examine, essentially reinscribing the supposed essence and dominance of one

The significance of these case studies from the 1960s and 1970s is not isolated to this time period. Like Serielle Formationen, the series of works presented here, while embedded in and affected by contemporaneous aesthetic and sociopolitical conditions, are also thinking about how to organize and understand history at a time when deciding what belongs where was becoming increasingly difficult. They present and reflect on broader problems of historiography – how and what gets written into history, and what gets excluded from the disciplinary discourse as not really belonging to it. Paul Maenz and Peter Roehr, the organizers of the student exhibition in Frankfurt, explained a similar situation that prompted their exploration of seriality: “Der Anlaß für diese Ausstellung […] waren Kommentare und Bemerkungen, die man häufig und seit langem immer wieder hören und lesen konnte. Das waren Äußerungen wie ‘das ist doch schon vor Jahren gemacht worden’,

‘das hat der und der als Problem schon gelöst’, ‘genau wie die Sachen von dem und dem.’ Weil wir uns mit der Sache seit längerem verhältnismäßig ausgiebig, wenn auch bei weitem nicht erschöpfend, befaßt haben, halten wir solche Argumente für falsch.”16 More and more names and movements were being piled onto a conception of history that was in the process of negotiation, with each faction seeking to explain and organize the present with their specific set of historical figures and precedents, but for Maenz and Roehr, there was not enough critical reflection on this process of piling up and sorting out itself. The way in which we organize and formalize history,

medium into a multimedial situation. For more on this problem, see chapter three (Antragsfilme – Film

Pitches).

16 Maenz and Roehr.

12 whether in archives or scholarly texts or exhibitions, is done not just out of concern for the past but, simultaneously, as a promise or signal for the future. One could view the projects in these case studies, either nostalgically or critically, as failed historical attempts to democratize art and culture. Despite this early engagement with TV by

Beuys, Vostell and Brock, television did not emerge as a major medium for

Kunstvermittlung. The magazines in a box, Aspen and S.M.S., folded after a few years due to the financial constraints of presenting subscribers with ‘direct’ access to the audiovisual art they contained. And Super 8 is clearly not the moving image format of the masses today. But rather than romanticizing these projects, or this historical time period and the movements with which it is associated, as ‘failed,’ one can potentially find in them continuities with the present era, a time when the rhetoric of democracy (access) and the proliferation of moving image material and information entailed in medial expansion (excess) result in important and often irreconcilable aesthetic, cultural and political tensions.

Despite the significance of projects and emergent medial forms from this time period, one could still wonder why these specific case studies are presented and privileged here over others. In other words: why this and not that. It was important, first of all, to find projects that exemplified the reality of transatlantic cultural imports, exports and exchange. Rather than trying to write a history of West German media art in the 1960s and 1970s, for example, it made more sense to consider projects on both sides of the Atlantic that, in some way, acknowledged that there was not an isolated “German” or “U.S.-American” art scene at this time, but a certain

13 level of exchange between the two.17 This presented a challenge and an opportunity to consider projects that would make new contributions to the discipline: a work by

Beuys, Vostell and Brock examined not just from the perspective of German studies, but thinking, for example, about what it means for these names to create a stage out of a television studio, or what German copyright law applied to this collective, multimedial work can tell us about attempts to ensure a rich public culture and discourse at present through transatlantic trade negotiations. Or rather than performing individual readings of the famous art historical names in Aspen, thinking instead about what it meant for subscribers to read the original publication of Roland

Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” in a stapled, black-and-white square booklet next to advertisements for Artforum, a grid study by Mel Bochner, a manifesto read by

Naum Gabo on a 16⅔ rpm flexi-disk and an 8mm filmstrip by Robert Rauschenberg, for which a home projector was required in order for it to be screened.18 In other words:

What happens when one approaches Aspen like an unboxing video, taking each item, including its packaging, as equally important parts of a multimedial compendium? And what if one doesn’t romanticize Costard as the so-called enfant terrible of New German

Cinema, but really listens in his film to all of his seemingly boring, monotone and

17 For an overview of the transnational turn in Jewish studies, German studies and cultural studies, see

Geller and Morris. “The ‘transnational turn’ that made its first mark in the discipline of history and, subsequently, migrated to literary and cultural studies has produced, over the last decade, readings of culture and history that have expanded our notion of nation, ethnicity, and the interplay between place and migration” (ibid., 3).

18 See Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (web), Bochner, Gabo as well as Rauschenberg. This problem is further explored in chapter two (Orders of Expansion).

14 complicated discussions, not just of his technological dreams for Super 8, but of his problems with institutions – the lengthy scenes documenting his film funding applications and detailing his rejection letters and renewed application attempts? Taking the parts of the film into account that don’t fit nicely into a predictable political narrative demonstrate, in fact, a complex and overlooked understanding of how technology and institutions relate to one another and, in many cases, how they create the conditions of possibility for ‘new,’ emergent media in the first place.19

Of course, there are many other case studies that could be helpful for these questions and that could be added to the series presented here. “Auch verwandte

Bereiche, in denen ähnliches zu beobachten ist, Literatur oder Architektur etwa, müßten eigentlich berücksichtigt werden. […] Und schließlich könnte man sich in etlichen Fällen wünschen, daß von den in dieser Ausstellung vertretenen Künstlern andere, noch bezeichnendere Arbeiten zu sehen wären. Daß es uns nicht gelungen ist, manche besonders interessante Werke beizuschaffen, tut uns leid.” 20 Me too. It’s the reality of having to make a selection without hope for, or belief in, a truly comprehensive approach. This student show has that in common with Serielle

Formationen as well – it’s also an attempt to approach a theme and a problem that

19 See Gitelman, Always Already New 4-12 and Gitelman and Pingree xii – xvi. Cf. Guins 296, n. 45.

Discussions of ‘old’ versus ‘new’ media are avoided here in favor of understanding objects at a certain point in their life cycles. Media objects and formats can be better understood in terms of cycles in which, for example, Super 8 would have been new at the time of its production, but in which it is also gaining a kind of ‘newness’ at present, at this time of its reemergence or reappearance in museums (see Antragsfilme

– Film Pitches).

20 Maenz and Roehr.

15 appeared to be in formation, and that will, in the course of this series, become more apparent and more differentiated. “Und so ist diese Ausstellung, die scheinbar soviel

Ähnliches zeigt, eigentlich dazu da, Unterschiede klar zu machen, indem sie

Vergleichsmöglichkeiten bietet.”21 Rather than pretend to have all the answers up front, this is an approach, an Antasten, of something that is still in formation at present, and not just in the pages of this project. On June 3, 2017, the day after I defend this approach and the larger project, Serielle Formationen will take shape again for the first time since 1967. Not in Frankfurt, but in Berlin. Not in a student gallery, but in a corporate one. “Serielle Formationen. 1967/2017: Re-staging of the

First German Exhibition of International Tendencies in Minimalism. June 3 rd –

November 5th 2017. The exhibition ‘Serielle Formationen’ (‘Serial Formations’), jointly curated by Peter Roehr and Paul Maenz for the Frankfurter Universität’s studio gallery in

1967, can be seen as the first thematic exhibition on Minimalist trends in Germany. In the context of its exhibition series ‘Minimalism in Germany’, which started in 2005, the

Daimler Art Collection is making a first attempt to re-stage the historical presentation.”22

This “re-staging” is about branding minimalism with nationalisms, about forcing

Berlin upon New York, as its bohemian counterpart or as the next big art scene, 23 about commodifying institutional critique.24 Certainly not a re-staging of the themes

21 Ibid.

22 “Serielle Formationen. 1967/2017.”

23 “Berlin ist das Versprechen von Komplexität, die man sich selbst nicht zutraut” (Hüser, “Dreitagebart”

39).

24 See Fraser 278, also further discussed in chapter one (Taking Down Pictures).

16 discussed here. But it very likely will be a re-staging of the discursive formations that Maenz and Roehr kept noticing and that served as the impetus for them putting together Serielle Formationen. Das ist doch schon vor Jahren gemacht worden, das hat der und der als Problem schon gelöst, genau wie die Sachen von dem und dem.

The student show from Frankfurt will take shape again in this new context, and nobody really knows, yet, what that shape will be.

Taking Down Pictures

I. Access and Excess

In May 2013, the Bundesgerichtshof, the highest German civil court, decided that silence didn’t have to be silenced anymore.25 In the previous two decisions from lower courts in June 2009 and December 2011, it was determined that the exhibition of photographs implicated in the case VG Bild-Kunst vs. Museum Schloss Moyland was in violation of copyright laws.26 The photos in question were taken by Manfred Tischer, and commissioned by Joseph Beuys, during a collective Fluxus performance in 1964 that included Beuys, Bazon Brock und Wolf Vostell. It was the first collaboration between artists in West Germany that incorporated the televisual medium and apparatus as a form of artistic production and, through the choice of site, as a platform for dissemination.

“Die drei Künstler führen im Fernsehstudio simultan Aktionen aus: Brock verliest einen

Aktions-Text, Vostell macht ein Dé-coll/age-Happening, bei dem auch ein Fernsehgerät zum Einsatz kommt, und Beuys führt die Aktion […] durch. Auch wenn die Regie ganz in den Händen des Fernsehteams liegt, ist ein erster Schritt zur Übertragung der neuen

Kunstformen ins Fernsehen getan.”27 The collective performance was broadcast live on

25 See Aktenzeichen I ZR 28/12.

26 Aktenzeichen 12 O 191/09 and Aktenzeichen I-20 U 171/10.

27 Daniels 63. “In der BRD finden zwar um 1963 die international wichtigen Anfänge künstlerischer Arbeit mit dem Fernsehen statt, es folgen hieraus jedoch zunächst kaum weitere Entwicklungen. Bis Ende der 60er

Jahre werden in der BRD auch mangels Verfügbarkeit von Technik keine eigenständigen Arbeiten von

18 the Zweiten Deutschen Fernsehen (ZDF) show Die Drehscheibe, a program intended for families, broadcast at the end of the workday, at 6:25 p.m., with “eine[r] bunte[n] Palette von aktuellen Informationen, Musik, Tips, Ratschlägen und Unterhaltung.”28 The producers envisioned that it would help “die Familie zu ‘Feierabendgesprächen anzuregen’, in einer Zeit, wo der Zuschauer ‘sicher nicht mit großen und gewichtigen

Themen behelligt werden will,’”29 and on this evening the family might have talked about fat and chocolate, bicycles and fish and beds and television. Since a broadcast of the show was not saved and since the photos of the event were ordered to be taken down, what we talked about until a few years ago was silence.

Künstlern mit Video oder TV produziert. Das deutsche Fernsehen verfolgt die Entwicklungen im Umfeld der intermedialen Kunst jedoch relativ aufmerksam. So wird über die Fluxus-Festspiele in Wiesbaden 1962 ein süffisant bis ironischer Bericht gesendet” (ibid.).

28 Vollberg 61. On the history of Die Drehscheibe (written in lower-case letters beginning in 1978, without the definite article), see Vollberg 59-61.

29 Vollberg 61.

Fig. 1. Joseph Beuys. Das Schweigen von Marcel Duchamp wird überbewertet (1964). On

exhibition at the Museum Schloss Moyland (with Bettina Paust). Photo: dpa.

Until 2009, only one image related to this performance had been on exhibit, and it’s this prop, a remainder of the performance from 1964, that has sustained the history of the event for over forty years. [Fig. 1] It consists of a mixture of Braunkreuz paint and chocolate and spells out the revised title of Beuys’s contribution to the television program: Das Schweigen von Marcel Duchamp wird überbewertet (1964).30 The original title for the performance on the ZDF invitation was simply listed as Fluxus

30 Hereafter referred to as Das Schweigen. Opposite the Tischer photo series in the 2014 exhibition in

Schloss Moyland was a framed piece of paper containing the title of this work, handwritten in ink by

Beuys, which is not dated. Beuys’s name and/or signature and a colon precede the sentence in this sketch.

Stefan Banz notes that the sentence is also written on the back of one of the photos of the Fettecke completed during this action: “Auf der Rückseite eines Fotos mit der fertigen Fettecke heißt es in Beuys’

Handschrift: ‘Fettwinkel -:-> Das Schweigen von Marcel Duchamp wird überbewertet / Aktion.’” (85).

Demonstrationen, referring to the group instead of its supposed father figure.31 The leftover painting exemplifies the reality of temporary working groups, how they form and shift over time. “Irgendwann brechen diese internen Kommunikationsnetze auseinander, entweder durch Erfolg, oder durch ständigen Mißerfolg […], oder man wird erfolgreich nachgeahmt, so daß die Standards (und Anti-Standards) der eigenen Produktion nicht mehr gehören (nicht mehr kontrolliert werden können), usw., […] einige Leute können auch als Opfer dieser Entwicklung draußen bleiben, gehen ins bürgerliche Leben zurück und hinterlassen keine Spuren oder bringen sich um, oder kommen zufällig ums Leben, oder verlassen die Szene aus persönlichen und künstlerischen Gründen usw. [D]ie

Überlebenden, Erfolgreichen stehen dann wieder alleine im Atelier und müssen mit dem, was sie aus der Situation gelernt haben, zurechtkommen.”32 The Fluxus Demonstrationen didn’t survive, but Das Schweigen did, considered as one of the last performances by

Beuys that the Fluxus community would want to claim.33 After Das Schweigen was over and nothing else remained of it or was saved, it was Beuys’s prop, his painting, that came to stand in for the entire Fluxus group event, hanging alone in the gallery until 2006, when it became clear that there was more to silence than we first realized.

31 See ZDF-Landesstudio. On the importance of Duchamp to Fluxus, see O. Smith 30 as well as Vautier 52.

32 Schüttpelz, “Die Akademie der Dilettanten” 56-57.

33 “Beuys’ name ceased appearing on ‘official’ Maciunas-authored programs soon after this performance

[Siberian Symphony, 1963]” (Stiles 69). While there was not a title listed for the larger group event listed on the ZDF invitation, it is clear that Ferdinand Ranft, the director of the ZDF studio, intended for this group performance to be about Fluxus, as he mentions this specific interest in his letter and invitation to

Beuys. See Ranft.

It was then that Schloss Moyland, home to the Joseph Beuys Archiv, acquired the photo series by Tischer as part of its new Sammlungspolitik that concentrated on acquisitions that were scarce and/or that contributed to the totality of works already in its possession. The objective was to increase public interest in Beuys through unique exhibitions at Schloss Moyland and to encourage more archival, scholarly research on

Beuys.34 Photographs were an important part of this new acquisition strategy. “Heute befinden sich im Joseph Beuys Archiv ca. 5.800 vorwiegend schwarz-weiß Fotografien

[…]. Neben der sukzessiven Erschließung und Digitalisierung […] konzentriert sich das

Joseph Beuys Archiv seit einigen Jahren auf die Erweiterung dieses Archivbereiches durch den Ankauf von meist unbekannten Fotoserien, die vor allem für die wissenschaftliche Forschung von immenser Bedeutung sind.”35 The photos by Tischer were a key acquisition, as it was a complete series and had never before been exhibited.36

In these twenty-two black-and-white photographs, one can observe, among other things, spatial relations and working conditions in the television studio: How the group members seek separate areas within a shared space, how they disperse and perform different functions, where they ended up in relation to one another and the objects they used in their performances.37 Beuys is seen creating a corner for himself out of wood, with a

34 See Paust, “Neues aus dem Joseph Beuys Archiv” 41.

35 Ibid.

36 Ibid.

37 There were twenty-two photos in total that were part of the 2009 installation that was accused of violating copyright laws and, as the director of the museum, Bettina Paust, describes, five of these images were determined in the hearing in 2009 to be in violation of copyright: “Da bedauerlicherweise die

Verwertungsgesellschaft Bild-Kunst, Bonn, seit Herbst 2008 Werken von Joseph Beuys aus dem Bestand

22 television set emanating behind him, while actors from the neighboring performance ride bikes around the set with fish hanging out of their mouths. The studio is demarcated by

Beuys’s corner and two other sections: one contains a large bed with a television set on top of it, and the other is marked by a white line and what look like pieces of ripped-apart paper placed behind it. During the show, which lasted between twenty and thirty

des Museums Schloss Moyland kaum mehr Reproduktionsgenehmigungen erteilt, und somit die Arbeit des

Museums zu blockieren versucht, hat die Museumsleitung im Vorfeld der Ausstellung […] von zwei

Rechtsanwälten alle rechtlich relevanten Fragestellungen überprüfen lassen […]. Beide Rechtsanwälte […] sind dabei unabhängig voneinander zu dem Ergebnis gekommen, dass das bloße Ausstellen der

Originalfotografien von Manfred Tischer nicht der Genehmigung durch die Verwertungsgesellschaft Bild-

Kunst bedürfte. Kurz vor Ausstellungseröffnung hat Prof. Gerhard Pfennig, geschäftsführendes

Vorstandsmitglied der Verwertungsgesellschaft Bild-Kunst und zugleich privater Anwalt von Eva Beuys, versucht, durch eine Einstweilige Verfügung die Eröffnung der Ausstellung zu verhindern. Das

Landgericht Düsseldorf hat dann in dem Einstweiligen Verfügungsverfahren am 15.05.2009 entschieden, dass insgesamt fünf Fotografien aus der Fotoserie […] nicht mehr gezeigt werden dürfen. […] Bereits in der mündlichen Verhandlung am 13.05.2009 stellte die Vorsitzende Richterin des Landgerichts Düsseldorf fest, dass fast alle Rechtsfragen im Zusammenhang mit dem streitgegenständlichen Fall höchst umstritten sind. […] Um einen unnötigen Zweitprozess wegen der noch nicht vom Urteil erfassten restlichen 17

Fotografien dieser Serie zu vermeiden, hat das Museum freiwillig und ohne dass dies als

Schuldeingeständnis zu werten wäre, die restlichen Fotografien am 29.05.2009 vorübergehend abgehängt”

(Paust, “Neues aus dem Joseph Beuys Archiv” 48). As the case proceeded to the higher courts, it was determined that there were only eighteen photographs out of the original twenty-two that were in dispute, given that the other four photos did not feature Beuys’s work exclusively or at all. See Aktenzeichen I-20 U

171/10, § 6 and Aktenzeichen I ZR 28/12, § 14.

23 minutes,38 Beuys can be seen in the photos constructing a Fettecke out of margarine, crawling around on his stomach, extending the length of a wooden staff with fat with the help of a felt blanket, integrating sound components (“ein Geräuschstück mit Glocken”) and spelling out “silence” in a slogan about silence.39 [Fig. 2]

Fig. 2. Manfred Tischer. Photograph of collective Fluxus performance with Joseph Beuys,

Bazon Brock and Wolf Vostell. On exhibition at the Museum Schloss Moyland in 2009 and in

2014.

38 The duration of the television program is cited as thirty minutes in the original letter of interest sent to

Beuys by the ZDF studio (see Ranft) and is stated as having lasted between twenty and thirty minutes in the court proceedings (see Aktenzeichen 12 0 255/09, § 43).

39 Beuys, Joseph Beuys 80.

On May 10, 2009, over a year after Tischer’s death, the photographs of the group performance were exhibited to the public for the first time at Schloss Moyland in an exhibition titled Joseph Beuys – unveröffentlichte Fotografien von Manfred Tischer. Five days later, they were taken down. Schloss Moyland received a takedown notice from the artists’ rights society, the Verwertungsgesellschaft Bild-Kunst (VG Bild-Kunst), of which

Beuys was only very briefly a member during his lifetime, but which has, since his death in 1986, represented Eva Beuys, the artist’s widow.40 In VG Bild-Kunst vs. Museum

Schloss Moyland, the Landgericht Düsseldorf determined that the exhibition violated copyright laws. Beuys, who died over thirty years ago, had authorized and paid Tischer to take the photographs, but there was, first, no explicit permission to exhibit them and, second, both the photographic medium itself and the specific arrangement of the photo

40 Opponents of the various copyright lawsuits initiated by Eva Beuys, such as Ute Klophaus, the most well-known photographer of Beuys’s works, drew attention during the trial(s) to Beuys’s objection during his lifetime to the VG Bild-Kunst: “Beuys war 14 Tage Mitglied der VG Bild-Kunst. Dann ist er ausgetreten. Erst als Toter ist er da wieder reingekommen” (Klophaus qtd. in Schröer). A few months after

Beuys’s death, Eva Beuys, now in charge of his estate, became a member of the artists’ rights society (see

Aktenzeichen I ZR 28/12, § 6). It has frequently been noted that Gerhard Pfennig, who was the managing director of the VG Bild-Kunst until 2011 and who represented Eva Beuys in the trials versus Schloss

Moyland, was also the family’s private lawyer. See Bayer, Deutsche Presse-Agentur, Hahn as well as

Völzke.

25 series were determined, after two lengthy court proceedings, to be in violation of copyright protections.41 Das Schweigen was promptly taken down, indefinitely silenced.

In media studies, copyright is often considered, on the one hand, too empirical to be theoretically interesting and, on the other hand, too implicated a binary system of thought of open access activism to receive nuanced treatment by a broader spectrum of the field. It was just recently listed, for example, on Alexander Galloway’s blog, a prominent media studies scholar writing on a wide range of topics from video games and creative code to Deleuze and Hitchcock, under a list of “Things I Have No Interest In.”

On this list of boring things, “copyright law” is flanked by “Hegel” and “The

Olympics.”42 Whether certain cultural or artistic works should be considered fair use, whether they have fulfilled the requirements that would allow them to qualify as

“transformations” of the ‘original’ work, is not the only, or even the primary, question that such copyright cases raise.43 If one of the challenges in media studies today is to

41 See Aktenzeichen 12 O 255/09 and Aktenzeichen I-20 U 171/10. There was a decision made at the level of the Landgericht Düsseldorf in 2009, but this referenced only part of the photo series, not the entire exhibition. See Aktenzeichen 12 O 191/09.

42 Galloway, “Things I Have No Interest In.”

43 On the qualification of “transformation,” see § 17 USCA. On the broader implications of copyright, see

Gillespie, Lessig (Remix and Free Culture) as well as Vaidhyanathan. “They [copyright protections] are a revised road map for the movement of information, tightly regimented to ensure that, first and foremost, cultural goods are always and already commodities, and that being commodities trumps all other considerations” (Gillespie 12). Lessig presents a historical perspective on the debate about copyright in the digital era, which most ultimately understand, however, in binary terms: “These modern-day equivalents

[digital technologies tied to the internet] of the early twentieth-century radio or nineteenth-century railroads

26 balance analyses of media objects and apparatuses with a consideration of media processes, not just focusing “on devices or apparatuses as such […] [but] more on the physical systems of power they mobilize,”44 to not only talk about “objects and operations […] [but also] practices and effects,”45 then copyright should land on a different list. While it of course does not circumvent media objects altogether, as the immediate purpose of copyright regulation is to determine which media works are allowed to be shown, to what extent and in what way, copyright is, more broadly understood, a discourse on these objects and their effects. Paying attention to copyright is a means of historicizing the effects it records and initiates, as well as the presumed possibilities of the media involved in copyright cases – the dreams and anxieties projected into these objects at the moment of their emergence, convergence and/or

are using their power to get the law to protect them against this new, more efficient, more vibrant technology for building culture. They are succeeding in their plan to remake the Internet before the Internet remakes them. It doesn’t seem this way to many. The battles over copyright and the Internet seem remote to most. To the few who follow them, they seem mainly about a much simpler brace of questions – whether

‘piracy’ will be permitted, and whether ‘property’ will be protected. The ‘war’ that has been waged against the technologies of the Internet […] has been framed as a battle about the rule of law and respect for property. To know which side to take in this war, most think that we need only decide whether we’re for property or against it” (Free Culture 9-10).

44 Galloway, The Interface Effect 18.

45 Ibid., 24. Galloway contextualizes the significance of interface effects by offering a critique of Friedrich

Kittler (and, by extension, Marshall McLuhan): “When Kittler elevates substrates and apparatuses over modes of mediation, he forfeits an interest in techniques in favor of an interest in objects. A middle – a compromise, a translation, a corruption, a revelation, a certainty, an infuriation, a touch, a flux – is not a medium, by virtue of it not being a technical media device” (ibid., 18). Cf. Kittler 23-26.

27 questionable distribution and exhibition. “The possibility of a medium stands in intimate relation to what a medium is, that is to say, the definition of whatever medium is in question.”46 Trying to theorize what a series of rare photographs ‘does’ would seem, from this perspective, insufficient. A question with broader implications, and which can be asked with less bias, concerns what this photo series is believed to do, and that can be addressed, if one can get through the dryness of court cases and legalese, by turning to copyright debates and acknowledging them as instances of discourse worthy and in need of our attention.

The case of the photographs taken by Tischer is particularly helpful here because it relates two terms that underlie many copyright debates today: access and excess. One usually finds the term “access” or “accessibility” paired with “preservation.”47 These are theoretical and practical positions recounted in archival texts, representing the dual imperatives of utilization, making documents and data stored in the archive available, attainable and comprehensible, and of perpetuation, ensuring that this same data is physically maintained over time, throughout the operations of storage, retrieval and usage.48 “Excess” is a term one would remember from discussions of the dissemination of

46 Ibid., 18.

47 See Kieckhefer. “A collection is usually given the formal name ‘archive’ only when it meets a narrower definition of the term: ‘official or organized records of governments, public and private institutions and organizations, groups of people and individuals, which are no longer needed to conduct current business, but are preserved’” (ibid.).

48 Spieker refers to these two poles through the metaphor of the Janus head in his historical study of archives, discussing the imperative of preservation as “administration” and the imperative of accessibility as “research”: “[O]ver time archives changed from being legal depositories to being institutions of

28 digital technologies to domestic markets beginning in the 1990s, describing reactions to the proliferation of data, from “epitomizing the initial technophobic responses to the ‘glut of information’” to the “more contemporary response of mastering the array of information which now forms the fabric of day-to-day life.”49 Excess, or the nature of being excessive, is also a characteristic of other contemporary media theories – of noise,50 reproduction51 and compression,52 just to name a few – which grapple with the management and organization of prolific information. This photo series from 1964 is, in essence, a dispute over access versus excess. It concerns a photo series that documented a live broadcast at a time when television was first emerging as a competitive medium for artists and filmmakers, providing them more affordable access to the means of moving image production and, for the general public, it became a means of providing broader accessibility to art and culture through network distribution.53 The performance was also

historical research. By the end of the nineteenth century, finally, the archive had morphed into a hybrid institution based in public administration and historical research alike: ‘There was often talk of the archives’ Janus head, a head with two faces of which one looks to the administration and the other to research, and it was and still is a matter for debate where the emphasis should come to lie.’ As they enter the archive, the papers of which offices rid themselves are resurrected as sources that historians consult in their efforts to write history” (xii).

49 Collins 4.

50 See Kelly 60-63.

51 See Balsom, “The Promise and Threat of Reproducibility” as well as her discussion of circulatory reproducibility in After Uniqueness 4-5.

52 See Gabrys 32-38.

53 For an overview of the perceived possibilities of television during this time in the Anglo-American context, see Spigel 145-147 and 284-286. For the West German context, see Shattuc 45-53.

29 broadcast around the same time that photography began to enter the museum, challenging the supposed indexicality and authenticity of more traditional museum media such as painting and sculpture, as it was initially criticized as a medium that did too much taking, not enough making.54 In other words, photography produced excess, not originality. The performance it documents (if one assumes this was, in fact, a “documentation”) involved an artist who is now well-known and whose estate is embroiled in copyright battles over his work, which includes multiples and the medium of performance, presumed by some to be essentially ephemeral.55 The photographs taken by one artist, commissioned by another artist, capture the performances of the two other artists in the studio. “Auf einigen

Fotografien […] ist von der Beuys-Aktion nicht viel zu erkennen, weil die Aktionen von

Bazon Brock und Wolf Vostell im Vordergrund stehen.”56 The collective content depicted in the photographs raises questions about which participant, if any, should be allowed to claim that the photographic series is an unauthorized exhibition of a work of reproduction.

54 See Crimp 6.

55 On the copyright battles over Beuys’s work, see, for example, Marina Abramović’s account of requesting permission from Eva Beuys to re-perform Joseph Beuys’s wie man dem toten Hasen die Bilder erklärt

(1965) in her 2005 series of reenactments, Seven Easy Pieces: “I went to see Eva Beuys, his widow, after I had sent her a letter asking for permission, but she had never replied. I showed up […]; […] she opened the door and said, ‘Frau Abramović, my answer is no – but you can have coffee’. I went in, and we talked for five hours, about her 45 law cases against everything and everybody […]” (in Abramović et al.). On the understanding of the ontology of performance art in terms of its “disappearance” or ephemerality, see

Phelan 146. Cf. Auslander, Liveness 44-48.

56 Aktenzeichen I ZR 28/12, § 43.

These beliefs about access and excess in the 1960s, about the extent to which emergent and converging media at the time served to increase the accessibility of the production and exhibition of art and culture, or its reproducibility, are all made from the perspective of today, in the so-called digital era. Contemporary copyright regulation “is certainly an important discursive element in determining the value of online media, including levels of access,”57 as concerns abound over maintaining a rich public culture and protecting the circulation of intellectual property.58 This copyright case can thus tell

57 Hogan 141.

58 Over the last few years, copyright law in Germany has become such a controversial topic affecting various media industries and political parties that the Zeit Online now has its own section devoted specifically to the topic: “Die Debatte über die Reform des Urheberrechts beschäftigt Politiker,

Kulturschaffende und Nutzer. Ihr Ausgang wird Auswirkungen auf die Kultur und das freie Internet haben.

In unserer Serie Künstler und Urheberrecht gehen wir gemeinsam mit Gastautoren der Frage nach, wie die

Wertschöpfungsketten im Kulturbetrieb funktionieren, wie sie sich durch die digitale Revolution verändert haben und wie eine Reform des Urheberrechts aussehen könnte” (“Serie: Künstler und Urheberrecht”).

With over 6,000 artists’ signatures, the “appeal to copyright laws” was published on May 10, 2012 in Die

Zeit as well as online, under the heading: “Aufruf: Wir sind die Urheber!” See “Aufruf: Wir sind die

Urheber” and “Wir sind die Urheber!” Meanwhile, copyright claims are still being submitted today from

GEMA, the Gesellschaft für musikalische Aufführungs- und mechanische Vervielfältigungsrechte, against

YouTube for not properly monitoring its users and preventing infringements (see Leistner and Metzger). In terms of political parties, the success of the Piratenpartei after 2011 raised concerns about how to revise copyright laws, as this was one of the party’s policy platforms (see Stipp). While Die Grünen had proposed a “Kulturflatrate” in order to spread additional costs amongst all internet users, regardless of their file- sharing habits, the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands announced that it intended to part with this idea in favor of changing the “Warnhinweismodell” for internet users engaging in illegal downloading practices (see Freisfeld). While a Leistungsschutzrecht was proposed by the Christlich Demokratische

31 us something about how we value objects from yesterday, how these values are affected by conditions of today and what effect copyright historiography has on our understanding of digital objects. “[F]aced with the dissolution of the indexical link between photograph and its object in the simple necessity of the two actually confronting one another at some point for the genesis of the image, theorists became interested in the politics of indexicality or its absence in contemporary image-making and theory. This shift invited, therefore, what we might call archaeological reconsiderations of pre-digital technologies

[…].”59

This case illustrates that the dialectic between access and excess in discourses on emergent, changing and converging medial forms is not confined to digital data. While more noticeable in debates concerning infinite reproduction in a time of file transfers and reformattable hardware, questions of access and excess are also central to disputes over the preservation and exhibition of artistic and cultural products that are believed to have developed out of a desire for increased accessibility but which must, at present, maintain their rarity in order to be institutionally and financially valuable. This would include projects that consciously moved away from traditional sites and platforms for exhibition that one might associate with ‘high’ culture, such as the museum or the gallery, but which are also objects that, for curators and rights holders today, should maintain a sense of

Union Deutschlands in 2012, which in its original form would have extended the copyrights of publishers to control even the circulation of news snippets in search engines, imposing a so-called “Google tax,” this was later revised. For an overview on the shifting positions of political parties on copyright regulation, see

Lagershausen.

59 Pollock and Bryant xvii.

32 authenticity, which is often based on preserving scarcity.60 And not just on producing scarcity, but on advertising it. “Die Kommunikation von Knappheit ist dann erfolgreich, wenn im Medium der Knappheit nicht nur gehandelt, sondern auch erlebt wird.

Wirtschaften beginnt nicht erst dort, wo auf knappe Güter zugegriffen wird, sondern bereits dann, wenn eine Erfahrung von Knappheit gemacht wird, die sich der Gesellschaft verdankt. […] Auf die Kommunikation von Knappheit, und nicht nur auf ihre

Bewältigung, kommt es an […].”61 Even while many of these projects developed out of a supposed desire to move away from institutions, it’s not a surprise, given this understanding of the importance of cultivating scarcity and speculation that, “nearly forty years after their first appearance, the practices now associated with ‘institutional critique’ have for many come to seem, well, institutionalized.”62

60 See Balsom, “The Promise and Threat of Reproducibility.”

61 Baecker 48.

62 Fraser 278. “It is artists – as much as museums or the market – who, in their very efforts to escape the institution of art, have driven its expansion. With each attempt to evade the limits of institutional determination, to embrace an outside, to redefine art or reintegrate it into everyday life, to reach ‘everyday’ people and work in the ‘real’ world, we expand our frame and bring more of the world into it. But we never escape it. […] Representations of the ‘art world’ as wholly distinct from the ‘real world,’ like representations of the ‘institution’ as discrete and separate from ‘us,’ serve specific functions in art discourse. They maintain an imaginary distance between the social and economic interests we invest in through our activities and the euphemized artistic, intellectual, and even political ‘interests’ […] that provide those activities with content and justify their existence. And with these representations, we also reproduce the mythologies of volunteerist freedom and creative omnipotence that have made art and artists such attractive emblems for neoliberalism’s entrepreneurial, ‘ownership-society’ optimism” (ibid., 282-

283).

By turning to the discourse on access and excess in such controversies, one can understand questions of copyright as not only concerned with the binary logic of permission and prohibition, but as dependent upon ideologies of power and control over circulation enacted through mediated processes. Already in the etymological roots of the term “access,” one finds reference to something more complicated than a yes/no question.

It’s about tradition, what’s socially acceptable, the risk of overstepping boundaries and admittance through permission – the power, opportunity and privilege of approach.63 So copyright understood not as a question of what a certain medium does (photography) in relation to another (performance on television), but as a specific process of mediation.

“What if we refuse to embark from the premise of ‘technical media’ and instead begin from the perspective of their supposed predicates: storing, transmitting, and processing?

With the verbal nouns at the helm, a new set of possibilities appears. These are modes of mediation, not media per se. The shift is slight but crucial.”64 This isn’t a case that is just concerned with whether or not to take down some photos, but is embroiled, through both the complex medial processes embedded in the work itself and the discourse on the case, with crucial questions about media access and excess today. It’s not just a copyright case, but one that sets a precedent for the circulation, exhibition and conceptual understanding of inter-/multimedial artworks. And it is not just exemplary of the curatorial and scholarly

63 See “access, n.” “[C]lassical Latin act or fact of approaching, approach, arrival, visit, […] undertaking, hostile approach, attack, right of approach, audience, means or mode of approach. […] Senses relating to entrance or approach. […] a. The power, opportunity, permission, or right to come near or into contact with someone or something; admittance; admission” [ibid.].

64 Galloway, The Interface Effect 18.

34 difficulties of dealing with Beuys’s archive, but is an indication of a range of dilemmas and consequences in determining the relationship between ephemerality, ‘liveness’ and archival storage today.

II. Transmitting

In the image or ‘painting’ that Beuys produced during Das Schweigen, one is able to trace the trajectory of medial instantiations that have made this work so challenging for analysis and for discussions about how it should be properly preserved and made accessible for posterity. [Fig. 1] Beuys takes the medium of text, painted text no less, to communicate something about silence, a mode of aurality which, as John Cage repeatedly emphasized, is never fully achievable: “There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make silence, we cannot.”65 Silence never performs, in utterance, what it promises and it is always a relative state. If you are reading the text in front of you ‘in silence,’ it would probably only take some closer listening for you to hear noises from outside the room you’re in or the sounds you make while thumbing through this paper. But you would probably still consider those sounds to be part of the silence you are experiencing.66 Silence requires context.

65 Cage, Silence 8.

66 “Silence is all of the sound we don’t intend. There is no such thing as absolute silence. Therefore silence may very well include loud sounds and more and more in the twentieth century does. The sound of jet planes, of sirens, et cetera. For instance now, if we heard sounds coming from the house next door, and we

Beuys’s slogan on silence, however, is usually taken out of its intricate context.

To take the most well-known example: “When Beuys made his notorious (and obscure)

1964 statement that ‘the silence of Marcel Duchamp has been overrated,’ he publicly confessed not to have the slightest clue of the scope of Duchamp’s theoretical positions and the lasting significance of his work.”67 Benjamin Buchloh then refers to a statement

Beuys once made about the Schweigen statement: “Der Satz über Duchamp ist sehr schillernd und ambivalent. Er enthält Kritik an Duchamps Anti-Kunstbegriff und ebenso an seinem späteren Verhalten und dessen Kultivierung, als er die Kunst aufgab und nur noch dem Schachspiel und der Schriftstellerei nachging.”68 Beuys often commented on

weren’t saying anything for the moment, we would say that was part of the silence, wouldn’t we?” (Cage,

“A Lethal Measurement” 166).

67 Buchloh 51. For one of several counterarguments to Buchloh’s reading of Beuys’s ‘slogan,’ see

Mieszkowski, and for a more positive interpretation of Beuys’s relationship with Duchamp, see von

Graevenitz.

68 Beuys qtd. in Adriani et al., Joseph Beuys: Leben und Werk 138. In Adriani et al., Joseph Beuys: Life and

Works, the translation reads: “BEUYS: The sentence about Duchamp is very scintillating and ambivalent. It contains criticism of Duchamp’s antiart concept and of his later conduct, when he gave up art and pursued only chess and writing” (119). In Tisdall, it is translated slightly differently: “The statement on Duchamp is highly ambivalent. It contains a criticism of Duchamp’s Anti-art concept and equally of the cult of his later behavior…” (92). This is the translation that is quoted in Buchloh 51. In these publications, however, the source for this ‘statement’ by Beuys differs. For Adriani et al., Joseph Beuys: Leben und Werk and Joseph

Beuys: Life and Works it is: Beuys, “Krawall in Aachen” 96. For Tisdall, it is her “interviews with Joseph

Beuys, September – October 1978” (Tisdall 7; see also Tisdall 284). For Buchloh, it is Tisdall 92 (both printings in London and New York). All these sources also quote the second part of Beuys’s ‘statement’ on the silence statement, in which he references Duchamp’s relationship with the Fluxus group: “Nebenbei

Duchamp throughout his career and although some of these statements seem concrete in their critical perspective, most remain ambiguous at best, contradictory at worst. In fact,

Beuys’s previous ‘statement’ about Duchamp, which Buchloh and others frequently cite, cannot be traced back to an actual source. “Dieses pointierte Statement haben die Autoren

[von Joseph Beuys: Leben und Werk – Götz Adriani, Winfried Konnertz und Karin

Thomas] bis zur erwähnten Ausgabe von 1994 als eine wörtliche Aussage von Joseph

Beuys ausgewiesen. Als Quelle gaben sie ein Interview an, das 1964 stattfand: Krawall in

Aachen – Interview mit Joseph Beuys, in: Kunst 4, Oktober/November 1964, S. 96. In

Wirklichkeit ist diese Aussage nicht in diesem Interview enthalten, was den Autoren erst zwanzig Jahre nach ihrer Erstausgabe aufgefallen ist.”69 One could even add to this that it has been debated as to whether Beuys actually wrote the sentence himself or whether his assistant, Norbert Tadeusz, was responsible for painting the now-infamous slogan. This is the position assumed in the first court proceeding, for instance: “Allein der Umstand, dass Herr Tadeusz selbständig die Beschriftung des Plakats übernommen hat, lässt eine

hatte sich Duchamp gegenüber Fluxuskünstlern sehr negativ geäußert, indem er vorgab, sie brächten keine neuen Ideen, denn er hätte alles schon vorweggenommen” (Adriani et al., Joseph Beuys: Leben und Werk

138). It appears in translation in Adriani et al., Joseph Beuys: Life and Works 119, and with minor differences in Tisdall 92 (the source for and Buchloh 51-52).

69 Banz 94-95, n. 7. “Denn in ihrer Neuausgabe von 1994 sind diese Bemerkungen als ihre eigenen und nicht mehr als Beuys-Zitat ausgewiesen, wogegen das Ende dieser Passage über Antikunst noch immer als ein Zitat von Joseph Beuys dargestellt wird, obwohl auch dieses, so wie es zitiert ist, im Interview nicht vorkommt (Hinweise von Barbara Strieder). Das legt die Vermutung nahe, dass der gesamte Absatz tatsächlich das Resultat persönlicher Gespräche mit dem Künstler über seine Aktion im ZDF ist” (ibid.).

Cf. Adriani et al. 138-139 and 374, n. 16 as well as Beuys, “Krawall in Aachen.”

37 eigene schöpferische Leistung nicht erkennen.”70 Bettina Paust, the director of Schloss

Moyland, has stated that during the subsequent court proceedings, it was more or less accepted that Tadeusz wrote the sentence himself, as evidenced in the handwriting style.71 This likely ‘statement’ by Beuys about Duchamp, like his painted statement in

Das Schweigen, has lost its context. It continues to circulate without a referent in various publications, its origin story remaining unclear.

Beyond the ambivalence and unreliability of Beuys’s statements on this specific statement on silence, commentators have nevertheless “tended to confine themselves to descriptions of his work, venturing by way of explanation little more than paraphrases of

Beuys’s own statements. But […] Beuys’s interviews and lectures do not constitute interpretations but exist at the same level as, even as part of (verbal extensions of), the art.”72 Understanding Das Schweigen as a “statement” once made by Beuys completely

70 Aktenzeichen 12 O 191/09, § 39. Cf. Mieszkowski 75-76. Schneede’s catalogue raisonné, which was quoted in the ruling and used as a primary source during the court proceedings in order to assess to what extent the photographic arrangement followed the linear progression of events, cites Beuys as having written the sentence himself: “Auf dem Boden liegend und kriechend bildete er im inneren Winkel des

Bretterverschlags eine Fettecke aus. ‘Dann kam’, so hat er [Beuys] berichtet, ‘eine Fettecke in Filz und ein

Geräuschstück mit Glocken, die auf dem Boden vor der Ecke lagen. Dann malte ich die Worte mit meiner

Braunkreuz-Farbe und Schokolade’” (Joseph Beuys 80).

71 Paust, “Interview mit Dr. Bettina Paust.”

72 Ulmer 228. Ulmer is commenting on the state of the secondary literature on Beuys in 1985, but given the fact that this specific statement on Duchamp still circulates in more recent research, Ulmer’s observation about the problematic trends in scholarship on Beuys remains valid here. In his critique of research methodologies that understand Beuys’s work first and foremost according to the artist’s own statements about his work, he cites Lothar Romain and Rolf Wedewer as a counterexample to this trend, as they

38 elides the medial complexity of the act: It is a sentence, a painting and has since become a slogan – a readymade of sorts – constructed during a collective performance, transmitted on live television, accompanied by functioning and prop television sets and sound components, and documented via a series of photographs which have since been banned, twice, from being displayed.73 Silence, in this case, is not just about not being able to hear anything. While the danger of silence, according to the secondary literature, lies at the heart of Das Schweigen – itself a representation of the misguided “lengths to which Beuys was prepared to go in order to shout out his silence” since he, “[u]nlike

Cage or Duchamp, […] felt it impossible, unconscionable, to stay silent” – in the debates

“stress in calling for analyses that bring to bear other categories and contexts” (ibid.). See Romain and

Wedewer 36-37.

73 On this “slogan” as a readymade, see Mieszkowski 75-76. “Octavio Paz, one of Duchamp’s most influential supporters, has underscored the notion that the paradigm of the ready-made is linguistic. […]

For Paz, the semantic capacities of a ready-made rest not on the fact that it attacks the sanctity of the fabricated object, but on the way it highlights the absence of any simple one-to-one correspondence between a physical entity and what it represents. It is from this perspective that one should interpret the

‘label’ that emerges from Beuys’s 1964 action, the ‘short sentence’ that comes to define his aesthetics as a whole: ‘The silence of Marcel Duchamp is overrated.’ In his comments on this utterance, Beuys is plainly aware of the degree to which the lapidary pronouncement confronts us not simply as a catchy proverb we will never tire of repeating, but as a ready-made in its own right, a piece of language that can never be reduced to the expressive intentions of the person who reads or writes it. It is not by chance that the poster from the action is often described as a piece of graffiti, as if it were something Beuys had stumbled across on the wall of an alley. From the moment it is articulated, the sentence emerges as prefabricated; it is a slogan that can be taken up and reappropriated time and time again, but it is never entirely in hand” (ibid.,

75-76).

39 leading up to and surrounding the Moyland court case, silence again becomes the crux of the problem.74 Here, concerns about silence abound: the way in which some medial forms simply cannot remain silent, how their supposedly mimetic nature too perfectly colonizes the stories that originate in other media; or the fear of silencing the dialogue between the object and the onlooker, for which Beuys so strongly advocated during his life, if his works are not exhibited properly; or how the copyright case could detrimentally silence

Das Schweigen by preventing the exhibition of photographs, leading scholars to conflate the complex medial event with the one ‘painting’ that has been left behind and the few contradictory oral tales about its original execution.75 Silence takes place across media.

If silence is indeed not the opposite of sound, not, as Cage would argue, truly synonymous with an empty space or time, but rather a marker of a certain discursive turning point, a threshold indicating what is at stake – whether it be an apparent turning away from one art form for another, or a reappropriation and recasting of this silence and its reception, or an accusation of muting the artist’s voice and his celebration of dialogue

– then tracing the enunciations of silence, of Das Schweigen, could lead to a better

74 Thompson 86-90.

75 For a critical perspective on the arrangement and preservation strategies for Beuys’s work in Schloss

Moyland, see Bastian: “Das grandiose zeichnerische Werk, die Objekte von Beuys sind in Moyland offenbar einem steten Überlebenstest ausgesetzt. Über all den frühen Werken liegt die Gravitation eines nicht auflösbaren Unverständnisses. Das, was wir erhellenden, lebendigen Dialog mit einem außerordentlichen Werk nennen, die Entdeckung seines grandiosen poetischen Zaubers, versinkt hier in

Ungerührtheit, in erstickender Profanität. Das, was sich in diesen frühen Werken in kühnen metaphorischen

Erprobungen beispiellos als Grundfigur allen Werdens und Vergehens zeigt, ist in Moyland dem

Schweigen überlassen.”

40 understanding of the implications of the copyright case in which it has since been embroiled. Working through these iterations of silence requires a rethinking and a repositioning of Beuys’s original project, something that the court case, with its new evidence and old arguments, clearly demands. What is the significance of Beuys staging

Das Schweigen on live television, a medium whose ontological properties, at the time, were derived from its ability to document liveness which was understood to be the exact opposite of silence? “[S]ilence is associated in western culture with death – the end of time. […] To secure the illusion of liveness over death, commercial television cultivated ways of filling silence with the sounds of life.”76 If revisionary histories of television now tell us that live TV broadcasts before the mid-1950s had their origins in radio shows of the previous decades, and thus “the history of television ought to be more readily depicted as sound first, images second – as an initial ‘blindness’ before the attainment of vision – than imagined in terms of an antediluvian phase of silence,” then Das Schweigen seems to deliberately undermine this expectation of sound that is grounded in the medium’s history.77 How did West German television audiences in the mid-1960s understand this broadcast in aesthetic terms if it featured, according to the accounts, sparse dialogue, if any, for a total of up to thirty minutes, making it a nearly ‘silent,’

‘live’ program?78 How were the photos, in turn, understood to be reproducing this silence for museumgoers over forty years later?

76 Spigel 182-183.

77 Briggs.

78 Briggs suggests that there is an important economy of spectatorial attention required in ‘silent’ television viewing, drawing parallels between it and the coming of sound film: “[T]he effect of silent television’s lack

When considering their immediate aesthetic properties, the photos of course did not encompass sound elements, and thus were, in this sense, silent. But they were also determined by the court to be unlawfully conveying something that was exclusive and essential to the original event. “Those who wish to hide pictures assume they wield a kind of power. Even a ban on images rests on an ‘insight into the peculiar nature of the image.

First it is recognized as having an enormous power. And only as a result does it become necessary to counteract its effects with an interdiction.’”79 In this case, one begins to wonder what exactly these photos were able to document in the exhibition that made them so suspect. What does this photo series from the 1960s say about the ‘original’ silence that should have been kept silent? The judicial determinations, in focusing on photography as a medium of reproduction, clearly reinforce the historical cliché of photography as an art of taking, not making, of documentation and not creation, and of

of dialogue – the event of ‘silence’ in broadcast television – can be understood in terms similar to those accounting for the arrival of sound in film, as demanding of its audiences, that is, a kind of attention that is otherwise practiced as inessential to the TV ‘viewing’ experience. Even as it breaks the perceived natural bond between sound and image, therefore, silent television demands of its viewers that they grant the televisual text an aesthetic completeness that it is otherwise rarely given” (ibid.). See also Spigel 178-212.

79 Geimer 22. On the origins of the relationship between the notion of the “creator” (“Urheber,” God as the original creator of all things) and the banning of images (the “Bilderverbot,” aniconism), see G. Böhm:

“Das Bilderverbot möchte vor allem sicherstellen, daß diese notwendige und unverzichtbare Analogie zwischen dem Schöpfer und seinem Wesen nicht umkehrbar wird. […] Zuvorderst wird ihm [dem Bild] eine gewaltige Macht zuerkannt. […] Die Macht erwächst aus der Fähigkeit, ein ungreifbares und fernes

Sein zu vergegenwärtigen, ihm eine derartige Präsenz zu leihen” (329-330).

42 selection rather than synthesis.80 “One could object that such negative definitions are characteristic for the early stages of any medium, when the goal is to determine how it is new and different from former practices. In the case of photography, however, the comparisons with drawing, graphic arts, and painting have never ceased. They have been taken up by nearly all the theorists of the trace mentioned here [e.g., Susan Sontag,

Charles Sanders Peirce, André Bazin, Roland Barthes, Rosalind Krauss and Philippe

Dubois].”81 Such determinations about the medium which underpinned the initial rulings in VG Bild-Kunst vs. Museum Schloss Moyland carry serious consequences for any documentary practice that seeks to make public a wide range of artistic events, essentially subordinating the artistic rights of the photographer to the rights of the performing artist.

“Höchst problematisch sind allerdings die grundlegenden Wertungen und Konsequenzen dieser Entscheidung. Für das gesamte Feld der Dokumentationsfotografie im künstlerischen Bereich bedeutet sie kaum zu überschätzende Einschränkungen.

Fotografen von Performances, aber auch von Opernaufführungen, Theaterinszenierungen

80 These are Crimp’s binaries for describing the historical prejudice against exhibiting photography in museums, an attitude that acts “as if Duchamp’s ready-mades had never occurred, as if modernism’s most radical developments […] had never taken place, or at least as if their implications could be overlooked and the old myths of art fully revivified. […] Duchamp’s ready-mades had, of course, embodied the proposition that the artist invents nothing, that he only uses, manipulates, displaces, reformulates, repositions what history has given him. […] The ready-mades propose that the artist cannot make, but can only take what is already there. It is precisely upon this distinction – the distinction between making and taking – that the ontological difference between painting and photography is said to rest” (6).

81 Geimer 18.

43 und Pantomime müssten künftig vor jeder Ausstellung ihrer Werke die – gegebenenfalls kostenpflichtige – Zustimmung der künstlerisch Verantwortlichen erhalten.”82

The main question about the unpublished photographs suspended between the two names in the exhibition’s title, Joseph Beuys – unveröffentlichte Fotografien von Manfred

Tischer, was what status these photos had with respect to the ‘original’ work. Were they a permitted adaptation of the work, “eine freie Benutzung,” or a transformation of it, “eine

Umgestaltung”? These are terms that are cited in cases in which rights holders’ claims are challenged, as there is no strict equivalent to the U.S.-American “fair use” measure in

Germany. Attitudes toward authors’ rights and, consequently, toward the protection of access to public goods, have always differed in both countries, in spite of the recent conclusion of a fifteenth round of negotiations on a bilateral copyright agreement.83 A

82 Elmenhorst and von Brühl. Elmenhorst and von Brühl then list a number of very relevant questions that have been raised by this ruling: “Wird damit nicht verkannt, dass auch Dokumentationsfotografie eine hohe

Kunst ist, in der starke subjektive Wertungen durch das Auge des Fotografen eigene, neue künstlerische

Aussagen begründen können? Muss mithin der Bearbeitungsbegriff des deutschen Urheberrechts nicht jedenfalls für den Bereich der Dokumentationsfotografie modifiziert werden? Hätte nicht das Landgericht

Düsseldorf auch berücksichtigen müssen, dass es sich bei Joseph Beuys als dokumentierte Person um eine historische Persönlichkeit der Zeitgeschichte handelt, die schon aufgrund ihres Bekanntheit auch bildrechtlich ohne Weiteres in jeder Zeitschrift und jedem Buch abgebildet werden darf? Und schließlich:

Wenn Tischer die Performance seinerzeit mit Wissen und Zustimmung von Beuys dokumentierte, nahm

Beuys damit nicht bewusst in Kauf, dass diese Fotos auch seine Aktion interpretierten?”

83 On the details of this latest round of talks concerning the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership

(TTIP), see Bercero. Digitization is frequently cited in copyright literature as providing the impetus for the approximation of rights regulation across the Atlantic over the last few decades. See Decherney; Lessig

Remix and Free Culture; Dommann; Steinhauer, Bildregeln; Stokes; as well as Baldwin.

44 snapshot of transatlantic developments in authors’ rights at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century is a helpful example: At the same time that the U.S. was refusing to engage in a multilateral treaty regarding copyright standards, being considered a “pirate nation” and “a copyright rogue” by essentially deeming the replication and distribution of all foreign intellectual property fair game and making significant economic and cultural gains as a result, Germany was embracing, following

France, the concept of authors’ rights. Signing the Berne Convention treaty of 1886, as other Western European countries did, would have entailed significant changes to the standing U.S. copyright law: “In limiting the 1790 Copyright Act’s benefits to U.S. citizens, Congress consciously chose the advantages of counterfeiting and piracy for the fledgling nation. Reprinting foreign works was not only permitted but encouraged. […]

With the spread of cheap print, mass education and universal literacy, America developed the world’s largest reading audience. […] ‘It seems to be their opinion,’ complained

Arthur Sullivan (the composer of Gilbert-and-Sullivan fame), ‘that a free and independent American citizen ought not to be robbed of his right of robbing somebody else.’”84

If copyright law in the U.S. was historically fueled by a desire to incentivize productivity and market growth, only indirectly offering the public inexpensive cultural products in the process, authors’ rights as implemented in France and Germany stemmed from the belief in moral rights: “Moral rights are based on a simple idea. The author of a work develops a special bond with his creation. The relationship between them is permanent. An author is, and always will be, the author of his own work. Writers

84 Baldwin 113.

45 describe this relationship in a number of ways. Words such as ‘intellectual,’ ‘personal,’ and ‘spiritual’ often appear.”85 These different priorities for protecting intellectual property (versus artist’s personality) can even be seen on an etymological level: the

English “copyright” regulation, “the right ‘to own and control a work of authorship’ and the right ‘to copy it,’” as compared to the German Urheberrecht, the right of the original creator to control the publication, attribution and integrity of the work.86 The owner of the work is excluded in the English term, while in the German it is specifically referenced as

“the original creator,” reinforcing the inherent connection between a work and its author

– and, by extension, the personality and ‘spirit’ of the author.87

These romantic notions of the importance of maintaining the author’s personal mark on the work, and her integrity through it, are to a certain extent upheld in the current German copyright law, which relegates the two “exceptions” to exploitation

85 Rajan 33.

86 World Encyclopedia of Library and Information Services 228. See §§ 12-14 UrhG, under

“Urheberpersönlichkeitsrechte” (literally translated as the “personality rights of the original creator,” commonly referred to as “moral rights”). These rights are listed as: “Veröffentlichungsrecht,”

“Anerkennung der Urheberschaft” and “die Entstellung des Werkes,” or the right of publication, the recognition of authorship and the distortion of the work (ibid.).

87 See §§ 12-14 UrhG. On the historical contextualization of these legal terms and concepts, see Bosse as well as Plumpe. Plumpe’s text in particular excavates the relationship between ‘German’ notions of property (“Eigentum”) and its necessary trait of uniqueness (“Eigentümlichkeit”) in order to be legally protected as intellectual property during this time, suggesting that such romantic concepts of the artist- genius greatly influenced and even provided the structural basis for legal policies that are still, in some form or another, valid at present.

46 rights, Verwertungsrechte, to the bottom of the list. Below the right of reproduction, distribution, exhibition and recitation through various medial forms (e.g., performance, video and broadcast), one finds section 23, Bearbeitungen und Umgestaltungen, adaptions and transformations, and section 24, Freie Benutzung, free use which, again, should not be confused with the U.S.-American fair use measure.88 While section 24 is rather vague, noting that the free use stipulation can only be applied in situations when it gives rise to a wholly “independent work” (ein selbständiges Werk), section 23 is much more detailed: adaptions/transformations of a work can be carried out and/or made public

88 In a comparative analysis of German versus U.S. fair use measures, Geller argues, however, that the

German “freie Benutzung,” at least in terms of its application in parody and citation cases, is gradually approaching the U.S. “fair use” measure: “In the Alcolix and companion Asterix Persiflagen cases decided in 1993, the Federal Court of Justice started by affirming that graphically portrayed characters, such as

Asterix and Obelix, were indeed produced by copyright. The traditional inquiry into free utilization [in

German: freie Benutzung] would have led to the question: Are the essential aspects or traits of such graphic works sufficiently attenuated, or faded away, so that no infringement may be found? […] The Federal

Court of Justice, however, broadened the test for free utilization in the Alcolix case. It asked whether the

Alcolix characters may be seen as sufficiently attenuated in the context of the parody. It spoke in terms of distance, more literally, some standing back, relative to the prior work that the later work creatively effectuated […]. At issue [in a landmark German case decided in 2000] were excerpts taken from the works of the Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht. […] To dramatize Brecht’s dilemmas at the time, Heiner Müller had his play Germania 3 feature large passages excerpted from Brecht’s works. […] Traditionally, a quotation may only be excused if it is no larger than necessary to serve its illustrative or related purpose

[…]. However, in Germania 3, the extensive Brecht excerpts did not illustrate or unpack any argument or theme of the play. The court rather understood them as a collage of texts that served a dramatic role in the play” (906).

47 only with the consent of the original creator, including film adaptations, sketches of an artwork as well as models and plans of a work.89 This clearly designates all marginalia, documentation and paratexts as adaptations or transformations of another work as not autonomous works in and of themselves.

In deciding on the status of these photos, determining whether they give rise to an independent work, thus qualifying as a “free use” of Das Schweigen, or whether they are rather an unauthorized transformation of it, the courts also claim a certain knowledge about what an image actually is and how it functions. “Setzen nicht die juristischen

Auseinandersetzungen um den ‘Bildnisschutz’ ein implizites Wissen darüber voraus, was

Bilder sind und wie mit ihnen umzugehen ist? Und ist dieses Wissen so selbstverständlich und nicht zumindest möglicherweise so wandelbar, dass es vor dem

Urteil nicht reflektiert werden müsste?”90 Given the complex intermedial nature of the work that was supposedly violated by the photo exhibition, and given the problematic

89 See §§ 23-24 UrhG: “Bearbeitungen oder andere Umgestaltungen des Werkes dürfen nur mit

Einwilligung des Urhebers des bearbeiteten oder umgestalteten Werkes veröffentlicht oder verwertet werden. Handelt es sich um eine Verfilmung des Werkes, um die Ausführung von Plänen und Entwürfen eines Werkes der bildenden Künste, um den Nachbau eines Werkes der Baukunst oder um die Bearbeitung oder Umgestaltung eines Datenbankwerkes, so bedarf bereits das Herstellen der Bearbeitung oder

Umgestaltung der Einwilligung des Urhebers. [§ 24] (1) Ein selbständiges Werk, das in freier Benutzung des Werkes eines anderen geschaffen worden ist, darf ohne Zustimmung des Urhebers des benutzten

Werkes veröffentlicht und verwertet werden. (2) Absatz 1 gilt nicht für die Benutzung eines Werkes der

Musik, durch welche eine Melodie erkennbar dem Werk entnommen und einem neuen Werk zugrunde gelegt wird” (ibid.).

90 Augsberg 491.

48 question of what qualifies as an ‘original’ image or artwork in an era of digitization, the court is shouldering quite a burden in having to rule on what this image series ultimately is and how it functions vis-à-vis the ‘original.’91 Its decision does more than just establish which work is primary, the collaborative performance broadcast on TV or the photo series. It also ascribes, in 2009, important aesthetic values to the photos that were taken in

1964: how much of Beuys’s artistic, “personal spirit” is left in this photo series? “Das

Gesetz kennt nicht nur das Original, sondern auch Bearbeitungen und Umgestaltungen.

Diese tragen, anders als Werke, die durch freie Benutzung entstehen, den individuellen

Geist des Urhebers weiter in sich. Es gehört daher zum Urheberrecht, das Recht zur

Bearbeitung und das Recht, die Veröffentlichung oder die Verwertung von

Umgestaltungen des Werkes zu erlauben oder zu verbieten.”92 So how much of Beuys’s dynamic nature is übersetzt from the television broadcast/live performance into the static images? And if Beuys’s hand does mark the photo series in some way, how come these photos, in turn, are not granted the status of an independent work? And what constitutes

‘a work’? ““If we wish to publish the complete works of Nietzsche, for example, where do we draw the line? Certainly, everything must be published, but can we agree on what

‘everything’ means? We will, of course, include everything that Nietzsche himself published, along with the drafts of his works, his plans for aphorisms, his marginal

91 For an understanding of juridical decisions themselves as complex compilations of text, image and speech, see Steinhauer, “Bildkontakt.”

92 § 23 UrhG. “Im Gegensatz dazu ist die freie Benutzung eines Werkes gem. § 24 UrhG ohne Zustimmung des Urhebers zulässig. Die Abgrenzung zwischen § 23 UrhG und § 24 UrhG kann im Einzelfall schwierig sein” (A. Böhm).

49 notations and corrections. But what if, in a notebook filled with aphorisms, we find a reference, a reminder of an appointment, an address, or a laundry bill, should this be included in his works? Why not?”93 The question of whether Nietzsche’s laundry bill qualifies has ‘a work,’ as absurd as it might seem, is, in nature, the kind of question for which the German courts were trying to find an answer by testing the applicability of its strict categorizations, an adaptation/transformation or a work of free use, to the former exhibition of photographs.

III. Storing

But before this debate about artistic hierarchies and legal definitions could take place, VG Bild-Kunst had to establish that Das Schweigen, the work at the core of the suit, was in fact independent, intellectual property protected under copyright law. This was complicated by the participatory nature of the event, the problem that no moving image documentation of the event was stored, leading to the uncertain medial status of the work.94 The court had to rule on whether the other participants in the event could

93 Foucault, “What Is an Author?” 118-119.

94 For more on this, see Aktenzeichen I ZR 28/12, § 43. Brock, moreover, had been very outspoken during the court case about his frustration with Eva Beuys’s lawsuit, as both his and Vostell’s performances were partially featured in several of Tischer’s photographs on display in Moyland: “‘Diese Aktionen von

[Gerhard] Pfennig und Frau Beuys verstoßen eindeutig gegen den Geist und die Arbeitsintention von

Beuys’, sagt der Weggefährte von Joseph Beuys, Bazon Brock. ‘Es ist eine Beschädigung des Ansehens von Beuys’” (Brock qtd. in Jung). The court proceedings note that “[a]uf einigen Fotografien […] (auch)

50 claim partial ownership of the images. This would include Brock, Vostell, as well as

Tadeusz, who might have actually been responsible for writing out the sentence and title of the work. Copyright experts debated the status of this ‘work’ as copyright-protected given the complication of there being no real-time account of it. “Da zu der Fluxus-

Aktion von 1964 keine Film- oder Fernsehaufzeichnung existiert, ist heute nicht mehr mit hinreichender Sicherheit feststellbar, ob es sich bei dieser Darbietung überhaupt um ein schutzfähiges Werk handelte. Allein die Tatsache, dass die Aktion von Joseph Beuys durchgeführt wurde, reicht zur Anerkennung der urheberrechtlichen Schutzfähigkeit nicht aus.”95 There was no basis upon which to assess the relationship that the photographs constructed vis-à-vis the ‘original’ performance on television, as this approximately thirty-minute event had only been depicted at the time of the proceedings through one visual remainder, the ‘painting’ of Das Schweigen, memories of those who were present at the ZDF studio and textual descriptions based on these first two elements. 96 So the

Elemente (z.B. Frauen mit Fahrrädern und Fischen) der Aktionen von Bazon Brock und Wolf Vostell zu sehen [sind]” (Aktenzeichen I ZR 28/12, § 10).

95 Maaßen 14. “Soweit die LG [Landgericht] Düsseldorf meint, dass die Bewertung von Fachleuten, die Art der Präsentation und der erkennbare Gestaltungswille von Beuys feine schöpferische Leistung sprächen, handelt es sich bei den angeführten Indizien um untaugliche und mit dem System des Urheberrechts unvereinbare Bewertungskriterien” (ibid.).

96 On the difficulties of understanding performance through oral history interviews, see Blocker. On the problems of constructing textual descriptions of this collective performance through the remaining painting and oral histories of it, see Schneede’s catalogue raisonné, which relied on both archival materials and testimonials for its summary of the work. In the catalogue, Schneede acknowledges these issues, noting, for instance, the discrepancies in the scholarship and archival records in terms of when this action supposedly

51 question then becomes: What exactly were these photos charged with copying? A telecast that no longer exists? An action that was not staged for an audience there at the scene, but at home in front of their televisions?97 Concepts that remain highly contested in media studies were thrown into the debate in service of classification. Is photography a static or a dynamic process? To what extent does photography, as a medium, embody the ability to reconstitute a sequence of events? Moreover, in the words of Paust, the trial didn’t even make clear what actually qualifies as a series: “Gilt das nur für alle 18 Bilder[?]

Oder auch bei zehn Fotos[?] Oder […] [darf das Museum] jeden Tag ein einzelnes Foto zeigen?”98 How can one begin to define an image series anyway?

In the first two proceedings, the courts determined, in short, that this photo series was at once reproducing essential components of the copyrighted action and, by temporally and spatially abbreviating the action, transforming elements of the work without permission. “Die Fotografien fixierten wesentliche Elemente der szenischen

Aufführung, die zur persönlich geistigen Schöpfung beitrügen. Die Fotoserie sei keine unveränderte Vervielfältigung der Beuys-Aktion, sondern deren Umgestaltung. Sie greife durch Verkürzung und Akzentuierung des Geschehens in die persönlich geistige

took place: “Adrianai/Konnertz/Thomas 1986, S. 137, nennt als Datum den 11. November 1964, jedoch geht sowohl aus der Einladung als auch aus dem zwischen dem ZDF und den Künstlern geschlossenen

Vertrag hervor, daß es sich um den 11. Dezember handelte” (Joseph Beuys 82).

97 According to Paust’s research, there were no spectators present at the ZDF studio who were there primarily to watch the action unfold. Only the television team and the artists themselves were on site

(“Interview mit Dr. Bettina Paust”).

98 Paust qtd. in Schürmann.

Schöpfung tief ein.”99 The photos do not constitute an artwork in their own right, because they are too reliant on “die prägenden schöpferischen Elemente” of Beuys’s work and, at the same time, their medial properties cannot reflect the work’s temporality – its unfolding over the course of twenty minutes or so – nor its spatial arrangement in the

ZDF studio. [Fig. 3] “Die gesamte Aktion dauerte zumindest 20 Minuten, so dass die hier vorliegenden 19 Fotos nur eine Momentaufnahme des Werkes wiedergeben.”100 [Fig. 4]

Fig. 3 and Fig. 4. Reproduction of decision by the Landgericht Düsseldorf on September 29,

2010. Aktenzeichen 12 O 255/09. Graphic indication added (KM).

99 Aktenzeichen I ZR 28/12, § 17.

100 Aktenzeichen 12 0 255/09, § 47.

It did not alter Beuys’s performance enough, however, to constitute a complete transformation in the eyes of the law and thereby give rise to a new work in its own right:

“Diese Veränderungen gingen allerdings nicht so weit, dass mit der Bilderserie ein selbständiges Werk in freier Benutzung der Beuys-Aktion entstanden sei.”101 The court recites the familiar story about photography’s inherent indexicality, specifically the way in which it reveals aspects of a performance that give away some of its mystery, since, “if the documentary photograph is necessary to confirm the origin and status of the art object, it might also itself come to occupy a destabilizing relationship to the object. […]

[T]he photograph, while being in a strict sense outside the auratic dyad of performance and art object – being only a record of the moment of production and therefore marginal to it – also seems continually to threaten to pervade the supposed autonomy of the work itself and to strip it of its auratic presence by returning one to the moment of its making, thereby reversing the semiotic drift from history to myth.”102 The photograph doubly threatens the work from which it is purported to originate.

In this case, the discourse on the documentary role of the photographic medium oscillates between the “paradigm of trace,” upheld by notions of indexicality and realism, and the paradigm of contingency, the contingent or epistemic values frequently ascribed to the photographic medium, in which “traces are not ‘produced’; rather, they are brought about deliberately but in an uncontrolled way. This is the case, for instance, in the field of scientific photography, where the picture is not meant to document what could already be

101 Aktenzeichen I ZR 28/12, § 17.

102 Green and Lowry 152.

54 seen, but is instead the condition of vision.”103 It can’t be decided here whether the photographs conform to the concept of realism, whether they strictly serve as a documentary index of the ‘real,’ or whether there is some aspect of them that unlawfully brings this event to life, a result of the tendency toward contingent, uncontrolled exposure that is inscribed into the medium itself.104 Even as it is proclaimed to convey the primary elements of the work and establish its authenticity, in an uncanny fashion, the photograph deviates from it, distancing the ‘original’ work from its presumed relation to time, space, vision and sound.105

103 Geimer 19-21.

104 Importantly, Geimer notes that “[t]he indexical value that is still currently ascribed to certain photographs becomes most clear when it gives rise to the demand not to show those pictures” (21).

105 In the court proceedings, although it is not explicitly stated, it almost seems as if the elusive medial object to which the photographs are being compared is the non-existent recording of the television broadcast, or ‘film,’ which might explain the instance on the “dynamic” versus “static” dichotomy in the verdict. It’s worth noting, therefore, some observations on the different temporal modes embodied in film versus photography: “[T]he sense of temporality attached to the film and to photography differ. This is not simply a matter of movement and stillness, but of the single image as opposed to the filmstrip, the instant rather than the continuum. The reality recorded by the photograph relates exclusively to its moment of registration; that is, it represents a moment extracted from the continuity of historical time. However historical the moving image might be, it is bound into an order of continuity and pattern, literally unfolding into an aesthetic structure that (almost always) has a temporal dynamic imposed on it ultimately by editing.

The still photograph represents an unattached instant, unequivocally grounded in its indexical relation to the moment of registration. The moving image, on the contrary, cannot escape from duration, or from beginnings and ends, or from patterns that lie between them” (Mulvey 13-14).

As shortsighted as this verdict was, one might be able to accept it if one question could be answered first: What precisely is the work that the photographs were accused of copying? At first glance, the answer seems to be: a performance. But, in this case, ‘the performance’ can’t be conceived outside of the medium of television. It came into being through this medium, not only in terms of transmission, but even at the level of conception. When Ferdinand Ranft, director of the ZDF studio, wrote to Beuys to invite him to participate in a group Fluxus event, he first specifically mentioned the television show on which he hoped the Fluxus group would appear: “Wir sind daran interessiert, eventuell in unserer Sendung ‘Die Drehscheibe’ (Montags bis Freitags von 18.30 h –

19.00 h) einen Filmbericht über diese Gruppe zu bringen.”106 This was not a performance in front of an audience present at the studio that was then additionally captured by a television crew. It was realized for television, ontologically based in that medium and it would be misguided to consider it apart from this platform.107 So what kind of television- performance were the photos documenting? One might be tempted to answer this through an idea of “theatrical” performance documentation as opposed to “documentary” performance documentation. “The documentary category […] assume[s] that the documentation of the performance event provides both a record of it through which it can be reconstructed […] and evidence that it actually occurred. [Whereas,] [i]n the theatrical category, I would place a host of art works of the kind sometimes called ‘performed photography,’ […] cases in which performances were staged solely to be photographed

106 Ranft.

107 There is no significant contribution in the existing literature that takes television, this crucial aspect of the work, into account.

56 or filmed and had no meaningful prior existence as autonomous events presented to audiences. The space of the document […] thus becomes the only space in which the performance occurs.”108 If there wasn’t an audience present at the studio, perhaps the photographs are evidence of this latter case, of “theatrical” performance documentation.

It’s not that an audience didn’t exist for this work, however. There was an audience, but it was not on site when the action took place. There are significant aesthetic

108 Auslander, “The Performativity of Performance Art Documentation” 1-2. The corner that Beuys built during this action has also been saved as a ‘relic’ of the performance, but it should be noted that in the photograph of it on display as part of the Beuys Block in the catalogue on Arena — dove sarei arrivato se fossi stato intelligente! (Arena – where would I have got if I had been intelligent!) (various dates, 1970 –

1979), there doesn’t appear to be any remnants of fat in this corner (Beuys, Arena 71). One could assume that it was removed, that only the wooden structure was preserved, perhaps anticipating its eventual deterioration. In the photograph of the corner in the Guggenheim exhibition catalogue, there appears nevertheless to be fat, or some kind of light-colored substance, pasted in the corner of the image (see

Tisdall 93). Tisdall quotes Beuys here from an interview with her: “I built a fat corner into the wooden gate-looking construction […]. That remained as a relic of the event and is now in the Ströher Collection.

Then came a fat corner in the felt too, and a sound piece with bells lying on the floor in front of the corner.

Then I painted the words with my brown cross paint and chocolate. Another element was the walking stick lengthened with fat. My actions and those of the other performers who were working in different parts of the yard were recorded simultaneously” (Beuys qtd. in Tisdall 92-94). It should be noted that in this statement there are inconsistencies related to the painting of the words, which in the court case were determined to be written, at least in part, by Tadeusz (Aktenzeichen 12 O 191/09, § 39). Therefore, it should not be taken as an unequivocal fact that this is indeed the ‘original’ fat or even the ‘original’ corner upon which Beuys worked in the action from 1964. In the exhibition of this wooden corner in the newly- opened (September 13, 2014) Beuys Block in Darmstadt, there seems to be no remainder of the fat, but in its place a large, funnel-like structure that is leaning against it.

57 consequences for this relocation of ‘live’ spectatorship. While, as part of a group at a performance event, you might be tempted to talk to your neighbor about what you are seeing or, depending on the dynamics, shame others when they do so, viewers of this event were watching in their living rooms, in domestic environments with familiar company.109 Whereas in a ‘live’ performance you might hesitate to walk out and attract attention to yourself, at home you can just change the channel – and maybe you’d be tempted to do so in West Germany in the mid-sixties when people on the screen in front of you are playing with fat and fish, bikes and beds, all the while remaining silent with respect to meaningful dialogue. The medial differences experienced by this displaced contemporary audience in our case complicate these distinctions between “theatrical” and

“documentary” performance documentation.110 Tischer’s photos are documentary, in that

109 On watching a performance ‘live’ versus watching a ‘documentation’ of it in a private viewing environment, see Rounthwaite 70-72.

110 Auslander recognizes that this complication can occur in specific cases, citing Vito Acconci’s Photo-

Piece (1969) as an example: “This performance confounds the already shaky distinction between the categories of documentary and theatrical images. On the one hand, the photos Acconci produced serve the traditional functions of performance documentation: they provide evidence that he actually performed the piece and allow us to reconstruct his performance. […] On the other hand, Acconci’s performance was also very like those in the theatrical category inasmuch as it was not available to an audience in any form apart from its documentation. […] Acconci’s Photo-Piece points toward a central issue: the performativity of documentation itself. […] Documentation does not simply generate image/statements that describe an autonomous performance and state that it occurred: it produces an event as a performance […]” (“The

Performativity of Performance Art Documentation” 4-5). On the importance of not privileging one viewing experience of performance over the other with respect to “knowledge” gained, see A. Jones, “‘Presence’ in

Absentia.” When referring to Carolee Schneemann’s 1975 Interior Scroll, she argues that “[h]aving direct

58 they serve as a record of a performance that took place before a live audience of sorts, but they are also theatrical in that this audience was neither known nor guaranteed, and there was no intention for the performance to be stored in any other medium apart from the photos and the one ‘painting’ that remains. It was deliberately decided that the photographs would be the primary space in which the performance could reoccur.

But by calling it a performance, we still might lose sight of the medium in which the work originated: television. Staging performance for TV is an act of remediation and entails more than a channeling of one medium through another. “Our culture wants both to multiply its media and to erase all traces of mediation: ideally it wants to erase its media in the very act of multiplying them.”111 Both poles of this logic try to lay claim to the ‘real.’ “Transparent digital applications seek to get to the real by bravely denying the fact of mediation; digital hypermedia seek the real by multiplying mediation so as to create a feeling of fullness, a satiety of experience, which can be taken as reality. Both of these moves are strategies of remediation.”112 In the case analyzed here, the

“transparency” and “immediacy” typically ascribed to the televisual medium are also clearly presumed in the judicial decisions. “Whether transparent or hypermediated, all television programs present the experience of watching television as itself authentic and

physical contact with an artist who pulls a scroll from her vaginal canal does not ensure ‘knowledge’ of her subjectivity or intentionality any more than does looking at a film or picture of this activity, or looking at a painting that was made as the result of such an action” (ibid., 13). Jones recognizes the differences between the knowledge that is gained during the live performance and that which is gained while looking at a documentary photograph, but she maintains that one should not inherently be privileged over the other.

111 Bolter and Grusin 5.

112 Ibid., 53.

59 immediate. Even when television acknowledges itself as a medium, it is committed to the pursuit of the immediate to a degree that film and earlier technologies are not.”113

Television, through its multiple-camera format, is indeed presumed to be able to convey a sense of ‘natural’ visual continuity, a medium with the ability to capture what the proceedings described as the “dynamic” unfolding of events.114 [Fig. 5]

Fig. 5. Reproduction of decision by the Landgericht Düsseldorf on September 29, 2010.

Aktenzeichen 12 O 255/09. Graphic indication added (KM).

113 Ibid., 187.

114 According to Paust, the ZDF broadcast relied on three cameras in total (“Interview mit Dr. Bettina

Paust”). “[T]he multiple-camera set-up deploying three to five cameras simultaneously, still the standard way in which television studio productions are shot, evolved specifically out of a desire to replicate the visual discourse of the spectator’s experience of theatre” (Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a

Mediatized Culture 19-20).

But this shouldn’t lead one to believe that early broadcasts mirrored the visual grammar of cinema. Television could shift the perspective on the performance by switching from one camera to another, but it didn’t have much flexibility in regard to what type of shots these were: usually frontal, relying on relatively immobile cameras, and seemingly independent of one another. Editing in television “appears as a reframing of a single, continuous image from a fixed point of view, rather than a suturing of image to image or a shift in point of view.”115 This single point-of-view was one of the defining characteristics of early live broadcasts that made them seem so optically-natural and immediate. In the court case, the fact that the medium of television considerably altered the ‘live’ perception of the work – some might say even more than the photographs did – was never mentioned.116 Instead, it was simply determined that the exhibited photo series disrupted both the “dynamic” nature and the immediacy of the action by turning it into a

“static” aesthetic object, resulting in an unauthorized transformation of the work.

This reductive judicial interpretation of photography shouldn’t surprise us.

Cornelia Vismann has shown in detail the way in which the function of photography in judicial discourse has developed since the nineteenth century, shifting from a medium that assists in expressing the essence of an act to a medium that perfectly – sometimes too perfectly – itself conveys this essence through its objectivity. Whereas photographs would initially be shown in court alongside oral descriptions of their content since “[d]ie

115 Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture 20.

116 See Paust, “Interview mit Dr. Bettina Paust.”

Bilder sollen nicht etwa für sich sprechen,” photography later became a medium that does the speaking all on its own.117 “Bilder können Zeugen voll und ganz ersetzen […]. Die

Wahrnehmungen [auf dem Foto] können […] von allen Anwesenden gleichermaßen gemacht werden.”118 In the case of VG Bild-Kunst vs. Museum Schloss Moyland, photography speaks too perfectly, or too perfectly reproduces the speech act, “die

Aussage,” that Beuys, according to the verdict, made in 1964. [Fig. 6]

117 Vismann 186

118 Ibid., 187. “So präzise Fotografien die Realität auch wiedergeben, spielen solche ‘Realien’, wie der

Untersuchungsrichter Hans Gross Fotografien preist, in der Hauptverhandlung also doch bloß eine untergeordnete Rolle, als unterstützendes Medium einer Aussage. Doch ändert sich der Status der

Fotografien in der Hauptverhandlung. Sie befreien sich Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts aus ihrer sekundierenden Rolle und werden eigenständiges Beweisobjekt” (Vismann 186-187). In this court case, of course, what they are called upon to “prove” is the existence of a work captured in another medium – television. Thus, what they end up establishing here is, in fact, their inherent ability to colonize the essence of another medium.

Fig. 6. Reproduction of decision by the Landgericht Düsseldorf on September 29, 2010.

Aktenzeichen 12 O 255/09. Graphic indication added (KM).

It’s about what the photos capture and how they capture it. “Damit wurde die individuelle schöpferische Aussage bildlich eingefangen und dokumentiert.”119 Photography speaks, but it can only speak what another medium – an action, a performance, a telecast stored in collective memory – has already spoken.

119 Aktenzeichen 12 0 255/09, § 44.

IV. Processing

Such assumptions about media in this decision raised serious concerns.

Photography is a second-class art, television has no effect on ‘live’ events and copyright needs to be extended in the digital age rather than reassessed. For contemporary artists in

Germany, especially photographers, the writing was on the wall. Two decided to take this idiom seriously. [Figs. 7-8]

Fig. 7 and Fig. 8. Caroline Bachmann and Stefan Banz. Ein Eklat (Kampf und Urteil) (2010-11).

Right: detail (graphic indication added [KM]). Left: installation view. Photographs (KM) taken

at the exhibition of Das Schweigen der Junggesellen, Museum Schloss Moyland, February 16-

April 27, 2014.

The excerpts from the court decisions that have been included here as images are photographs of their work, which they began after hearing about the disturbing precedents these decisions were setting. Caroline Bachmann and Stefan Banz take the

2010 verdict by the Landgericht Düsseldorf and spatially amplify its presence, pasting it word-for-word on a gallery wall in Schloss Moyland for all to see in front of metallic realizations of Duchamp’s Neuf Moules Mâlic from Le Grand Verre (1915-1923). “Der schwer verständlichen juristischen Sprachgewalt stehen leicht überlebensgroße, bläulich schimmernde Metallfiguren auf Rollen gegenüber. Die Besucher sind eingeladen, diese durch den Raum zu schieben. Die Installation provoziert Fragen nach künstlerischer

Autorschaft, Urheberrecht und Verfügungsgewalt. Sie thematisiert extreme Positionen im

Umgang mit Kunstwerken. Reglementierung und Unfreiheit […].”120 This work was planned before the unexpected ruling made by the Bundesgerichtshof in May 2013 to overturn the two previous verdicts. Paust was finally able to hang Tischer’s 1964 photo series back up, and she decided to place it on the other side of Bachmann and Banz’s

120 Museum Schloss Moyland. Le Grand Verre is also known as La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même. On these figures, see Museum Schloss Moyland: “Reglementierung und Unfreiheit, wie sie der

Urteilstext und dessen Sprache verkörpern, treffen auf den freien, spielerischen Umgang mit der Aneignung von Formen aus einem bereits bestehenden Werk: Die Figuren sind große, dreidimensionale Umsetzungen der Neun männischen Gussformen aus Marcel Duchamps Werk Die Braut von ihren Junggesellen nackt entblößt, sogar (1915–1923). […] Der Ausstellungstitel Caroline Bachmann / Stefan Banz – Das

Schweigen der Junggesellen kombiniert den Titel des oben genannten Hauptwerks von Marcel Duchamp mit dem Titel der Aktion von Joseph Beuys, Das Schweigen von Marcel Duchamp wird überbewertet

(1964), und führt damit beide als Protagonisten der Ausstellung ein.”

65 installation. [Figs. 9-10] The writing was on the wall, but so were the images that it originally banned from being shown.

Fig. 9 and Fig. 10. Installation view showing both sides of the exhibition wall. Left: Joseph

Beuys – Unveröffentlichte Fotografien von Manfred Tischer. Right: Caroline Bachmann and

Stefan Banz. Das Schweigen der Junggesellen. Photographs (KM) taken at the Museum

Schloss Moyland, February 16-April 27, 2014.

This case has ramifications that go beyond both copyright concerns, as serious as they are at the moment, and the ongoing debates about the competing authenticity between ‘live’ and mediated experiences of performance art.121 It addresses a problem at

121 For a brief overview of this debate in art history and performance art, see, for example, two texts by A.

Jones: “‘The Artist is Present’: Artistic Re-enactments and the Impossibility of Presence” and “The Now and the Has Been: Paradoxes of Live Art in History.”

66 the core of documented mixed-media work, especially from the sixties and seventies, as many of the artists from this period are dead and can no longer voice their thoughts on the circulation and reception of their work, and since much of the research on this work has been done along strict disciplinary lines, neglecting to carefully read the co-presence of various media. It’s no longer possible, and it’s actually detrimental, to read Das

Schweigen as a “statement” or a “performance” or a “painting.” Instead, one can return to actions of the 1960s and 1970s and rethink their relationship to the documentary media that authenticate them and enable them to be studied by posterity. This doesn’t entail an attempt to establish some kind of hierarchy between the performer and the photographer;

“the issue is not who has authorial primacy […]. […] The real significance of the documentary dimension of performance is not one about fictionality but about historicity, about the relation of performance to the past.”122 In our case, we don’t need even need to turn first and foremost to the photo series to get a better – more complete, more complicated – impression of the relationship between performance, art object and

‘documentary’ media. It has been staring us in the face all along, in the one ‘picture’ that wasn’t taken down: the ‘painting’ that Beuys made during the action, usually described as consisting of a mixture of Braunkreuz paint and chocolate, most likely because this is what spells out the infamous ‘statement’ on silence.123 [Fig. 11a]

122 Widrich 142 and 149.

123 For just two examples of this tendency to reduce this ‘relic’ of the action to a few medial forms, or sometimes even a singular medial form, see de Duve 57 (“a board from the action”) or Calotychos 102, n. 2

(“a collage”).

Fig. 11a: Joseph Beuys. Das Schweigen von Marcel Duchamp wird überbewertet (1964). On

exhibition at the Museum Schloss Moyland. Photo: dpa.

Although this sentence gets all the attention, perhaps, now that we have had a glimpse of

Tischer’s contested series, we might be more interested in the photo that Beuys pasted in the bottom right-hand corner, the place where one usually finds a signature or, in its place, the stamp of ownership: ©124 [Fig. 11b]

124 Referring to John R. Searle’s text published in Glyph in 1977, a reply to his own reading of J.L. Austin in Signature Event Context, Derrida remarks on the manuscript he received from Searle before it went to print, particularly the “proper place” of the copyright symbol: “And handwritten above the ©, the date:

1977. I received the manuscript shortly before Christmas, 1976. The use of this mention (which I rediscovered in the text published by Glyph, this time in its proper place at the bottom of the first page) would have lost all value in 1976 (no one abused it then) or in another place, or between quotation marks, as is here the case, in the middle of a page that no normal person (except, perhaps, myself) would dream of attributing to the hand of John R. Searle” (30).

Fig. 11b: Joseph Beuys. Das Schweigen von Marcel Duchamp wird überbewertet (1964). On

exhibition at the Museum Schloss Moyland. Photo: dpa. Graphic indication added (KM).

Fig. 12: Manfred Tischer. Photo of Fluxus group event at the ZDF-Landesstudio, December

11, 1964. Joseph Beuys Archiv/Stiftung Schloss Moyland, JBA 7 – 92838.

It was unknown until it appeared in the exhibition at Schloss Moyland in 2009 that this was a reproduction of a photo that was part of a larger series, marked as such and signed by Tischer. [Fig. 12] Beuys uses this photo, a reproduction of Tischer’s photo showing a bird’s-eye view of all three performances, the extras on set and television cameras peeking in from the corners, to sign the one artwork he leaves behind. But if this photograph occupies the place of the signature – “(can a signature be cited, and if so, what are the consequences?)”125 – essentially taking its place, who in fact signed this

(remainder of the) work? The placement, content and origins of the photograph indicate a copyright to a Beuys “who is divided, multiplied, conjugated, shared. What a complicated signature!”126 What’s the function of Beuys signing this work with a group photograph?

Since it features not just him, but all the Fluxus participants who were in the studio that day, does it serve as a ‘signature’ by the three artists who staged their works on ZDF? Or, coming from the hand of the photographer, is it rather Tischer’s ‘signature’? If the photo

“were to signal not only the multiplication of the signature, which takes place at the end of the text, but also that, situated within the text as its ‘object,’ the signature no longer simply signs, even though it does still sign, being neither entirely in the text nor entirely outside, but rather on the edge? Who shall decide?”127 The photo pasted on the painting leftover from the performance on television forces a realization that not only did this

‘painting’ not arise out a performance alone, but that the author to which it is usually attributed is a split and multiple one. In the layers of this ‘painting,’ we find that it

125 Derrida 32.

126 Ibid., 31.

127 Ibid., 32.

70 continued to be worked upon even after the show came to a close.128 Right underneath the sentence about Duchamp, exclusively attributed to Beuys’s personal criticism of the father figure, is a photo of all three actions that took place in the ZDF studio. Beuys’s piece takes up just a corner of the image. For him, the photos were not just there to document, for posterity, what happened that day in 1964. He didn’t understand them as separate from – as outside of – the work that he was doing. Their historicity was always part of the artwork itself, in this case even embedded in its very materiality, waiting for us to find it.

128 In a letter to Beuys dated December 21, 1964, Tischer writes that he is including twenty photos of the action in the ZDF-Landesstudio that took place on December 11 of that same year. He notes that enlargements of these could be developed at an additional cost (Tischer). Beuys chose to publish, in one form or another, at least two of these photos: one in his ‘painting’ and one in exhibition catalogues. As the photos were available only ten days after the collective action took place, it’s clear that Beuys continued to work on the ‘painting’ (i.e., waiting on the photo that he would integrate into it) after the event took place, disrupting any idea of this mixed media object as a relic of the performance alone. On the judicial understanding of the previous ‘publication’ of these two photos, see Aktenzeichen 12 0 255/09, §§ 58-59.

Orders of Expansion

I. Unboxing

In 2015, I opened up two boxes from the 1960s. I heard one would find

sculpture, performance and film in there, as well as records, photo albums and pills.

Fig. 13. Aspen 5+6. 1967. Photograph (KM) Fig. 14. S.M.S. 1. February 1968.

taken at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Photograph (KM) taken at the Klingspor

Marbach. Museum Archive in Offenbach.

When I had difficulties trying to close these boxes, having to order and fit all of the different objects back into the box, the archivist at the museum told me: “Tja, man muss was für die Dinge tun.”129 To access these sorts of magazines, that is certainly true. As a guide for its readers, Aspen and S.M.S., like most magazines, include a table of contents:

“B = L∪F∪R∪B∪D” for the former, “a sequence of insertion” for the latter. [Figs. 13-14]

The table of contents is a place where, in a magazine, contributions are typically arranged according to text type and where a particular mode and sequence of reading is fostered.130 It’s also the place where tension becomes obvious between an image of

‘the work’ as a whole, being able to see, in other words, the structure of the entire work at a glance, and the acknowledgement that this is a place where authorial and intertitular particularities can surface, where the image of the whole can, and maybe is supposed to, come undone. In Aspen and S.M.S., two experimental art magazines published in New York in the late 1960s, the tables of contents tempt readers with the possibility of order.

The table of contents in Aspen, found at the front of the box, is printed in sans serif black lettering on a white piece of paper, folded over, forming an eight-inch square.131 It announces the magazine title, issue number and dedication at the top

129 Weiß.

130 For examples of the table of contents as a form of paratext that encourages various paths of navigating the text, see Genette’s subsection on “The order in which to read” (218).

131 “Published at the peak of minimalism’s influence in the New York art world, Aspen 5+6 featured work by well-known minimalist artists including Sol LeWitt, Mel Bochner, Tony Smith, and Robert Morris.

With its square white box cover and its reductive sans serif font, the magazine stylistically embodied the geometric forms of this work” (G. Allen 54).

73 which, in the UbuWeb version of this magazine consistently referenced in art blogs and library catalogs, has morphed into “Stephen Mellarmé” [sic].132 Below the credits for the guest editor and art directors, one finds two formulas, one consisting of letters, the other of numbers: “B = L∪F∪R∪B∪D” and “28 = 1 + 4 + 5 + 8 + 10.”133 These are expedient ways to indicate the essential components of the set, a Box (Literature and

Film and Record and Board and Data), and the quantity of each of the 28 components (1 piece of literature, 4 films, 5 records, 8 boards and 10 data).134 More specifically, such

132 “Aspen No. 5+6, Item 2.”

133 See O’Doherty: “I wondered if I could converge the entire project in one word, a single equation, using set theory. So I went to a mathematician and he said ‘It’s the easiest thing in the world, you use B for book,

F for film etc, and U for and.’ This ended up as LUFURUBUD, and I said, that’s my Rosebud” (“Brian

O’Doherty with Phong Bui.”). Although the alphabetic formula for the Aspen box begins with “L,” for

“literature,” the table outlining the categories and subcategories for these objects lists the booklet of three essays under the subcategory of “essay” and the main category of “book,” instead of “literature.” The

“data” in this formula is also referenced as the category of “printed data” here, followed by the subcategories of “poetry” and “data.” Thus, it appears that three of these alphabetic symbols refer directly to categories (“record,” “board,” and “film”), one of them directly to a subcategory, rather than a category

(“data”), and another, namely “literature,” rather indirectly to either a category (“book”) or a subcategory

(“essay”).

134 “A set may have finitely many elements, such as the set of desks in a classroom […]. The members of a set can be practically any objects imaginable, as long as they are clearly defined. Thus a set might contain numbers, letters, polynomials, points, colors, or even other sets. In theory a set could contain any combination of these objects, but in practice we tend to only consider sets whose elements are related to one another in some way, such as the set of letters in your name, or the set of even numbers. […] [There are] two most basic means of combining sets. The set of elements common to two given sets A and B is

74 shorthand and mathematical notational schemes serve to abbreviate the temporally and materially complex container, reducing it down to its supposed essentials.135 These two forms of notation mark an attempt to record this excess in some immediately recognizable way, returning “notation” to it etymological roots in the Latin notāre, to note or record, later used to refer to the archiving of aural media – music – in a textual form, such as a score.136 The notational formulas in Aspen, similarly to a score, strive to

known as their intersection and written as A ∩ B. The set of elements appearing in at least one of these sets is called the union, denoted by A ∪ B” (Vandervelde 25-26 and 29).

135 Goodman distinguishes between notational schemes, which are based on syntactic requirements, and notational systems, which are semantically determined (130-140 and 148-153). Although the two formulas in the Aspen table of contents, “B = L∪F∪R∪B∪D” and “28 = 1 + 4 + 5 + 8 + 10,” neither directly correspond to his requirements for notational systems, nor for notational schemes, there are aspects in these formulas of “character indifference,” or disjointedness between characters in the set, and of

“differentiation” between the classes of characters. While character indifference means that each character in the set can be substituted for another character in the same class without changing, to any degree, the syntax of the set (and thus, by extension, any copies of characters are indeed ‘true’ copies), requiring classes to be disjoint “is to say that there is no intersection of membership between them. To say they are finitely differentiated throughout is to say that it is possible to determine (in other words, there is an effective decision procedure for determining) whether any mark not belonging to both of two characters does not belong to one or to the other” (Nussbaum 125). See also Goodman 132 and 139-140. Although these criteria aim to precisely identify and differentiate notational schemes from systems, notation is understood here more broadly as a means to archive, abstract and reduce data and, potentially, as a basis upon which to reproduce this box compilation, or a similar one, in the future.

136 Notāre is defined as “to notice, observe, to mention, to put down in writing, to denote, to indicate, […] to make or put a mark on, to mark a passage as important, to mention in an annotation, in post-classical

Latin also to provide with musical notation, to record in musical notation” (“note, v.”).

75 represent the unique compilation of the box, the box as event, in an abstract form, therein suggesting the potential and offering a scheme for reproduction, adjustment and reinterpretation in the future. The numbers in the set imply that the quantity of material such a magazine-box could contain is potentially infinite, that “28,” in other words, is just one, or the first, of many different sums of content. The letters, standing in for the diverse medial forms in the box, indicate that there could be other media added to the notational scheme, such as “image” or “video,” and that the characters belonging to the same medial class are essentially equal. One “film” is not more important than the other, and it isn’t one particular film that makes or breaks this compilation. Rather, the particular combination is what is important here. The formulas don’t represent each work as singular events but, as notational sets, they produce singularity in their specific combination of classes of media, even while the sets themselves reduce, visually, the complexity of the box as a multimedial, unbound magazine absent of explicit navigational cues. Below (on the next page of, and written in a different direction than) these formulas, one finds a table ordering the 28 artistic projects according to their physical medial form, the same forms represented in the formula, but then further broken down into media type: a “record” can be “fiction,” “music” or “document,” “print” is both “poetry” and “data,” etc. [Fig. 15] Again, one recognizes that many other subcategories could be added here, from “document” for the category of “film” to

“fiction” for the category of “book,” but one is also compelled, with this at-a-glance view of Aspen’s contents, to consider just how well such categories and subcategories are able to contain and keep separate their variety of objects.

Fig. 15. Aspen 5+6. 1967. Photograph (KM) taken at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach.

Fig. 16. and Fig. 17. S.M.S. 1. February 1968.

Left: Photograph (KM) taken at the Klingspor Museum Archive in Offenbach. Right:

Screenshot from Sensate online video documentation of S.M.S. 1.

Instead of alphanumerical formulas, S.M.S., in contrast, organizes its content spatially via a diagram, providing an instant overview of how objects relate to each other in the space of the box that contains them. [Fig. 16] At the top of its table of contents, here called a “sequence of insertion” and found on top of or inside the box, is a series of letters corresponding to each artist-name in the box, which in turn corresponds to the physical dimensions of the works and the order in which they are stacked, an order that must be maintained if one wants to fit all the items, of various shapes, sizes and media, back into the original package again. [Fig. 17137] The titles of the works are absent on the sequence of insertion, appearing instead on a thick card covered with gold-dusted lettering that leaves traces on one’s hands after it is unfolded. On the inside, this card looks like a program for some fancy event, listing the authors alphabetically by last name, followed by the titles of their works. But the ordering of the names on this title card does not correspond to the ordering of physical objects in the box. This means that, to figure out, for example, the title of one of the material objects peeking out from within the box, such as the plastic baggie containing something with a swastika and a first-class stamp at the top, one must first locate the object shape on the sequence of insertion card, which is hardly physically representational, even though the diagram relies on this as the basis for classification. One must then find the letter next to the shape – in this case, “E” – designating the artist-name at the top – here, “Nancy Reitkopf” – and then move over to the title card to find out that this piece, consisting of promotional bumper stickers for the

Titanic, the Hindenburg, the Andrea Doria, etc., is called “Luggage Labels,” needed for

137 For the video documentation of this issue of S.M.S., see Copley, S.M.S. 1.

78 those more unfortunate trips.138 On the outside of this title card, this program for the box, the top line, “LEBP,” refers to Letter Edged in Black Press, the Upper West side loft in which S.M.S. was produced and distributed, now commonly, and ironically, catalogued in archival holdings as “LERP.” Ironic, because it’s precisely this operation of lerping, the linear interpolation of value based on a starting point and an end point, that the magazine’s composition rejects.139 The stacks of objects, split between the right-hand side and the left, elide a fixed point of departure and a final destination for reading, thus also eliding the incremental accrual of value. The magazine’s title serves as a further disavowal of standard value systems as, like other alternative magazines in the late

1960s, S.M.S. appealed for a different logic of supporting, exhibiting and accessing art, film and other media objects, one that took place outside of what it saw as the hierarchical gallery context. S.M.S.: a demand that “shit must stop.”140

138 See Reitkopf.

139 “Linear interpolation, or lerp, calculates a value somewhere linearly between two other values. For example, if a = 0 and b = 10, a linear interpolation of 20% from a to b is 2. Lerp is not limited to only real numbers; it can be applied to values in any number of dimensions. It is possible with points, vectors, matrices, quaternions, and many other types of value […]. In games, a common application of lerp is to find a point between two other points. Suppose there is a character at point a and it needs to be smoothly moved to b over time. Lerp will allow you to slowly increase f until it hits 1, at which point the character will be at point b” (Madhav 55-56).

140 The title is usually referred to in terms of a polemic against the gallery system: “SMS [sic, without periods] was conceived by Copley as a Fluxus-inspired populist art platform that, in the words of art historian Carter Ratcliff, ‘bypassed the hierarchical labyrinth of museums and established galleries.’ […]

SMS [sic] was also a tacit manifesto against art corruption that brought numerous art forms, from poetry to performance to printmaking, onto a level stage, making it available to everyone (or at least to anyone who

In the tables of contents for the magazines Aspen and S.M.S., the equations, classification tables, diagrams and programs seek to establish a pretense for order that the excess of content quickly undoes. This is the first of several ways in which these magazines exhibit a push and pull between access and excess, between their utopian mission to put art into the hands of ‘the people’ and the recognition that the problems of processing, distribution and exhibition are more complex than this, that sorting through, ordering and finding information amongst a proliferation of multimedial materials is no simple task. Designed to distribute a cross-section of the late 1960s art world, their medial compilation was key in forcing a rethinking of how individual formats function within and alongside a broader multimedial context during a time when the status of media, both inside and outside of the institution, was in a state of flux.141 The strategies, operations and effects of merging many medial formats within these single publications have yet to be thoroughly examined in the existing literature. Gwen Allen, in her seminal text on artists’ magazines, mentions that Aspen “presented a peculiar challenge to its readers, requiring various types of concentration and hands-on interaction,” and she follows this up with a list of its contents: the 8mm film, flexi-discs, texts, performances, sculptures and poems

subscribed)” (Heller 148-152). Copley claims that the title did not have any broader implications: “Yes,

S.M.S. That was what we [Dmitri Petrov and I] called the magazine. It was The Letter Edged in Black

Press Incorporated. And the S.M.S. really had no particular meaning except between the two of us, which was supposed to mean Shit Must Stop” (Copley, “Oral History Interview”).

141 See Stimson 23-24.

80 that require reader participation.142 A similar inventory strategy is seen in the moving image archival documentation of S.M.S. recently published online by the Harvard-based intermedia journal Sensate.143 On this site, one can see a set of hands carefully pulling out and examining the boxed objects one-by-one, looking at each object once in full view and making sure to place it outside of the frame of vision before moving on to the next object. Neither of these contemporary representations, however, seriously considers one of the fundamental aspects of these magazines: their insistence on a co-presence of different medial forms as an inherent part of the reading process, a

142 G. Allen 52. Although film was a prominent topic in the second issue of Aspen, with seventeen

“excerpts” from the Aspen Film Conference being published under the title “The Young Outs vs. The

Establishment,” the first four rolls of films were included in issue 5+6 under the heading “Four Films by

Four Artists” (see Aspen No. 2). The films presented on this roll of 8mm film were by Hans Richter

(Rhythm 21, 1921), an excerpt of László Moholy-Nagy’s Lightplay (c. 1928-1932, dated in Aspen as 1932

[the dating of this film here corresponds to Wees 186]), an excerpt of Site (1964) by Robert Morris and

Stan VanDerBeek and an excerpt of Robert Rauschenberg’s Linoleum (1967) (see Aspen No. 5+6). Some subscribers, however, received a note from the editor instead of the film reels: “Included in some copies in lieu of the film spool was a note from the publisher promising that the reel of film would be mailed seperately [sic]” (Aspen No. 5+6). See also G. Allen: “[M]any issues of Aspen 5+6 were missing the films because money ran out to produce enough copies of it, according to O’Doherty” (322, n. 24). For an interpretation of texts by László Moholy-Nagy, whose film is one of four included in this issue of Aspen, as a precursor to theories on the dematerialization of film and the importance of theorizing film intermedially, see Walley, “The Material of Film and the Idea of Cinema” 24-25.

143 The online documentation of S.M.S. was published in coordination with the exhibition running from

October 2014 to spring 2015 at the Davis Museum at Wesley College and the Harvard-based intermedia journal Sensate (see “Edged in Black”).

81 medial claim that is first announced in their tables of contents, but which takes on a new significance once the objects are taken out of this sequence and experienced side by side.

Unboxing the contents means collapsing this pretense of order. The act of unboxing has consequences beyond the immediate counter-consumerist impulse frequently cited with respect to viral unboxing videos on YouTube. 144 What one sees, for instance, in the Secret Compartments exhibition in Frankfurt, which opened in

July 2015 at the Museum Angewandte Kunst, is an emphasis on hiding, in other words how different container types hide and position their contents, and the idea that one must begin (as one does with unboxing videos) with the premise that

“packaging is worthy of concern.”145 As the description of this exhibition suggests, the type of box determines the spatial context of the object it contains and, in our

144 “These videos have been around, notably in the world of tech, almost since YouTube went live in 2005.

The first known unboxing video on the site was of a Nokia E61 cellphone in 2006. Today you can find unboxings for almost anything, although luxury items or pieces of expensive technology seem to make up a large percentage of the clips” (Silcoff).

145 Brown and Rugnetta. See also Sterne. Although Sterne makes an important argument that formats have been overlooked in media studies scholarship (see chapter three: Antragsfilme – Film Pitches), he either inadvertently disregards the box, rather than considering it an object worthy of concern, or he assumes that the box is something that has been given a disproportionate amount of attention in media studies and which is, as a consequence, not necessarily embedded into the broader technical systems that help condition formats: “If there were a single imperative of format theory, it would be to focus on the stuff beneath, beyond, and behind the boxes our media come in, whether we are talking about portable MP3 players, film projectors, television sets, parcels, mobile phones, or computers” (11).

82 case, the positionality and relationship of one object to another: “A chest, a pill box, a folding screen ‒ what these so very disparate objects have in common is that they all define a space. They offer an in-front-of or a behind, an on-top-of or an underneath, and they are distinguished by the ability to reveal or conceal, depending on the perspective of the beholder.”146 In this exhibition, the compartment is not a static object to be contemplated, but one that gives rise to a specific temporality that can serve to heighten the experience of the act of unveiling, to dramatize it, or it can elide and undermine this expectation altogether. “The interplay between concealment and exposure made possible by objects with the aid of drawers, doors and lids in turn creates stages for further items and reflections. Finally, there are also objects – for example a bookcase by Dieter Rams – that profess to keep nothing secret.”147 In the Sensate videos of S.M.S. previously mentioned, the box is always inspected last, once its contents have been cautiously pulled out, opened up, played with, turned around – once they’ve been thoroughly displayed. [Fig. 18148] The box is only considered as an object worthy of attention after the elements that it structures and organizes have disappeared, once the box is empty, which drastically underestimates, therefore, the object “not just in the moment it is revealed, but in all of the pageantry that is required to do so. You know, like digging through the bits and bags and stuff.”149 [Fig. 19]

146 Koch and Wagner K.

147 Ibid.

148 For the video documentation of this issue of S.M.S., see Copley, S.M.S. 1.

149 Brown and Rugnetta.

Fig. 18. S.M.S. 6. December 1968. Fig. 19. Kornhaber Brown and Mike Rugnetta.

Screenshot from Sensate online video “What’s the Deal With Unboxing Videos?”

documentation of S.M.S. 1. PBS Digital Studies Idea Channel. YouTube.

Screenshot.

This unboxing of S.M.S. entails certain consequences for the aesthetic, medial qualities of its objects. In the Sensate videos, objects are held apart from one another, separated by a standard pause and moment of contemplation after the hands have explored one of the many objects in the box. There is no chaos, no unpacking surprises, no spilling out of pills.150 A photo series by Kasper König is thus turned into a singular, independent art object among many, which just happens to be included in this collection, rather than an envelope containing four still images surrounded in the box by other photos, other drawings, other personal writings and

150 As one contemporary reviewer of S.M.S. remarks: “(a) I had great difficulty getting it [S.M.S.] open and out of its mailer, (b) when I finally did, I found a bunch of capsules of the medical variety rolling around amongst the drawings, posters, cryptic messages and luggage labels that the portfolio tried to, but did not quite, contain” (Ashton 272).

84 reflections. When the 1921 film by Hans Richter, sent out in Aspen on an 8mm strip, relocates to UbuWeb in 320x240 resolution (nowadays quite low), it is viewed as a wholly separate time-based sequence, filling only a small part of the new QuickTime window that opens on the viewer’s screen, therein extracting it, through this mode of access and exhibition, from the context in which was distributed to subscribers. 151

What the YouTube unboxing videos do differently is that they insist on film as one media object among so many others. A film is no longer intrinsically defined by what it alone is representing on celluloid, but enters into a network of relationships, both between the representational matter of other media and their actual materialities. The

Aspen box doesn’t ask us to reflect on a film or an essay, but on an assemblage of films and essays, forcing a juxtaposition of “cinema” with “still images,” “sculpture,” “music” and “texts.” It troubles the exclusive consideration of the moving images contained in this one film, insisting on film not as a mere mediator, but as an object with certain operational imperatives. “If I use a refrigerator to refrigerate, it is a practical mediation: it is not an object but a refrigerator.”152

When IntellivisionDude receives his 70th Anniversary Wizard of OZ Ultimate

Collector’s Edition in the mail in 2014, he handles it as a precious object even before he

151 “While a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels was state of the art in 2007, this has increased to 840 x 480 pixels and even further” (Sauter 260). For recent discussions on the role of UbuWeb in the contemporary distribution of moving image art, see King and Simon as well as Balsom, After Uniqueness 85-93.

152 Baudrillard 91.

85 knows what’s in it.153 Taking a box cutter to the outside of the white packaging, he asks out loud, “why am I carefully cutting this?” [Fig. 20]

Fig. 20 and Fig. 21. IntellivisionDude. The Wizard of OZ Ultimate Collector’s Edition 70th

Anniversary DVD Unboxing. YouTube. Screenshots.

Inside the cardboard box is another box, a shiny green one. Inside this, a book. “Nice, very nice.”154 Underneath this is a bunch of unbound A4 pages. “What is this a reproduction of?”155 They are copies of notes on the projection of costs for producing the film (costumes, meals and lodging, etc.). The next thing he finds is “The Complete

Campaign Book.” “Not sure what this book is…a lot of papers that come with it...”156 It’s

153 IntellivisionDude.

154 Ibid.

155 Ibid.

156 Ibid.

86 a collection of advertising material for the original release. “Very cool, I like this. ‘Cause it’s all like pictures from a long time ago. It’s all retro. Love it.”157 Inside a silver tin box is a Wizard of OZ watch, “[…] that I’ll probably never wear.”158 [Fig. 21] He pulls out the bonus digital copy with download codes, advertisements and, finally, the DVD collection itself. “This is four discs long, and there are extras on every disc! […] I’m not that big on picture quality. Sometimes, to me, things that are old should look old.

Sometimes there’s no reason to clear up the picture.”159 In his unboxing of the collector’s edition of Wizard of OZ, it’s not about Dorothy, or Victor Fleming, or Technicolor. It’s about the soft black fabric lining the box, the ribbons keeping the objects ordered and holding them together, the watch that will probably break on him, the fragile bottom of the container, the sixteen hours of “wonderful wizardry about the movie classic,” including documentaries, a TV movie special and the 2007 Hollywood walk of fame salute to the munchkins.160 At the end of the unboxing extravaganza, while looking upon this mass of papers, books, images, discs, containers and objects now spread out on the bed, IntellivisionDude signs off: “I have a feeling that we’re just not in Kansas anymore.”161

And we’re not. Such unboxing videos insist on understanding a film through its expansion to other contexts outside of the cinema, to other media, troubling traditional

157 Ibid.

158 Ibid.

159 Ibid.

160 Ibid.

161 Ibid.

87 concepts of medium specificity, ‘the work’ and authorship. What happens to the films in

Aspen when they are unpacked or, taking this a step further, what would an unboxing video of Aspen actually look like? Where would one start, what would be shown as important, with commentary and in-depth perspectives, and how long would this video last? With what order, speed, care and attention would objects be selected from the box, and how would one approach its internal logic of disorder and excess?162 [Fig. 22]

162 Before the advent of the modern moving box, the chest served as the standard moving container, an object associated with procedures of selection, limitation and placement. With the rise of the moving box, these procedures became replaced by a new logic of disorder and excess: “Aus hochindividualisierten

Kisten sind allgemeine Behälter geworden. War in der Kiste alles an seinem Platz, von Anfang an und für immer, auch im Transitorischen, so geht genau diese festgefügte Ordnung mit dem modernen

Umzugsbehälter verloren” (Klose 151). Distribution, particularly intermodal distribution, has also been a key factor in the historical development of the modern shipping box: “Diese Entwicklung, die

Entscheidung gegen das Fahrzeug und für die Kiste, weist […] einen weiteren, naheliegenden Weg, den

Container aus den Tiefen der Geschichte herzuleiten: als Geschichte der Kiste. Handelt es sich bei ihm als beweglichem Wagenkasten einerseits doch um einen vom Fahrzeuggestell abgelösten Fahrzeugaufbau, andererseits aber eben um eine auf die Dimensionen von Schienen- bzw. Straßenfahrzeugen gebrachte

Kiste” (ibid., 146).

Fig. 22. Aspen 5+6. 1967. Photograph (KM) taken at the Deutsches

Literaturarchiv in Marbach.

The 32-page booklet in Aspen with texts, in two and three columns per page, by

Roland Barthes, George Kubler and Susan Sontag is likely not read in one sitting.

[Fig. 23163] Maybe it’s put aside to build Tony Smith’s miniature Maze, or interrupted by Richter’s black-and-white screens, or folded in with William

Burroughs’s signature drawl in his reading of Nova Express. [Fig. 24 and Media files

1-2164]

163 See Sontag.

164 See T. Smith; Richter; and Burroughs.

Fig. 23. Susan Sontag. “The Aesthetics of Silence” Fig. 24. Tony Smith. The Maze (1967). In Aspen 5+6. 1967.

(1967). In Aspen 5+6. 1967. Detail. Photograph (KM) Photograph (KM) taken at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in

taken at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach. Marbach.

Media file 1. Hans Richter. Rhythm 21.mov

Media file 2. William Burroughs. Nova Express.mp3

Media file 1. Hans Richter. Rhythm 21 (1921). 3 Media file 2. William Burroughs. Nova Express (1964). 4

mins. 36 secs. Photograph (KM) taken at the mins. 20 secs. Recorded by the English Bookshop, Paris,

Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach. 1965. In Aspen 5+6. 1967. Photograph (KM) taken at the

Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach.

Similarly, when the sequence of insertion in S.M.S. fails to systematize the reading process, when the items in the box no longer correspond to neat stacks on a diagram, a different ordering logic takes its place. The Order of Things, Michel

Foucault writes, came about after he broke out in “shattering laughter” while reading that animals are “divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame,

(d) sucking pigs, (e) sires, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,” etc. in Jorge Luis Borges’s imaginary Chinese encyclopedia. 165 Foucault laughs with such joy at this point because Borges’s sorting out of things seems absurd, and also utterly fantastical. It might, actually, not be precise enough to describe this classification system as “imaginary,” as it posits, in such a matter-of-fact way, its system as truth – a truth that is, in its painstaking detail, radically other, therein resulting for Foucault in a sense of marvel. “[B]ecause of the absence of hesitation, even of astonishment, and because of the presence of supernatural elements, we find ourselves in another familiar genre: the marvelous. The marvelous implies that we are plunged into a world whose laws are totally different from what they are in our own and in consequence that the

165 “This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought – our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography – breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between Same and the Other. […] In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the things we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that”

(Foucault, The Order of Things xv).

91 supernatural events which occur are in no way disturbing.”166 It’s a system that completely lacks the “operating table” of Western thought, “[that] table, a tabula, that enables thought to operate upon the entities of our world, to put them in order, to divide them into classes, to group them according to names that designate their similarities and their differences.”167 It’s only when his laughter calms down,

Foucault writes, that he starts feeling “a certain uneasiness,” not about the lack of his trusted tables per se, but about a more troubling disorder, one in which “things are

‘laid,’ ‘placed’, ‘arranged’ in sites so very different from one another that it

[becomes] impossible to find a place of residence for them, to define a common locus beneath them all.”168 The laughter and consequent anxiety about the possibility for a radically different logic for ordering what seem to us like known entities is a reaction that such magazines play with, magazines which, instead of consisting of pages bound to a codex, take their etymology seriously. They function as storehouses containing an array of objects, sometimes necessary provisions and – why not? – explosive elements, but ultimately defined by their storage capabilities rather than their contents.169 Although these are sites in which a seemingly non-order prevails,

166 Todorov 140.

167 Foucault, The Order of Things xvii.

168 Ibid., xvii-xviii.

169 See “magazine, n.” Yalkut extends the etymological significance of “magazine” and discusses the meaning of the term in military contexts: “It ‘feeds’ cartridges into a gun. There are ‘magazines’ for film, recording tape, videotape, and other recording mediums. When the printing press actualized the possibility of reproducing words and images, a magazine became ‘a periodical publication containing articles by

the common ground needed to generate relational references, which Foucault fears is

lost in crazy classification systems, is not altogether absent here. One can’t get a

sense of it by cataloging objects, which neglects their proximity and juxtaposition to

other works, nor by closely looking at objects in isolation from others. But by

unpacking a couple of objects in these magazines, one can start to become more

aware of their medial implications – how works are affected by their medial

surroundings and why this matters – and one can also start to unpack the different

organizational logic underlying their contents, announcing at once their intention to

make art, film and media accessible to a broader public and challenging the

simplicity of this gesture with their aesthetics of excess and disorder.

II. Aspen

Of the 5+6 double issue of Aspen that was mailed out to subscribers in the fall

of 1967, Time Magazine wrote that, clearly, this was a publication “for people who

don’t like to read much.”170 But Time didn’t have to say this; Aspen advertised this

all on its own: “It comes in a box stuffed full of all sorts and sizes of things – from

records to posters to film – whatever medium is most appropriate to the subject

matter. […] Mail the coupon today – then start planning your first ASPEN Box

various writers,’ a series of ‘reports’ from individual psyches like the explosive bursts of bullets. A

magazine ‘issues’ forth, is a multiplicable series of things and ideas ‘put into circulation’” (12).

170 “Hear It, Feel It, Hang It.”

Party.”171 [Fig. 25] The Tupperware box parties that came before it set the tone for what such unpacking festivities should look like: black-and-white images of happy, curious people, who all suspiciously look the same, gathered around in “‘the world’s largest auditorium – the American living room’” to demonstrate and inspect a range of previously unfamiliar items of various shapes and sizes. 172 [Fig. 26173] This auditorium was no longer reserved for domestic events alone, but allowed for a different kind of sociality to emerge, inviting friends into this otherwise sacred family space to witness and help contribute to the inherent chaos of the parties. 174

The Aspen auditorium advertises itself as a social setting in which novelty objects are to be spread out, passed around, closely inspected and enjoyed in all their unique materiality – with all these different modes of object engagement occurring, in this advertisement, simultaneously.175 As one of the Tupperware slogans dared its

171 See Aspen Magazine Issue 5+6 (advertisement in Evergreen Review in September 1968).

172 Alison Clarke 106.

173 See McCollum. “Tupperware vice president Bonnie Wise tosses a Tupperware container to a partner to demonstrate its lightness, durability and airtight seal” (ibid.). See also Alison Clarke 97.

174 “[T]he [Tupperware] party acted as a ritual ceremony that, while focusing on Tupperware products, was filled with social significance among maker, buyer, and user. The structure of the party plan system blurred the theoretical boundaries of several identifying categories such as domesticity and commerce, work and leisure, friend and colleague, consumer and employee” (ibid., 108).

175 “Tupperware parties animated the product range using detailed description and highly tactile, even sensual, displays. Women were encouraged to touch and handle products. […] The structure of the party plan system blurred the theoretical boundaries of several identifying categories such as domesticity and commerce, work and leisure, friend and colleague, consumer and employee” (ibid.) .

94 customers, “‘[y]ank it, bang it, jump on it,’” or, as the title of the Time review suggested for Aspen, “hear it, feel it, hang it.”176

Fig. 25. Advertisement for Aspen in Evergreen Review. Fig. 26. Advertisement for Tupperware

September 1968. Photograph (KM). with vice president Bonnie Wise. 1954.

On the different kind of communities encouraged by the rise of the Tupperware party, as well as the historical precedents for this, see Alison Clarke 109-110.

176 “On-site promotional teams […] physically demonstrated Tupperware products to passing shoppers within the department stores. They entreated passing customers to grab a Tupper container and ‘yank it, bang it, jump on it’” (Alison Clarke 79).

Aspen parties don’t just mock Tupperware parties. There is something sincere behind this reference. Even though the scholarly discourse typically posits the Aspen boxes as portable art galleries, which is based in part on the exterior appearance of one of its most well-known issues, the 5+6 box – a white square suggesting “the proverbial white cube of the gallery space” – and on a later series of essays about the “white cube” by the guest editor for this issue, Brian O’Doherty, it would be shortsighted to exclusively discuss Aspen as an attempt to distribute “miniature museums.”177 This would elide the self-understanding of the magazine, which encouraged a playful engagement with the objects that arrived in the white cube. On the left-hand side of the advertisement above [fig. 25], the woman on the sofa holds open white pages of text, reading and laughing with the man seated next to her, who is glancing over her shoulder. He holds a film reel in one hand, a record in the other. Underneath the text she’s reading there are

177 G. Allen 52. O’Doherty’s later text, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, was first published as a series of three essays in Artforum in 1976, almost ten years after this issue of Aspen was distributed. See O’Doherty, “Inside the White Cube: Notes on the Gallery Space,” “Inside the White Cube:

The Eye and the Spectator” and “Inside the White Cube: Context as Content.” One should insist on understanding this issue as more than a portable art gallery despite O’Doherty’s working notes for the 5+6 issue, which refer “to the magazine as a ‘miniature museum’ and specified that it would contain diminutive works of art, such as dollhouse-seized sculptures by [Claes] Oldenburg and [Donald] Judd (neither of whom ended up participating in the final version)” (G. Allen 49). For a theory of the “expanded [mobile] museum” from the perspective of a different set of materials, namely early portable film equipment from the 1930s, see Wasson, “Every Home an Art Museum” 163-171.

96 several other records, not in covers, just spread out over her lap. A few feet away on the floor, the same couple has laid out pieces of black cardboard. He seems to be holding a ruler, maybe used to measure the model pieces, while she is showing him a three- dimensional cardboard sculpture, presumably one of the finished products. And on the coffee table in the center of the ad is another version of this couple. He is on his knees setting up the film projector. She is behind him, hands on his shoulders, smiling. The

Aspen box, the “white cube,” is lying open the table, its lid toppled over on its side. The box is left unattended, surrounded by several iterations of the same two people fascinated by the objects it once carried, part of it even covered up by the man in the foreground who is busy playing with a flip-book. Objects of ‘high’ and ‘low’ are not hierarchically ordered in this case. Rather, they are equally-important, co-dependent entities in a mixed media assemblage with no clear linear direction, no starting or end points. Aspen 5+6 distributes works of ‘high’ theory by the likes of Susan Sontag, but it also insists that such texts be read next to – possibly, as playfully suggested in this ad, even at the same time as – a toy maze that must be cut apart, glued together and re-colored, or made anew with completely different materials.178

178 “The models have been scaled down to fit in this box. The models may be set up standing free on neutral ground. They should be set up in accordance with the plan indicated in the drawing. Those who wish to reproduce the work in its original dimensions (in metal or wood) may do so. The individual pieces may be cut from the enclosed cardboards by a matte-knife […] guided by a metal ruler. […] The parts should be attached as indicated i.e. the appropriate edges should be opposed to the grey areas. (Elmer’s Glue All may be used). ‘White’ edges should be darkened with ink or water color. The drawing below may serve as a guide” (T. Smith).

As founder Phyllis Johnson announced in the first issue of Aspen released in

1965: “The articles [in Aspen] will be as surprising as the format, ranging from beautiful picture stories on nature and sports to the more esoteric subjects of art, humanistic studies, design, underground movies, music (always with a record), poetry, dance, architecture, gourmet dining. In other words, all the civilized pleasures of modern living, based on the Greek idea of the ‘whole man’ as exemplified by what goes on in Aspen,

Colorado, one of the few places in America where you can lead a well-rounded, eclectic life of visual, physical and mental splendor.”179 The magazine Aspen was not just an art magazine. It was art combined with architecture, music mixed with food, poetry placed next to skiing. Johnson was inspired by the city’s unique ability to combine and fuse these elements of life. It wasn’t unusual that, during this time, inspiration for expanded forms of engagement with art and culture were sought not within the site of the museum, but outside of it. In the wake of modernist minimalist sculpture, having absorbed its pedestal and symbolically severed ties to its physical site, the concept of institutional critique assumed a different focus. By emphasizing the role of space in aesthetic contemplation, minimalism ushered in concerns about the materiality of one’s viewing environment, a new regard for natural landscape and the potential that could be found in cultivating an ‘impure’ or ordinary, everyday space for art. Artists in the late 1960s and

1970s “variously conceived the site not only in physical and spatial terms but also as a cultural framework defined by the intuitions of art.”180

179 Johnson.

180 Kwon 13.

The interest in Aspen as site seems to correspond, however, to more a contemporary engagement with site-specificity, “the pursuit of a more intense engagement with the outside world and everyday life – a critique of culture that is inclusive of nonart spaces, nonart institutions, and nonart issues (blurring the division between art and nonart, in fact).”181 The city of Aspen was not just a space in which artistic communities and institutions were beginning to flourish but, for Johnson, it also was significant for the forms of commerce, politics, nature and leisure that helped condition its budding artistic community in the 1960s: the Aspen Institute for Humanistic

Studies, the Aspen Music Festival and School and the International Design Conference in

Aspen, all in which industrialist Walter Paepcke had a hand in founding.182 “These were the Aspen muses: music, photography, design.”183 Paepcke was not only financially

181 Ibid., 24.

182 After the successful Goethe Bicentennial Convocation held in Aspen 1949, several other arts and cultural programs began to flourish in the former mining town. “Through Paepcke’s encouragement and benefactions in the early fifties, musicians established there a permanent home for the Aspen Music

Festival and Music School; photographers gathered for a unique conference on their fledgling art; industrial designers and graphic artists founded the annual International Design Conference; and only death kept

Paepcke from building there a museum of modern architecture.” (J. Allen 268). See also J. Allen 119-121 and Sobel 13-14.

183 J. Allen 268-269. See also Sobel: “Over the next five years [1965-1970], Aspen would serve as host to many of the most important American artists of the day, representing such contemporary developments as color-field painting, Happenings, Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptualism, Process Art, earthworks, and various amalgams of these oftentimes overlapping movements. Writing for the Aspen Times, as he and many of the artists-in-residence did so often, [John] Powers claimed, ‘the summer of 1966 probably finds

99 important for these developments. His connections brought Walter Gropius and László

Moholy-Nagy from his hometown of Chicago to Aspen, and later adding artist and designer Herbert Bayer to the mix, who, “[f]inding Aspen’s mountain climate reminiscent of his Austrian homeland,” eventually moved there.184 Bayer played an important role in the redesign of the city as well as in Paepcke’s profitable business, organizing in 1945 the “Modern Art in Advertising” exhibition at the Art Institute of

Chicago, which was devoted exclusively to his company’s distinctive artistic advertising strategy since the mid-1930s.185 “Although not the first exhibition of modern advertising art […], no other single company could display a collection of modern advertising like this. […] [T]he exhibition of eighty-nine pictures by forty-four artists from [Adolphe

Mouron] Cassandre and [Jean] Carlu to Ben Shawn, Richard Lindner, and Willem de

Kooning led visitors through a dramatic maze of mostly abstract images and subtle propaganda.”186 These ads weren’t selling products; they were selling a corporate image.187 And the image they sold was the container. The box. [Figs. 27-30]

more fine art in Aspen than in most U.S. cities,’ an assertion, as we will see, that was entirely defensible”

(36).

184 Sobel 16.

185 See J. Allen 35.

186 Ibid., 75-76

187 On the rise of CCA’s institutional advertising strategy, see J. Allen 30-36.

100

Fig. 27. Advertisement for CCA. Designed Fig. 28. Advertisement for CCA.

by “W.C.” Designed by A.M. Cassandre.

Fig. 29. Advertisement for CCA. Fig. 30. Advertisement for CCA. Designed

101

The idea here was “to use art metaphorically to ‘package’ the company,” the Container

Corporation of America (CCA).188 The ads visually bind the concept of “the package” with a standard figure, the three-dimensional square, functioning as a carrier of a potentially unlimited variety of other figures and, in doing so in this serialized fashion, proceed to make the package something abstract. The container, as a medium, epistemologically shapes its content, making it knowable in certain ways. In these ads, the package is indeed an object that is visible – we can see its outlines and its basic shape

– but it is also something that is meant to remain invisible, with the box visually fading into the background and allowing its contents to take center stage. The ads play out, therefore, a basic media effect: “Media make things readable, audible, visible, perceptible, but in doing so they also have a tendency to erase themselves and their constitutive sensory function, making themselves imperceptible and ‘anesthetic.’”189

The ads emphasized the essential qualities of the container, such as its potential to package an array of objects and its ability to distribute these valuable items to places where they would otherwise be inaccessible: “To the farthest corners of the world today go the myriad accoutrements of civilization. Aspirin to Alaska, radio to Australia, whiskey to Cape Town, electric alarm-clocks to Peru…whether perishable or fragile or delicate…man’s necessities now can follow man.”190 Although CCA produced a range of

188 Bogart 260.

189 Vogl 16.

190 Text in Fig. 27.

102 container types, their logo abstracted the image of the container.191 It was a three- dimensional square with flaps either opened or closed, placed in the lower right-hand side of the ads. [Figs. 29-30] This abstracted box was placed in other portions of the ads as well, serving to expand the possibilities for visualizing what this storage medium could actually become. In figure 28, the box is born from the eye, subject to its will and imagination as it gazes into the universe, the space of potentiality and the not-yet-known:

“Tomorrow’s containers envisioned today.”192 “When Noel Coward, whom Paepcke had met casually in the twenties, jocularly inquired of him in the year CCA’s corporate image took form, ‘What is a container and what does it contain?’ Paepcke might have replied,

‘It is a box designed to be seen. It might contain nothing at all.’”193 Other ads thematized this act of storage, eliminating the outside appearance of the box in favor of highlighting its contents [fig. 29] or the process of packing itself, such as in figure 30, in which an oversized photographed hand is collaged onto the abstract drawing of shapes, namely squares, circles and lines, as it transfers tiny items into the tiny box.

The wide range of artists working for CCA were thinking boxes, or storage, and thinking about how to communicate this on the page. Aspen, while also thinking about intermedial transmission, was making the opposite move: not thinking about how to visualize volume and space on the page, but how to manifest what is typically on the

191 “The Chicago-based Container Corporation of America (CCA) produced paperboard containers and cartons essential for packaging (for clients like Campbell’s Soup, Hunt’s Foods, and Scott Tissues)”

(Bogart 259).

192 Text in Fig. 28.

193 J. Allen 29.

103 page in a three-dimensional, unbound space. Aspen took some of the propositions of

CCA seriously. It celebrates the experimental system, for example, emphasizing the laboratory as site and the objects found in it, transporting research results into the medium of the box. [Figs. 31-32]

Fig. 31. Advertisement for CCA. Designed Fig. 32. Advertisement for Aspen in

by A.M. Cassandre. Evergreen Review. April 1967. Photograph

(KM).

104

Or it foregrounded the most basic three-dimensional rectangle, fading away behind or sandwiched in between the very different items it could contain – a pocket watch and a washing machine [fig. 33], sculpture and articles [fig. 34].

Fig. 33. Advertisement for CCA. Designed by Fig. 34. Advertisement for Aspen in

A.M. Cassandre. Evergreen Review. April 1968. Photograph

(KM).

The International Design Conference is typically cited as the main inspiration for

Johnson’s founding of Aspen, but this other historical lineage, which can be traced back to the city’s founding family, points to one of the main objectives of the magazine,

105 evident in its self-advertisement, in Johnson’s opening statement about the purpose of the publication and in Aspen’s explicit intermediality – its insistence on it. Was Aspen about design? Yes. But it was also about what a package could be. How separate is the Fab package for Aspen 3 from its contents [fig. 32] or, in the CCA ad below designed by

Joseph Cornell [fig. 35], how does the wood on the outside of the box relate to the wood on the inside of it? What does it mean that these ads, or the Aspen containers for that matter, ‘contain’ an image but are also themselves an image?

106

Fig. 35. Advertisement for CCA. Designed by Joseph Cornell. Part of

“Great Ideas of Western Man” series, c. 1957-1958.

The container, in its ability to store very different physical objects in a very different constellation of space, doesn’t provide guidance in terms of what to unpack first, physically or conceptually. After taking a first look at Cornell’s open box, where does one then begin reading? Beyond the uncertainty about how to read the scene

107 contained in this box, the container itself raises a number of questions about visual navigation and perception.194 Appearing on a page as an advertisement for CCA, part of its long-running “Great Ideas of Western Man” campaign, the work thematizes and complicates the organization of vision.195 The prominence of the frame calls attention to

194 “Cornell worked by placing fragments directly into his boxes. There are a few extant drawings of ideas or partially developed designs for boxes, but these are the exception to the rule” (Lea, “Joseph Cornell”

261, n. 59). “His method of working directly with physical things, recognisable pieces of the world, allowed him to channel his mental matrix of associations through the objects, images and textures that comprised his archive, for things have a peculiar capacity to hold stories and ideas, real or imaginary”

(ibid., 34).

195 On the origins of the “Great Ideas” series and its close connection with the Aspen Institute, see J. Allen.

In preparation for the first conference of the Aspen Institute, Paepcke sought ideas for a theme from his staff. “Of the several responses, the most influential in shaping the institute’s future came from Mortimer

Adler. Adler’s reply had been quick and predictable: the ‘Unity of Western Culture’ as expressed in the

Great Ideas that Adler had been indexing for nearly seven years. […] As it happened, Adler was not the only one to have a personal interest in associating the Great Ideas with the Aspen Institute. Paepcke had acquired such an interest, too. For not long after Adler had made his recommendation, Paepcke had received a kindred proposal pertaining not to the institute but to the advertising of the Container

Corporation. […] Referring to an attached copy of the ‘Preliminary Draft of a World Constitution’ published by the Borgese-Hutchins-Adler Committee to Frame a World Constitution in 1948, [Egbert]

Jacobson recommended taking ‘some of the ideas of its authors’ and some of the historic statements quoted in it and publishing them as advertisements ‘strikingly illustrated by [Pablo] Picasso, Le Corbusier,

[Cândido] Portinari, [Marc] Chagall, and others.’ […] Perfectly adapted to Container’s reputation as a stylish innovator in advertising, Jacobson’s suggestion also caught the wind of perfect timing. Coming alongside Adler’s proposal for Aspen, it opened Paepcke’s eyes to the opportunity of making his two pet enterprises, the Container Corporation and the Aspen Institute, allied agents of publicity and cultural

108 the construction of depth and the insistence on spectatorial focus. It is an appeal to look closely into this scene, this slice of life and time, which was hand-selected for you, and imagine what goes on in this miniature world now on display. The glass pane on the box at once ensures that distance is maintained between the viewing subject and the objects behind it and suggests a window offering up to its viewers a scene containing a representation of a figure. The glass protects and prevents inspection of the figure but also invites it. The only figure represented here is, however, materially fixed to the background, to the back of the wooden box, a fact that is accentuated by the visible grains in the surrounding frame. The foreground, that site that is fundamental for visual distinction and in which the figure is meant to reveal itself as such, it dispersed among two objects: “the constellation of Auriga as the figure of a man carrying a goat and her two kids in his arms” and the three-dimensional objects in front of this backdrop, namely the piece of driftwood and sea shells.196 It’s only appropriate that, for this quote about dreams and navigation, Cornell provides this celestial figure, since “Capella, the star representing the goat, ordinarily is the first bright star seen through the breaking clouds of a storm, thus earning it the reputation as the sailor’s friend.”197

reform through the Great Ideas. […] The Great Ideas of Western Man, in the form of an advertising campaign destined to run for a generation and more, bringing Container numerous awards and peerless national recognition, had found a use that not even Adler had previously imagined” (J. Allen 219-221).

196 Hoving 147. See also Griffin. The figure of Auriga was used in Cornell’s Hôtel du Nord box (c. 1953), part of his Winter Night Skies exhibition at the Stable Gallery in 1955-1956. See Hoving 146-153. It was also featured on the exhibition leaflet. See Street 255. On Cornell’s use of driftwood, see Lea, “Untitled.”

197 Hoving 147.

109

Beyond broadening its company image, these ads for CCA threw long-standing dichotomies about the container into question. Is the outside – the frame, the form – really of secondary importance, and where are the boundaries between outside and inside anyway? The promotion of the container is an effort to undermine the belief in the carrier as a secondary concern, of marginal importance. In addition, the question that is often asked of Cornell’s boxes could also be asked of Container’s boxes: What does it mean to make art out of something that is supposed to be held, used to protect other things and transported? The container is the object that is allowed to get wrecked along the way, keeping its contents intact and private. In these ads, the diverse depictions of the container disrupt the dichotomous logic of traditional figure-ground relations, of content and form, of the idea of a carrier. Doing so enables the possibility for alternative forms of aesthetic perception and interaction. This uncertainty about how to read, evident in

Cornell’s thematization of the box, is encouraged in Aspen’s unbound, boxed format.

Relocating artistic media to sites outside of the museum and the gallery, a move that exemplifies the magazine’s democratic impulse, allows for a serious consideration of a logic of packaging that is unique in opening up a space for unusual, co-medial arrangements.198

198 “With their glazed fronts, Cornell’s box-constructions depend on barriers, albeit transparent (crystal clear or in colors of night blue and amber), and distance between spectator and object viewed, all of which creates a situation of having but not touching, of viewing without interacting. […] [W]hile these boxes provide the illusion of free movement and access, they are also traps, capturing, framing, and holding their subjects tightly away from the spectator outside” (Hauptman 49-50).

110

One question that this raises for magazines is how to deal with moving images in a way that reflects on, acknowledges and/or interrogates media difference. How does one talk about, or ‘translate,’ a series of moving images made for a supposedly quiet, communal space through words, and maybe some still images, appearing on a page? It’s not customary, given costs and expediency, for conventional magazines to spend much time pondering this question, although select artists from the 1960s and 1970s were actively exploring this issue through their page-based magazine work, several of whom also contributed to Aspen and S.M.S.199 Usually, however, when films are discussed in magazines bound to a codex, this occurs in the form of a review consisting of blocks of text that strive to represent, in a condensed fashion, the film’s plot and formal features. Its ultimate objective is to make a persuasive argument about the film’s positive or negative qualities, relying on individual film frames or screen shots that correspond, in a hierarchical way, to the text. Aspen’s strategy for dealing with the problem of intermediality was to promote the distribution of the film object itself: “ASPEN gives you actual works of art! […] In exactly the media [the artist] created them for. […]

199 For an example of how moving images could be experimented with and translated in text for the site of the page, see deBruyn on Mel Bochner’s Alfaville: “Alfaville passes itself off as a review of Godard’s

Alphaville, a movie that had its premiere in 1965, but it seems more adequate to describe this discursive object as an extended exercise in estrangement. […] He [Bochner] formed part of a milieu of postminimalist artists […] whose work participated in a migration of artistic practice into the spaces of information, both old and new, already under way in Pop art. I am referring, for instance, to the use of the film and video media, but also the adoption of the magazine as a site of presentation. Importantly, Bochner,

[Robert] Smithson, and [Dan] Graham viewed the mass media as more than a means of distribution, they were involved in an active disturbance of the media’s protocols and codes” (77-78).

111

ASPEN reports on experiments in avant-garde cinema by literally sending the experiments to you on 8mm film!”200 This was quite a feat at $4 per issue when, for the sake of comparison, an issue of Life magazine would set one back 35 cents.201

Aspen sought, with its unbound form and, thus, its limited editorial direction to democratize the reading experience and become a magazine that was not only “a tool of media access,” using the medium as a means for accessing a broader cultural or public sphere, but also “an access medium,” or a medium through which audiences gain more control over how they interact with content.202

Once the Aspen box is opened, the medial-based order outlined in its table of contents becomes difficult to maintain. The items are mixed, stacked tightly next to one another, often without titles or any other kinds of cues as to what they are and who made them. In the Aspen box at the University of Minnesota, this was especially evident since, upon its arrival in 1968, it was treated – circulated – like any other magazine. “Auch Bibliotheken pflegen eine Art von ‘Informationsreduktion’ bezüglich der ihnen anvertrauten Bücher.”203 One scholar described looking at this

200 Aspen Magazine Issue 7 (advertisement in Evergreen Review in March 1970).

201 G. Allen 322, n. 24. On the cost of Aspen, see G. Allen: “Because it was a double issue, Aspen 5+6 cost eight dollars (at a time when an issue of Life cost thirty-five cents, a movie ticket one dollar, a paperback book two dollars, and a vinyl LP around three dollars)” (ibid.). As a comparison, the leading avant-garde art magazine at the time, Artforum, still cost, around this time (1972), $1 (John Coplans qtd. in A. Newman

363).

202 Hilderbrand 8.

203 Wiedemeyer, “Marshall McLuhan Understanding Books” 43. Wiedemeyer is referring here specifically to the way in which The Medium is the Massage, a book that relies and reflects on its own material

112 box as a “heartbreaking experience,” not only because of its used look but also because the first object in it was pinched, the one that is normally filed in the front behind the table of contents, namely Roland Barthes’ text “The Death of the

Author.”204 If it’s not missing, the 8-inch-square booklet opens with thoughts on

Honoré de Balzac, printed in small black font on shiny, slightly thick, off-white paper. The text is laid out on the page in block form, and there is no introduction by the editor before the text, no argument in the form of an abstract at the top of the text, no images throughout the text – nothing to guide us as to what it could be about, except, perhaps some kind of review of Balzac. What does this have to do with the magazine-box in our hands? The knowledge that “The Death of the Author” was published for the first time in Aspen doesn’t help answer this question either.

Although not mentioned in the publication at the time, the text was actually written specifically for this site after O’Doherty asked Barthes to contribute with a multimedial work and received the following reply: “[Y]our project is of much interest to me, but I for

conditions in the process of outlining its arguments, circulated as a library book which was, in fact, highly altered, both in its material appearance and concept, by the preservation conditions set forth by such institutions.

204 “Unless a nearby rare-book room or special collection has the text, in which case, go look at the thing.

But this can be a heartbreaking experience. The University of Minnesota’s copy of Aspen 5+6 was treated like any other ‘magazine,’ meaning the box’s clean white surface is now covered in various stickers and stamps, including – at the time of my arrival – a large manila pocket for the card recording the names of those who checked out the magazine when it was part of the circulating collection. Worse yet, the booklet containing the Barthes essay had been filched” (Logie 511, n. 7).

113 one hold a radical belief in writing, and cannot imagine doing anything but writing.”205

This isn’t an expression of a preference for the written over the visual or multimedial text, but a commitment to a kind of expansion of writing, a radicality that Barthes views as inherent to the writing process.

Barthes states that he can’t contribute to the Aspen issue in the way O’Doherty desires. But then, of course, he does. “The Death” is not presented as an autonomous theoretical masterpiece that guides our reading of the box, nor is it part of a formal collection of high-brow academic essays by Barthes, Kubler and Sontag. It is printed in black, block lettering on white, glossy paper, and appears at the beginning of this flimsy, stapled booklet of texts. This piece of “literature” is perfectly square, seeming less like a book or a volume than an artwork meant to be looked at, not just read. “Writing,” the first page of this booklet explains, is “this special voice, consisting of several indiscernible voices.”206 Skipping through these voices, one might look to the opening sentences in the paragraphs to get a better idea of what is at stake: “We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning […], but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing […].”207 This text asserts that what we are looking at in this moment – namely the slick, modern booklet in our hands, with the sculptures, performance scores and films surrounding us – is something other, something more radical, than the writing we are used to. Glancing behind the page and into the open Aspen box, one might start to contemplate the various

205 On O’Doherty’s interest in Barthes, see G. Allen 55-57. See also Alberro 172-173.

206 Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (print).

207 Ibid.

114 dimensions and forms of writing it contains. The arguments it makes against a text as a mere block of words, as hermeneutically conveying a singular message, as being original, also gain a deeper significance by the work being read within the context of this multimedial assemblage. This happens when “literature” is referenced in the text, followed by the comment in parentheses: “(actually, these distinctions are being superseded).”208 Yes, they are. In this magazine, even the little text we’re reading, which appears, at first, to be about “literature,” about Balzac, is itself “literature,” part of the

“L” in the Aspen formula. This happens when the “utterly transformed,” “modern text” is cited – what is a more utterly transformed and modern text than the magazine we’re currently unpacking?209 [Fig. 36]

208 Ibid.

209 Ibid.

115

Fig. 36. Sol LeWitt. Serial Project #1. 1966. In Aspen 5+6. 1967.

Photograph (KM) taken at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach.

It happens when it is claimed that “every text is eternally written here and now.”210

Indeed, this is an apt description of the imperative contained in one piece of the “print” category in Aspen, namely the performance score by O’Doherty, which requests to be

‘written’ and made in the here and now, and only then does it fully come into being.211

[Fig. 37]

210 Ibid.

211 On the performance score as a medial object, see Gallope et al. as well as Kotz.

116

Fig. 37. Brian O’Doherty. Structural Play #3. In Aspen 5+6. 1967.

Photograph (KM) taken at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach.

This happens when the text explains that the modern writer can only “combine the different kinds of writing, to oppose some by others, so as never to sustain himself by just one of them.”212 This sounds more like the job of a magazine editor than an author. And this happens toward the end of the text, when the author’s reach is surpassed by the

212 Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (print).

117 power of someone else, and “this someone is precisely the reader (or here the spectator).”213 Here, in the many theoretical claims embedded in the many magazine objects before us, is where the text claims that this new kind of reader, or spectator, emerges.

So, here, while reading this magazine, we do what is asked of us: We read through this “multiple writing […]. [T]he space [in which] […] writing is to be traversed, not penetrated.”214 Cutting across this collection of twenty-plus authors, maybe it’s the filmstrip that catches our attention, but the technical equipment it requires, the home projector, probably results in its immediate illegibility, postponing a consideration of what is inscribed on it. So maybe we take out a record. [Media file 3215] What we hear sounds like chipmunks.

Media file 3. Samuel Beckett. Text for Nothing #8.mp3

Media file 3. Samuel Beckett. Text for Nothing #8 (1958). Read by Jack

MacGowran. 12 mins. 45 secs. Recorded by Aspen Magazine, November

1967. In Aspen 5+6. 1967.

213 Ibid.

214 Ibid.

215 See Beckett.

118

While media histories tell us that by this time, 1967, the 16⅔ rpm flexi-disk, widely known as the format for “Talking Books,” was obsolete, one was included in Aspen with two speeches, both of which would have been indecipherable on the then-standard 33- player, although they look, on the outside, exactly like the other four 33⅓ disks in the box.216 On this outdated format, Jack MacGowran reads Samuel Beckett’s Text for

Nothing #8 (1958), a 12-minute text about speaking, which, in the media file above, can be heard at double speed, as it would have been on the 33-player. On the other side,

Naum Gabo spends 17 minutes reading The Realistic Manifesto from 1920, demanding a new kind of art, which is free of academic and descriptive labels, its public expanded beyond the site of “the white cube”: “In the squares and on the streets we are placing our work convinced that art must not remain a sanctuary for the idle, a consolation for the weary and a justification for the lazy. Art should attend us everywhere that life flows and acts…at the bench, at the table, at work, at rest, at play […].”217 [Media file 4218] In this rendition, one doesn’t hear his pauses in the middle of sentences, minor mispronunciations or intonation at the beginning of each of his five appeals.

216 See Rubery 136 and Gelatt 223-234.

217 Gabo and Pevsner 10.

218 See Gabo, The Realistic Manifesto.

119

Media file 4. The Realistic Manifesto (1920) read by Naum Gabo.mp3

Media file 4. The Realistic Manifesto (1920). Read by Naum Gabo. 17

mins. 24 secs. Recorded by Aspen Magazine, November 1967. In Aspen

5+6. 1967.

This older recording format was likely used by the Aspen staff for a specific purpose, namely to capture the classical texts in full.219 How can one possibly trim

Beckett/MacGowran and Gabo, those canonical texts of literature, art and architecture?

While they were not abridged, they were, on the 33-player at least, hurried along a bit. If the outdated player was found, one hears something else besides chipmunks:

MacGowran’s deep, steady voice narrating the text, patiently approaching each sentence and using cautious intonation throughout.220 To listeners, this recording feels more like a dialogue than a speech. In the recorded version of The Realistic Manifesto, Gabo’s original “punchy [typographical] paragraphs” from the text are replaced with some stuttering and awkward hesitations, the emphasis that was originally conveyed through bold and capitalized font now stressed through the reader’s raised voice, sometimes at

219 Kozlik.

220 See Ashton 272. The Text for Nothing recording took place shortly after MacGowran had started to engage in readings of Beckett for other venues: “Early in 1966 Jack read a selection of Beckett’s poems for

BBC Radio. Almost simultaneously he recorded excerpts from the one-man show, again with Sam’s supervision, for a long-playing album called MacGowran Speaking Beckett” (Young 106).

120 appropriate moments, other times abruptly.221 Rather than reproducing the textual forms of these older works, the recordings inscribe in them a sense of presentness, not a past that is perfectly reanimated in the present, but one that contains the traces of this process of reanimation itself: the esteemed, squeaky voices on the 16⅔ disk, the questions

MacGowran seems to address directly to the listeners themselves rather than to an abstract audience and the accented speech of a manifesto for a kind of art that now, in

1967, has long seemed to be underway.

While Aspen announced accessibility as its main motivation, and while this claim has been uncritically recited in the existing literature, reinforcing a narrative of

‘democratic’ media experiments without exploring what precisely this entails, the medial contents complicate this claim, not to mention the contemporaneous reviews of the boxed double issue. As one reviewer writes: “I […] had to arrange a film showing in my school in order to see the films […]. I had to borrow a phonograph with extra-slow time speed in order to hear Gabo reading his manifesto […]. And I had to wrap up the essays and ‘data’

[…] and take them on a train to read.”222 When Francesco Casetti gives an example of what he calls “the new media of delivery,” one path of contemporary cinematic relocation, his train experience is also chaotic: “[T]here is no auditorium […]. The place where I am now [the train] seems just the reverse: with its noises, its activities, its

221 On the manifesto by Gabo, see Hammer and Lodder: “The Realistic Manifesto is highly rhetorical, in the manner of polemical artistic statements of the period. It is organised in terms of short, punchy paragraphs, using capitalisation and bold type to emphasise key points” (62).

222 Ashton 272.

121 comings and goings, it seems to interfere with my attempt to be a spectator.”223 There’s lots of “noise” that readers of Aspen encounter in this different means of media delivery as well. Although there is no one normative exhibition environment that could be modified to heighten the experience of this unbound collection, that doesn’t mean that it can be ‘read’ just anywhere, anytime. There are missing players and projectors, for example, leading to its immediate illegibility, to the not-yet-realized moving images and sounds inscribed on specific formats.224 And in addition to these technical requirements limiting physical accessibility, there is, more generally, the excess of materials and medial formats in Aspen that is structurally overwhelming. Not only are there twenty- something objects to be ‘viewed’ in the box, but the engagement with the media is, from the beginning, an uncertain endeavor. How does one know if one is supposed to ‘read’ a text or ‘look’ at it, ‘build’ and destroy an object or simply ‘touch’ it, ‘decipher’ a record or ‘merely’ listen to it?

223 Casetti understands this relocation as occurring on two fronts: in the form of a relocated object

(experiencing a filmic object that is now made accessible outside of the cinema, “the new media of delivery”) and in the form of a relocated setting (experiencing a cinematic space outside of the cinema, “the new media of environment”) (Casetti). He explains these two paths of relocation, or two types of media, as follows: “In the first case, I am dealing with the film object of viewing that is presented to me where I am now; in the second, with a viewing environment that is reproduced where it is possible. On the one hand, a conveyance occurs: a deliver; on the other, a reorganisation of the space: a setting” (ibid.). For Casetti,

“[t]hese are not only two different strategies through which to relocate the filmic experience, but also two different modes of referencing the cinema” (ibid.).

224 See Ashton 272.

122

Even after the archivist who was assisting me went to the trouble of digitally transferring the outdated record formats into information, into legible words and sentences I could more easily understand, the temporal media – the four films and five records – necessitate a reading that takes place at least over a couple of days, and the different materials found on identical formats force one to ‘unlearn’ reading, listening and viewing protocols. If one thinks it’s possible to tackle the excess of materials by playing a record while reading a text, for example, one quickly learns that not all records contain background music. [Media file 5225]

Media file 5. John Cage. Fontana Mix.mp3

Media file 5. John Cage. Fontana Mix. 1958. Realized by Max Neuhaus.

Nov. 6, 1967. 9 mins. 57 secs. In Aspen 5+6. 1967.

The score of Fontana Mix, as distributed in Aspen, consisted of a grid and three transparencies containing points, curves and a straight line.226 The positioning of these

225 See Fontana Mix.

226 See Cage, Fontana Mix. The score usually consisted of ten transparencies with points and ten with curves. Aspen, sampling the scoring process, distributed one of each: “Editor’s Note: Reproduced here is one each of the ten different drawings, transparent sheets and graphs which make up the complete score”

123 sheets on top of one another determine the specifics of the score, thus fostering elements of chance in the process of composition. “For example, the height of a curve on the grid determined the amplitude of the sound. The duration of a sound would be determined by the point at which a curve first touched the grid and then left it. Spaces in between the intersection would mark silence.”227 While the insistence on indeterminacy in musical scoring was one of Cage’s trademarks, this was located predominantly in the production process, with the performance of the score relying less on contingency and interpretation and more on the reading and execution of the score itself. “[T]he score was created using a system for making chance decisions about notes, duration, amplitude, timbre, and other possible dynamics, but the outcome was determined once the score was being followed.”228 Even though magnetic tape, as a carrier, enhanced certain kinds of experimentation in the production process, any fixed, material inscription of the score

(including on the above MP3 version of the 8-inch flexi disk) can also be understood to run counter to the contingency of the scoring process.229 “A magnetic tape composition,

(O’Doherty, “Editor’s Note”). “Original format: Single sheet, 16 by 8 inches, enclosing three 6-1/8 by 8 inch sheets, two of which are translucent” (Fontana Mix).

227 Holmes 89.

228 Ibid., 87.

229 “Finishing what the playback had begun, magnetic recording divorced the sound track still further from the image and from the image’s optical technology. Now, any number of sound sources could easily be separately recorded, mixed, and remixed independently of the image […]” (Altman 48). While several sources cite Fontana Mix as an example of Cage’s growing interest in tape music (e.g., Pritchett 130-134), it’s important to note that “arguably the score of Fontana Mix is better conceived of as a compositional tool for the creation of music; the tape piece, Fontana Mix, is only one instantiation of this, confusing though it

124 no matter how the material was conceived, remains forever fixed as a recorded performance in time. Cage was conflicted over this […]. ‘Everyone now knows that there’s a contradiction between the use of chance operations and the making of a record.

[…] I do think that one can live without recordings. And I do that. I don’t play them, except when I use them in a live performance…I still believe that’s true; that if you want music to come alive, that you must not can it.’”230

But how canned is Fontana Mix in this box? As part of an assemblage to be played in a sequence of other actions – unfolding, building, counting, listening, watching, etc. – the score, even though inscribed on its material carrier, is reliant once again on chance operations and encounters. This box encourages a kind of Zweckentfremdung for its objects, complicating expectations of media types, specifically what kind of formats are for primary versus secondary activities and solitary versus communal. While one can’t really ‘do’ any of these activities simultaneously, like the hippie clones in the

Evergreen Review ad for Aspen [fig. 25], it’s also impossible to do anything in complete isolation of other materials. As Merce Cunningham states on one of the records, it was

then becomes that they share the same name, when other pieces in which the score of Fontana Mix was also used as a tool […] do not” (Iddon 98). Cage’s notes on the piece in Aspen explain that “[t]he use of this material is not limited to tape music but may be used freely for instrumental, vocal and theatrical purposes” (Cage, Fontana Mix).

230 Cage qtd. in Holmes 90.

125 not about creating music specifically for a dance or creating a dance for a specific piece of music, but about letting them co-exist and seeing what happened.231 [Media file 6232]

Media file 6. Merce Cunningham. Further Thoughts.mp3

Media file 6. Merce Cunningham. “Further Thoughts,” Interview. 9

mins. 22 secs. Recorded by Aspen Magazine, November 1967. In Aspen

5+6. 1967.

231 “What do I do about the separation of space and time? I think that they are the same thing. At the same time in my working processes, I separate them. And I…I separate them as two separate, workable things. I will take, say, a dance sequence, and then proceed to find out how long it’s going to be or what its divisions in time are, and so on, without any reference to the space. Then I will take that same working dance phrase, or whatever it happens to be, and work it with the space. Then I put the two together. But because of this division, they do come out as separate things. […] The other thing I do in space is to not take a center point.

I start with the premise, first of all, I have for many years now, that the dances could be seen all the way around. That is, they are just in an area, not on the stage. But in an area, which could be a stage, or it could be a basketball court, or it could be outdoors, and so on. And then you can come at this any way. You don’t come at it that there is a center of interest, as in the proscenium stage – there’s a center point, to which or from which everything radiates, front and center business, you know [laughs]. Well I decided that any point was of equal interest in whatever area you were in. And therefore, any place that anybody went was of equal interest also. But that was, again, was done separately from the time, so when the two are put together, they act together, but they act separately” (Cunningham).

232 See Cunningham.

126

III. S.M.S.

“Acting together and acting separately” seems vague, but a similar organizational

principle was also underlying the production of S.M.S. according to its founder, artist and

gallery owner William Copley. Although this magazine ran for only one year, 1968,

closing shop after six issues for financial reasons, Copley states that his goal was “[not

to] editorialize [the artwork] at all. We didn’t want any critical comment. I wanted

something that would just open up and be full of what’s going on.” 233 In issue 2, this

sentiment was conveyed even before one opened the box. For this issue, Duchamp

designed, at once, a cover for the magazine [fig. 38], a record of himself reading

word plays out loud [media file 7234] and a kinetic object: The disk could be turned

while screwed onto the box or taken off the cover entirely and played with as a

remake of one of the rotoreliefs from his film Anemic Cinema. [Media file 8235]

233 Copley, “Oral History Interview.”

234 See Duchamp, Seven minute recording.

235 See Duchamp, Anemic Cinema.

127

Media file 7. Seven minute.mp3 Media file 8. Anemic Cinema.mp4

Fig. 38. S.M.S. 2. 1968. Cover: Marcel Media file 7. Marcel Media file 8. Marcel

Duchamp. Recording of Contrepetrie. Duchamp. Seven minute Duchamp. Anemic Cinema.

Remove to play. Photograph (KM) taken recording of contrapetrie, a Excerpt. 1926.

at the Klingspor Museum Archive in surrealist word game. In

Offenbach. S.M.S. 2. 1968.

In the film, these disks with spinning words alternated with disks with spinning graphic spirals, blending lines of words with solid lines themselves. The disks with spirals expanded to sites beyond their initial filmic context long before the disks with words migrated to the cover of S.M.S. In 1935, Duchamp displayed them in a small stand at the Concours Lépine Inventions Exhibition, and it was hoped that this would broaden the influence of the work, reaching audiences apart from the standard art crowd.236 “[M]aking a connection with the public had been one of the things on

236 “His own invention, which he was trying to sell to that crowd streaming through the aisles of the hall, consisted of optical phonograph records. They came in sets of six, each cardboard disk printed with spiral designs on both sides, for a total of twelve different patterns. Mounted on a record

128

Duchamp’s mind. ‘Several years later, in Paris,’ [Henri-Pierre] Roché remembers, ‘he wanted to attempt a “direct contact” with the people. He had produced a dozen

Rotoreliefs in a large edition […]. […] The disks were all turning at the same time, some horizontally, others vertically […]. Those disks are now in demand by collectors,’ he says, ‘not by the people. But all the same the people can see them on Sundays if they go to the museum.’”237 And a different set of people could see the other kind of disks, the ones with word puns, which made up Anemic Cinema as part of their S.M.S. subscription thirty years later.

What these two sets of disks have in common is, first, their fluctuation between objects of filmic set design, art objects ‘in their own right’ (to be sold and displayed outside of their original filmic environment) and their precarious status as objects more playful than ‘practical,’ which require a certain amount of interaction.238 “In his self- described profession as ‘ocularist,’ Duchamp sought to focus our attention on the act of

player’s turntable, the disks revolved soundlessly, the product of their turning a series of opt ical illusions, the most gripping of which was that rotation transformed their two -dimensionality into an illusory volumetric fullness that appeared to burgeon outward, toward the viewer” (Krauss, The

Optical Unconscious 96).

237 Ibid., 97.

238 On the lack of practicality of these objects, see Henri-Pierre Roché qtd. in Krauss, The Optical

Unconscious: “‘It was incredibly festive,’ Roché goes on, ‘but one would have said that the little stand was shrouded in invisibility. Not a single one of those visitors chasing after practical inventions stopped. A quick glance was all they needed to see that, between the machine to compress and burn garbage, on the left, and the instant vegetable cutter, on the right, this thing wasn’t practical. I approached. Duchamp smiled and said, “One hundred percent error. At least, it’s clear”’” (97).

129 seeing itself, rather than creating depictions to be seen. To advance this project, Duchamp would recover, in a series of assisted readymades, a variety of outmoded artifacts from the previous century often grouped under the Victorian term ‘philosophical toys.’ […]

Philosophical toys were ‘philosophical’ precisely insofar as they overthrew the earlier, decorporealized subject of vision on which a whole philosophical conception of subjectivity has been grounded. They conclusively demonstrated that visual perception could no longer be understood within a rhetoric of equivalence between interior and exterior reality, but instead concerned the conjunction of multiple physiological operations within the subjective mind.”239 And yet, what changes when one considers the description of the toys quoted here and the spinning record on the cover of S.M.S. is the idea of these objects as primarily cinematic.240 Although expanded cinema is often defined in terms of its intermedial impulse, the expansion of cinema to other medial production constellations and sites of exhibition, there is also the tendency in contemporary scholarship to ultimately reaffirm the cinematic as the Urmedium, the medium to which expanded cinema projects conceptually return. Staying with this example: “Like the works of so many of his time, Duchamp’s ‘precision optics’ were propelled by his fascination not with ‘the machine’ in general, but with a particular machine – the most revolutionary and disruptive motor of the twentieth-century aesthetics – the cinematographic apparatus. All of Duchamp’s optical toys might be considered thinly veiled explorations, critiques, and transformations of this singular,

239 Uroskie 98-99.

240 On the problem (and decline) of single media object studies at present, see Schüttpelz and Gießmann 19-

23.

130 insidious machine.”241 The attachment to an exclusive cinematic point of reference is misleading, as these disks had also been contextualized in their various environments as visual, kinetic and aural objects. It is not only, then, representative of “an investigation of cinema by means of a space historically and epistemologically prior to cinema,” but also, as most evident in S.M.S., a means of testing the hold that the cinematic reference maintains, placing it in tension with other art and media contexts of the time, such as conceptual art, experimental music, kinetic art and artists’ magazines.242

What these two sets of disks also have in common, related to this previous point, is their impulse for expansion, their fundamental desire not just to develop “cinema’s

‘expansion’ into the institutions and discourses of late modern art” but to expand the possibilities of encounters with various media objects, complicating their accepted boundaries.243 As a magazine cover, this object doesn’t say much. And yet, in this immediate visual negation of explanatory text, it also says a lot. Unlike Aspen, there were no lengthy texts or speeches in S.M.S. about what art is, its process of creation, its history or its future direction. But that doesn’t mean, as the literature claims, that this was ‘merely’ a random instant art collection without historical or theoretical interests.244 While the works in Aspen have a Fluxus-score feel to them, by restricting the use of objects, for example, to then allow for chance to emerge even within these

241 Uroskie 100.

242 Ibid., 101.

243 Ibid.

244 Cf. Heller 53, Mizota 44 as well as Holliday 29.

131 constraints, S.M.S. gives few instructions for its objects.245 This is a box that forces one to think twice about what kind of art is worth collecting, editioning and experiencing.

More than just placing objects of ‘high’ and ‘low’ side by side, asking them to be read with and against each other, S.M.S. confronts our expectations of access. At the top of one box is a bowtie designed by Lil Picard, individually charred for each edition (i.e., approximately 2,000 times), and underneath this are six poems that Mimmo Rotella wrote on torn scraps of paper in prison, and underneath this is some large, flat object wrapped in pink tissue paper, the spine perforated in a tight pattern, so one must open it carefully.246 What is inside is not so delicate: 12 xeroxed pages of what might appear, at first, to be abstract forms, but which eventually take the shape of a range of recognizable objects: a lightbulb, a can of gold spray paint, the bottom of a vacuum. [Figs. 39-41]

245 See Kahn 117 as well as Gallope et al.

246 “The quality and detail of the reproductions in S.M.S. are astonishingly high, and the Letter Edged in

Black paid all of the fabrication costs; in most cases, the artist had only to submit a single original work.

For issue #4, Italian poet Domenico Rotella contributed six poems he had written in prison, each on a different type of scrap paper. Copley and Petrov reproduced every detail, down to the torn edges of a sheet of yellow legal paper and the singed corner of a postcard. It’s unclear exactly how many portfolios were produced for each issue – estimates range from 1,500 to 2,500 – but it’s safe to say that hundreds of sheets of paper were torn by hand, and hundreds of cards – printed to resemble the original postcard – were individually burned. […] Almost all of this painstaking fabrication was done by contractors, but Copley and Petrov did recruit interns to assemble the portfolios and to re-create more unusual pieces such as

[Yoko] Ono’s smashed teacup, or Lil Picard’s burnt bowtie” (Mizota 50).

132

Fig. 39, Fig. 40 and Fig. 41. Paul Bergtold. Concept Bergtold. In S.M.S.

4. 1968. Photographs (KM) taken at the Klingspor Museum Archive in

Offenbach.

S.M.S. doesn’t just fulfill desires for access; it’s not just a means, as the literature has stressed, of putting art in the hands of ‘the people.’ It also makes one question this desire – undermining it, mocking it. Its mix of formats packed tightly together calls attention to assumptions about unique versus reproducible media, sometimes within the same artwork. Rather than cataloguing the differences introduced by technological media,

S.M.S. proposes that a closer relationship exists between these objects of analog reproduction and other audiovisual forms, and maybe that it always has. Cinema is never

(or never was) just cinema, photography is never (or never will be) just photography. It urges one to think about accessibility during the actual process of ‘reading.’ How many subscribers in 1968 could connect the cover of their strange magazine with

Duchamp’s 1926 film? Even without this historical knowledge, it’s a puzzle to figure out, first and foremost, what this thing is and how it’s supposed to function in the present moment. Is it a cover, meant to simultaneously protect, advertise and reflect on the contents of the publication? Or an image, a circle of conceptual art displayed

133 against a white background? Was this thing supposed to be taken off, spun or played with? Was it really meant to be played as a record, and how would one come to know this unless one closely investigates the object and discovers the grooves on the opposite side of its word plays? Objects in S.M.S. are not categorized according to media type, nor is this type ever mentioned in the table of contents, leaving it open as to whether Duchamp has reanimated an object of filmic set design here or redesigned a visual artwork for an aural medium.

The multimedial compilation encourages this moment of uncertainty and undecidability, so that one begins to ask, for instance, if Kasper König’s project – mentioned previously as the envelope containing four photos of (according to the title) West Germany in 1968 – is surrounded in the S.M.S. box by other photos, other drawings, other personal writings and reflections, what exactly is it? [Figs. 42-45247]

Is it a little photo album or, since it came in an envelope, a ‘letter,’ or is it the preparatory sketch, some kind of storyboard, for a television production?

247 See König.

134

Fig. 42, Fig. 43, Fig. 44 and Fig. 45. Kasper König. My Country ‘Tis of Thee - West

Germany, 1968 (Four Views). In S.M.S. 1. 1968. Screenshots from Sensate online

documentation of S.M.S. 1.

The box, in contrast to the concept of a time capsule or a Wunderkammer, for example, has an additional function that comes to light when unpacking these four

135 views from across the Atlantic.248 It was precisely during this time, between what

Alexander Klose terms the second and third phases of container development at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, that containers were no longer conceived as mere storage devices: “Erst in der dritten Phase, ab etwa 1970s bis heute, wird der Containertransport konsequent als Meer-Land-Verbund ausgebaut und zur dominierenden Form des (Stück-)Gütertransports, mit den entsprechenden

Auswirkungen auf die bzw. Wechselwirkungen mit der Organisation der Produktion im Prozess der Globalisierung. […] Der Unterschied zwischen Behältern (Räumen) zur Lagerung und solchen zum Transport ist (nahezu) getilgt.” 249 Central to these colorful portfolios was the function of transport, not just preservation. Regularly- delivered issues, albeit five times as expensive as the issues of Aspen, was part of the

S.M.S. logic.250 Every two months, between 1,500 and 2,000 subscribers were sent

248 For an understanding of Warhol’s Time Capsules (beg. in 1974, 610 boxes in total) through the lens of container theory, see Klose 19-44. In addition to the function of transport that a container or box implies, another major difference between a box and a capsule is the implicit anxiety of historical erasure and/or societal collapse embedded in the latter: “Die Zeitkapseln sind einerseits der Versuch, einen

Überlieferungszusammenhang herzustellen, der auch durch eine globale Katastrophe nicht unterbrochen wird” (Klose 21). On Warhol’s box sculptures exhibited at the Dwan Gallery already in

1964, see Warhol as well as Comenas.

249 Klose 128.

250 On the general unpredictability of Aspen’s arrival date, see the 1968 review in Time Magazine: “The publication date of each issue is as much of a surprise as the contents. Billed as a quarterly, Aspen comes out when Mrs. Johnson manages to get it out. ‘All the artists are such shadowy characters,’ she says, ‘that it takes months to track them down’” (“Hear It, Feel It, Hang It”). S.M.S. was billed at $125 annually and was produced bi-monthly (for only one year), thus coming out at over five times as much per issue as Aspen

136 multimedial packages of contemporary audiovisual material from Copley’s loft in

Manhattan’s upper west side.251

(Mizota 47). Most sources cite S.M.S.’s circulation numbers at around 2,000, although Steven Heller notes that one-quarter of these were probably never distributed: “While only 2,000 copies were produced of each of the six portfolios, rumor has it that 1,500 were mailed. In 1981 Copley made a gift of the remaining 500 or so sets to the New Museum of Contemporary Art, which sat, presumably forgotten, for a number of years in basement storage until a flood destroyed many copies. Had it not been for the flood, SMS [sic, without periods] might well have become a veritable Dead Sea Scrolls of ‘60s art. On the 20th anniversary of SMS [sic, without periods or italics] in 1988, Robert Brown and Susan Reinhold of Reinhold-Brown

Gallery resurrected the surviving issues in an exhibition where they offered them for sale. One hopes various museums have preserved a fair number as well” (153). For the sake of comparison, Aspen was billed as a quarterly, with each issue costing $4.00 or a yearly subscription $10.95 (see multiple advertisements in Bibliography for Aspen Magazine in Evergreen Review: Aspen Magazine Issue 3, Aspen

Magazine Issue 4, Aspen Magazine Issue 5+6 [April1968 and September 1968], Aspen Magazine Issue 7 and Aspen Magazine Issue 9). It was claimed in the Time Magazine review to circulate in editions of up to

20,000: “Today, some 20,000 subscribers receive Aspen at $4 per box, and Mrs. Johnson just about breaks even” (“Hear It, Feel It, Hang It”). As G. Allen notes, however, this number was likely inflated: “Brian

O’Doherty’s notes for Aspen 5+6 also indicate that he was at one point planning to produce the issue in an edition of 15,000 to 20,000. While it is possible that the first issue of Aspen was produced in numbers close to this size, given the relatively large number of copies of this issue that are still extant, later issues, which are exceedingly rare, were almost certainly produced in much, much smaller editions” (322, n. 24). On the court ruling that made the circulation of Aspen no longer financially possible and thus led to its abrupt cancellation, as it was no longer considered “print” (a magazine), but a package, see “Aspen” - Denial of

Second-Class Mail Privileges.

251 S.M.S. was published by Letter Edged in Black Press in Manhattan’s upper west side (246 W 80th St,

New York, NY 10024) (see Appleton and Perera 368; see Katz et al. 31). On the “contrarian” placement of

Letter Edged in Black Press, see Heller: “The majority of the New York avant-garde was found on the

137

Some of the pieces announce, aesthetically, their process of production, storage and distribution more openly than others, such as Copley’s own contribution to issue five, which consisted, among other things, of copies of newspaper clippings about the Chicago

Picasso sculpture. In a bright orange booklet at the very top of the issue, with a business card of a Chicago-based barber clipped to the front, it reads like a letter from the editor, a commentary on the state of things. [Fig. 46] Let me introduce myself to you and show you what I do. The card doesn’t just hold all the subsequent news stories and advertisements together. It also foregrounds its function, generally, as that often- overlooked promotional paratext and, specifically, as a reference to a space of public discourse, the barber shop, that is at once separate from the state and embedded in its market economy.252 The clippings one pulls out of this booklet concern a local barber

Lower East Side of the East Village where, among many provocateurs, Claes Oldenburg had his storefront

Mouse Museum, Lil Picard fomented art happenings and three radical underground papers, the East Village

Other, Rat, and Other Scenes, published political and sexual contraband and promoted cultural extravaganzas in, among other venues, grungy Tompkins Square Park. Only a few avenues west, but still downtown, Andy Warhol was making his bad of artistic gypsies famous in the legendary Factory. But

Copley, a prince of contrarians, decided that uptown was just as culturally fertile as anything below 14th

Street” (152-153). Aspen, in contrast, was published by Roaring Fork Press in Greenwich Village (107

Waverly Place New York, New York 10011).

252 On the importance of understanding the barber shop as a different public sphere than, for example, a church, precisely because of its ties to the market, see Mills: “Unlike churches, barber shops are profit- generating institutions that various classes of men enter, for grooming services or to socialize, without much at stake; no professions of faith or obligations of membership are required. At the end of the day, barbers must turn a profit to stay open, and we must therefore account for the influence of the market economy on the shop’s culture. […] The benefit of bringing the barber back into our discussions of barber

138 who is being sued for using an image of the Chicago Picasso sculpture on his business card. Taking the image on this card as a starting point, the stories one finds in here branch out to issues that reach far beyond an isolated incident to include a number of aesthetic, legal, financial and cultural questions: from the kind of public art that should be found in the city of Chicago and the debate about which group of people this famous sculpture truly speaks for, to the irony of copyright – the fact that the sculpture Picasso designed, which was constructed by William Hartman, will soon be available “as a jigsaw puzzle.

Or a set of earrings. Or a beer mug.”253 [Fig. 47] Meanwhile, a small business owner is going to go broke for reprinting the sculpture on his local business card.

shops is that a better understanding of the business of barbering not only increases our knowledge of the early history of the occupation and the shop, but it also deepens our understanding of how market decisions inform public discourse” (3-4).

253 Copley, The Barber Shop. These various commercial objects that iconographically derive from Chicago

Picasso are also items now frequently found in museum gift shops, the rise of which, according to Wasson, was influential for the development of the “expanded museum,” the museum that became, through such objects, mobile and present beyond its physical institutional boundaries beginning in the 1920s. Wasson focuses on the Metropolitan Museum of Art at this time, analyzing this “museum’s paradigmatic turn toward consumer culture and domesticity as modes of curation and as sites for furthering the museum’s presence in everyday life. The ongoing commodification of reproducible art as well as the reproducible museum coalesced during this period, manifesting concretely in the birth of the museum gift shop. […]

Mediating and merchandising the museum functioned as a necessary mechanism for mobilizing art beyond the museum’s walls, inserting both art and the museum into the ebbs and flows of everyday life. Inspired in part by its close relations to the department store, the mediated museum and its gift shop are indexes too – and symptoms of – the general conditions of culture and art under capitalism” (“Every Home an Art

Museum” 163).

139

Fig. 46 and Fig. 47. William Copley. The Barber Shop. In S.M.S. 5. 1968. Photographs (KM) taken at

the Klingspor Museum Archive in Offenbach.

The project consists of copies of things: xeroxed newspaper articles, postcards reproducing original sculptures, business cards that rely on the logic of reproduction and circulation in order to be effective. While the texts in this orange booklet, mostly excerpts from newspaper articles, frequently reference the need to preserve originality, such as ensuring a “limited reproduction” of Chicago Picasso gift items and prosecuting illegal copying, the copied nature of the work challenges this resistance to an aesthetics of reproducibility and transport, precisely by distributing the reproductions, both sanctioned and unsanctioned.

140

König’s work, in contrast, fluctuates between these two poles of scarcity and reproduction.254 It is at once a work of photography, the medium that, in the 1960s, raised a number of curatorial problems for museums as a result of its uncertain ontological status, and this work, in its title, foregrounds its selection of “four views,” a process that, along with the notion of ‘taking’ (as opposed to ‘making’) and ‘documenting’ (as opposed to ‘creating’), continues to reinforce reductive historical clichés of photography even into the present day.255 But part of this work is also a drawing: traced onto the paper overlaying each photograph is a greyish marking, a singular line with texture like that of a pencil, as if this line were the beginning of a drafting process. Drawing is that art form against which photography has always been and continues to be defined.256 It is a project that references its mechanical reproduction at the same time that it insists on a human hand exerting influence over this production of the image. The hand that one detects on this series of four views draws, however, an instrument that serves to place the work back into the realm of ‘selection’: merely the shape of that penciled line drawn around each image is enough to trigger the thought of television. The television monitor is not drawn directly on the photograph itself, but on the pergamin paper surrounding each photograph. This is the material often found in photo albums that protects images,

254 For a recent theory of the relationship between reproduction and scarcity in avant-garde film production of the 1960s and 1970s, see Balsom, “The Promise and Threat of Reproducibility.”

255 See Crimp 6.

256 See Geimer 18.

141 implying that they are or depict something precious and valuable, and it also serves to keep the photos in the album distinct and separate from one another.257 [Figs. 48-49258]

Fig. 48 and Fig. 49. Kasper König. My Country ‘Tis of Thee - West Germany, 1968

(Four Views). 1968. In S.M.S. 1. 1968. Right: Screenshot from Sensate online

documentation of S.M.S. 1. Left: Photograph (KM) taken at the Klingspor Museum

Archive in Offenbach.

It’s not just the content of the image that cites, in contrast to the title of the work, a time before 1968. Besides the intertextual signifiers of a more immediate post-War German setting, such as the traditional style of furniture, dress and

257 “Als Schutztaschen für Negative wurde Pergaminpapier seit Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts verwendet.

Pergamin als Zwischenblatt findet sich zunächst ungeprägt in den Büchern und Alben. Geprägtes Pergamin taucht in den Privatalben ab den 1910er Jahren mit unterschiedlichsten Mustern auf” (Wiedemeyer,

Buchfalten 37-39).

258 See König.

142 household objects depicted in black and white, the pergamin paper encourages a historicity of these images. “Wenn Pergaminpapier in zeitgenössischen Publikationen oder auch im Film auftaucht, wird das Vergangene, das sich in einem Dokument, etwa in Form einer Fotografie im Album, aktualisiert, mit etwas Vergangenem, einem der ursprünglichen Funktion Enthobenen adressiert. […] Als Stellvertreter des

Fotoalbums taucht das Spinnwebenpapier in zeitgenössischen Publikationen als Zitat auf. Es wird eingefügt, um Dinge als Entschwundene zu präsentieren oder in der

Potentialität des Entschwindens.”259 Beyond the cultural significance of its material history, how it can cite notions of historicity, the pergamin paper also functions as a historical index to the extent that, in this instance, it holds evidence of a trace: the trace of what appears to be a pencil line circled around the image, rounding off its sharp edges. It demonstrates that there are really two images here: the image underneath the paper – a clearer, shinier, black-and-white photographic square – and the image revealed through the paper, which is framed by the pencil trace and made slightly opaque by the pergamin layer fastened to the top and bottom of it. One could say that, in this respect, the paper layer “claims to be nothing more than a writing tablet from which notes can be erased by an easy movement of the hand.”260 Remove the pergamin layer and the trace is gone. Like the combination of the waxed paper and the celluloid layer covering the wax slab of Sigmund Freud’s mystic writing pad, the removable tracing paper in My Country ‘Tis of Thee is a retainer of fleeting inscription as well as a protective layer for the photograph underneath, intricately

259 Wiedemeyer, Buchfalten 41-42.

260 Freud 209.

143 involved in the process of writing/recording, archiving/storing and remembering/transmitting. “[T]he structural asymmetry, in the case of human beings, between the quantity of data capture and the relatively restricted repertoire of data processing (if we regard our culture store of narratives, poems and stories as ‘processing programmes’) encourages one to think of Freud’s theories of memory […] as also a problem of data management […].”261

The issue of data management, of quantity, is also raised in the title of this work, implicitly asking how one should accommodate the numerous, varying views – here, four

– of the past, not to mention the question of how to write and record the past, whether fleetingly and flexibly with a pencil trace, cautiously with protective measures or more permanently with a chemical impression of an image. While the photographic images are coded by the materiality of the protective tracing sheets overlaying them as historical images, the title of this piece insists that this is, essentially, not four views from the past, but of the present, of West Germany in 1968: “My country ‘tis of thee.” The box, in particular the box on the move, can serve as a generative site to experiment with such historical constellations. “Im Karton werden alle Geschichten

261 Elsaesser, “Freud as Media Theorist” 104. On the writing pad’s transparent sheet as a protective

“sheath” or “shield,” see also Freud: “If, while the Mystic Pad has writing upon it, we cautiously raise the celluloid from the waxed paper, we can see the writing just as clearly on the surface of the latter, and the question may arise why there should be any necessity for the celluloid portion of the cover. Experiment will then show that the thin paper would be very easily crumpled or torn if one were to write directly upon it with the stilus. The layer of celluloid thus acts as a protective sheath for the waxed paper, to keep off injurious effects from without. The celluloid is a ‘protective shield against stimuli’; the layer which actually receives the stimuli is the paper” (210).

144

bei jeder Behandlung in neue Konfigurationen gebracht. Was in ihm landet, hängt ab

vom Zufall, von der ordnungslogistischen Kompetenz seines Packers und, in letzter

Instanz, vom standardisierten Volumen und der Tragfähigkeit des Kartons selber.” 262

Through the medium of the container, what gets thrown into the box is always

subject to different configurations when it is unpacked. Accessing the box – deciding

when, where and with whom you open the box, choosing what to focus on and for

how long, figuring out which pathway to take through the maze of objects it contains

– is guaranteed, each time, to be a different experience.

IV. Reboxing

The way I opened the box this time, here, will be different from the next time

I do it. This could theoretically be said of every aesthetic experience, time-based

and/or spatial. But what is required at the end of this endeavor in particular is a task

of equal importance as the unboxing previously performed: I must now close the box.

After having spent the time carefully pulling out each individual object, negotiating all

the confusion the objects sowed and looking at a few of them under a critical lens, this

task of tidying up, of coming to a close, is not necessarily as simple as it might seem.

262 Klose 152. See also Pias. Pias understands the moving box as an explicit attempt to experiment

with the arrangement of history, “weil es gewissermaßen ihr Wesen ist, ahistorische räumliche

Konfigurationen zu bilden. Im Umzugskarton scheint das Transitorische zu sich und das Ende der

Geschichte gekommen” (ibid.).

145

“Tja, man muss was für die Dinge tun.”263 It’s hard to put a lid on it, to fit it all back into a nice, neat package according to the nice, neat diagram we looked at in the beginning. The table of contents, an abstract map showing me how all the smaller squares and boxes flowed into the one big box, served as a kind of map for the package when I initially opened it. But what does this flowchart look like now, lying on the right-hand side of this unboxed mess, suddenly one item among many, one part of a sprawled-out collection? [Fig. 50]

Fig. 50. S.M.S. 1. February 1968. Photograph (KM) taken at the

Klingspor Museum Archive in Offenbach.

263 Weiß.

146

Perhaps the flowchart is always just that: a map for how things are expected to work, how they are expected to flow, relate to each other and become processed, not a representation of how they actually work. Perhaps the flowchart can be an expression of how things are believed to work. A couple charts in art history that worked like this quickly come to mind. In Alfred Barr’s 1936 “Development of Abstract Art,” one finds the well-known example of how an ideology of art history, its assumed genealogy, could be visualized. The source of abstract art, for Barr, is “Van Gogh,” “Gauguin,” “Cézanne” and “Seurat,” and it ends conclusively with either “non-geometrical abstract art” or

“geometrical abstract art.”264 George Maciunas also relied on a series of interconnected boxes mapped onto a page to convey the lineage, as he saw it, of “expanded arts.”265

Included in a special issue on the topic in Film Culture in 1966, Maciunas’s flowchart was abound “with rectilinear forms and lines running the length of a full page.”266 And as with Barr’s history of art, “Maciunas’s diagram was also highly prescriptive. From this contemporary vantage point, the diagram presents a discursive code that arranged information in order that it may be more visible, while also remaining dogmatic and potentially authoritarian.”267 While Maciunas, in this chart, alludes to the possibility that, in its updated version, it could “be expanded to include more artists” and that “[a]ny comments, suggested additions and/or changes from readers will be welcome,” his boxes

264 See Barr.

265 See Maciunas.

266 Sutton 2.

267 Ibid.

147 are not completely modular.268 While some flow, through diagonal pipes, into others, there are many boxes that can never meet up. The “joke” category at the top of his chart is separate, and cannot be united with “dada,” for example, just like “Yoko Ono” is relegated to the box labeled “Events/Neo-Haiku Theatre,” separate from “John Cage” in

“Acoustic Theatre,” “Merce Cunningham” in “Kinesthetic Theater,” “Claes Oldenburg” in “Happenings/Neo-Baroque Theatre” and “Dick Higgins” in “Verbal Theatre.”269 There are different paths one can take through this chart, but that number is limited by design.

If a flowchart conveys how processes are expected or believed to work, then how could such a map of interrelated boxes possibly help guide us in a situation like the unboxing and reboxing done here, which is, by definition, expected to be carried out differently every time? This would have to be a graphic representation of the magazine issue that acknowledges that previous unboxings affect those that follow, that “previous steps determine […] present reactions,” even if such reactions were essentially

“unpredictable: an output once observed for a given input will most likely be not the same for the same input given later.”270 Such a chart would capture this inherent duality: a false hope or expectation that its orderly abstract constructs yield a definite, uncontaminated meaning, as well as a guarantee that this meaning will be, in practice, each time and always, different. An unpredictability that is iconographically built into the organizational flow. [Fig. 51271] It comes in a box.

268 Maciunas (“Introduction to Diagram”).

269 Maciunas.

270 von Foerster 208.

271 Shannon and Weaver 34.

148

Fig. 51. Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver. “Schematic Diagram of

a General Communication System.” In The Mathematical Theory of

Communication. 1948/1949.

“Kann man zweimal in dasselbe Flußdiagramm steigen? Es gibt Leute, die darauf antworten würden: nicht einmal einmal.”272 When Erhard Schüttpelz analyzes the iconography of Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s flowchart of a communication system, he notes a key difference between this and earlier models of the system, namely the fact that “die ‘Störung’, ausgehend von physikalischen Störungen, dann aber übertragen auf alles, was den Erfolg einer Signalübertragung negiert, zu einem eigenständiger Element des Diagramms geworden ist; was im Vergleich für andere

‘Kommunikationsmodelle’ nicht galt und gilt.”273 The box as a unifying element in

272 Schüttpelz, “Eine Umschrift der Störung” 236.

273 Ibid., 237. It should be noted that “flowchart” is referring here to the German “Flußdiagramm” instead of using “flow diagram,” which would be the literal translation: “On the other side of the Atlantic [in the

149 the chart was key to this. Despite its placement in the lower part of the chart, “Noise

Source” is not outside of the communication flow. Its modularity means that the box can be connected, shifted around and reconnected to the process flow without being inside of it, and its relevance is reflected in the size of its box, which is of equal proportion to all the others in the chain.274 In fact, when building, not just modeling, his “Ultimate Machine,” Shannon again relied on the box as ultimate form, one which, ultimately, reboxed itself. “It is merely a small wooden casket the size and shape of a cigar-box, with a single switch on one face. When you throw the switch, there is an angry, purposeful buzzing. The lid slowly rises, and from beneath it emerges a hand. The hand reaches down, turns the switch off, and retreats into the box. […] There is something unspeakably sinister about a machine that does nothing

– absolutely nothing – except switch itself off.”275 He coalesced his flowchart into a single box in which input reverses output, a box that contains only what is not

1940s], Herman H. Goldstine and John von Neumann were wrestling with the same sort of problem that

[Konrad] Zuse had faced: How should algorithms be represented in a precise way, at a higher level than the machine’s language? Their answer […]: They proposed pictorial representation involving boxes joined by arrows, and they called it a ‘flow diagram.’ […] The term ‘flow diagram’ became shortened to ‘flow chart’ and eventually it even became ‘flowchart’ – a word that has entered our language as both noun and verb”

(Knuth and Trabb Prado 208).

274 See Schüttpelz, “Eine Umschrift der Störung” 238.

275 Arthur Clarke 159. “Sie [die Maschine] ist aber ganz und gar nicht frei erfunden, übrigens auch oder gerade nicht von Claude Shannon. Er adaptierte den Mechanismus von seinen Kollegen, die genau die gleichen Maschinen in Präsentationen einsetzten” (Roch 28).

150 expected, a machine that it automated to undo what you have just done, as if mocking, or hyperbolizing, the entire system of feedback.

In our case, in the tables of contents that help guide us through Aspen and

S.M.S., noise or interruption is also built into the designs. The diagrams and formulas modeling the boxes we are about to unpack or put away exhibit gestures of access – showing us how to navigate the unique system – but they also encompass, and thematize, a certain level of excess. They offer up various formulas, letters equaling letters, letters corresponding to numbers corresponding to formats, and boxes marked by letters marking names. When the box containing unpredictability, noise, interruption or excess is built into the system itself, and when it can, as a true modular entity, occur at any point in the transmission process, then not only does signal not exist without noise, or access without excess. There is also a struggle, a push and pull between access and excess, that marks this system. 276 When opening up the box anew, or when closing it, noise might seep in at different places, through a different arrangement of the boxes within the larger box, even while the nature and number of boxes, of objects in the big box, remain the same. Thus, it’s not just about how access and excess influence the processing, transmission and storage of data

276 “Schon aufgrund des Universalanspruchs, der das Modell – und sein Diagramm – so überaus wirksam werden ließ, ließ sich der Terminus ‘Noise’ daher nicht mehr auf den abgebildeten Kanal begrenzen, sondern findet sich überall dort bereit, wo etwas ‘als Kanal’ einer Signalübertragung verstanden werden kann […]. Der Universalanspruch des Modells (seine Metapher) und seiner Elemente (‘Störung’ inbegriffen) ließ als erste neue Größe ‘semantic noise’ entstehen. Damit aber konnte ‘Noise’ prinzipiell

überall entstehen” (Schüttpelz, “Eine Umschrift der Störung” 240-241). On the antagonism inherently built into Norbert Wiener’s conception of cybernetics, see Galison 258-261.

151 contained in the Aspen and S.M.S. boxes, but about how access and excess each seeks to control this flow, and how they act together but act separately in doing so. 277

Charting how information flows is not enough – one must also chart how this information is controlled and antagonistically fought over. Conditions of possibilities for expansion include not only an increased accessibility to different medial formats and physical sites for experiencing media. It’s not just about the democratic appeal to bring art to ‘the people,’ that impetus for the founding of alternative magazines in the 1960s that is usually cited in the secondary literature. 278 What these boxes show is that there is no hierarchy or teleology between the two: not access, availability and exhibition first; excess, control and restriction second. But, rather, in order to conceive of the very possibility of access, one must acknowledge that excess was always already there – in the records on the cover, the envelopes stuffed with photo albums and the pills that pushed their way outside the box – challenging expectations of immediacy.

277 “Acting together and acting separately” (Cunningham).

278 “Inexpensive and accessible, the magazine was an ideal expressive vehicle for art that was more concerned with concept, process, and performance than with final marketable form. The ephemerality of the magazine was central to its radical possibilities as an alternative form of distribution that might replace the privileged space of the museum with a more direct and democratic experience. […] The prospect of the disappearance of the art object carried with it the utopian promise that art might escape its status as commodity and circumvent the gallery to become a truly accessible and democratic form of expression”

(G. Allen, 1 and 15).

152

Antragsfilme – Film Pitches

I. Revolting Formats

It’s hard to know when the right moment to shoot has come. In the opening of

Hellmuth Costard’s Der kleine Godard: An das Kuratorium Junger Deutscher Film

(1978), two girls at the lake exit the frame just when the music reaches its climax. [Fig.

52] The sound of French television, Les actualités Gaumont – Reflets d’automne, plays over the scene. “Urlaubsstimmung auf Super-8. Vielleicht auch ein Homemovie von der

153

Alster.”279 They are playing apportieren, master and dog.280 One girl throws the stick and the other, the loyal servant, brings it back. Each round is performed in a slightly different way. Exaggerated movements, throwing the bounty farther out. Der kleine Godard is interested in rehearsals of retrieval. When the girls all the sudden walk off the scene, the film fetches a quote from the past about the importance of timing. White typed text is superimposed over the lake, but ephemeral, appearing and fading away in four parts.

“Bruno (off): ‘Each time the coast was clear, no witness… / … I hesitated a few

279 Prinzler 255. On the source of this footage, see Dawson 8 and Harris 146-147. Harris refers to this footage as shot “with a telephoto lens,” providing further information about its possible origin: “Dietrich

Kuhlbrodt claims these are the children of Petra and Uwe Nettelbeck, who appear later in the film.

However, it is not clear whether or not Costard shot this opening footage” (Harris 146-147). By focusing on the rehearsal of retrieval by two girls, this opening scene/mini-film could also be referencing Harun

Farocki’s thirteen contributions to children’s television (Sesamstraße and Unser Sandmännchen for

Norddeutscher Rundfunk): Einschlafgeschichten (1976-1977) and Katzengeschichten (1978). The contributions featured two girls visualizing operations of transport and transmission. See also Wulff: “In den Einschlafgeschichten geht es um Brücken, um Seilbahnen, um Schiffe, die Straßen kreuzen. […] Sie geben sich der enzyklopädischen Methode hin, weil dieses ihr Prinzip ist. Serielle Assoziation, das Spiel mit den Prinzipien ‘der Wiederholung und der Permutation’ – das ist, möchte man mit Farocki fortfahren, ein Spiel mit ‘filmischen Operationsweisen [...], wo die Gedanken im Film oder im filmischen Vorgehen erzeugt werden’” (207-208).

280 See “apportō.” “1 To carry, convey, or bring (to a person, place, etc.); (spec.) to import. b to bring with one; (of an event) to bring in its train. c to present (a play). 2 To bring (news). 3 (refl.) To betake oneself, make one’s way; (so, facet.)” (ibid., 153).

154 seconds… / …and once again it was too late.’ / ‘LE PETIT SOLDAT’ Jean-Luc Godard

1960.”281 Something got lost. [Fig. 53]

Fig. 52 and Fig. 53. Hellmuth Costard. Der kleine Godard: An das Kuratorium Junger Deutscher Film

(1978). Screenshots.

The phrase is attributed to 1960, the year when the words in the film were spoken, when production on the film was finished, and not 1963, when the ban on the film was lifted and it was released, a result of the Algerian War having come to an end.282 And the

281 Written text in Der kleine Godard.

282 For production details on the film, see Brody 100-101. There were three reasons that Louis Terrenoire, the Minister of Information, cited for maintaining the ruling of the Commission de contrôle to deny the film a visa and ban its screening, both in France and abroad: “First, because the film showed torture […].

Second, because the film’s hero is a deserter from the French army. And, finally, because of ‘the words

155 title is referenced as “Le Petit Soldat,” not “The Little Soldier,” which would correspond with Bruno’s voice-off that is quoted in English, but which doesn’t create as clear a parallel with Der kleine Godard as Le petit Soldat. The film cuts to typed text on screen, not hovering over a lake this time, but more permanent, imprinted on paper. It’s read out loud by Costard.283 “1974. Unsere Hamburger Filmmacher Cooperative ist endgültig zusammengebrochen.”284 The film co-op was founded in 1968 amid appeals for “ein anderes Kino,” but by the mid-seventies, while New German Cinema was critically and financially flourishing, Costard and others were having to explore new methods of production and alternative institutions for support and distribution.285 This includes Jean-

Luc Godard, whose negotiations with the Cultural Committee of Hamburg about a potential artist-in-residence stipend are documented in detail in Der kleine Godard, setting up a parallel with Costard, as indicated in the film’s subtitle that mimics the address in the letter he’s drafting to a funding committee, An das Kuratorium Junger

Deutscher Film.286 While Costard reads to the viewers what they see on screen, namely the typed text about his fantasy “Spielfilme vollkommen phantasielos zu drehen, den ungestörten Ablauf der Ereignisse als perfekte Inszenierung auszunutzen,” this paper

given to a protagonist of the film and by which the action of France in Algeria is presented as devoid of any ideal, whereas that of the rebellion is defended and exalted’” (ibid., 101)

283 See Ebert 640. Ebert refers to this text as a “Titel”: “Da sich aber der Titel von unten nach oben bewegt, bleibt die Feuerfront etwa immer im oberen Drittel des Bildes” (ibid.).

284 Written and spoken text in Der kleine Godard.

285 Töteberg 186.

286 See Harris 171-172.

156 gradually goes up in flames.287 Although he initially tried, “ausgerüstet mit einem kleinen

Fernsehauftrag, ein eigenes Kamerasystem herzustellen,” he now has to view his attempt

“als gescheitert [...].”288 He missed the moment. Thus, in Der kleine Godard, he sits down, “um für das Kuratorium junger deutscher Film einen Antrag auf Filmförderung auszuarbeiten.”289

In the first five minutes of Der kleine Godard, France and Germany, the Algerian

War and Oberhausen, pre- and post-1968, the big Godard and the little Costard, critically- acclaimed 35mm films and failed Super 8 projects, broad institutional support and small television grants all come together to force a reconsideration of the dichotomous model of success and failure – of revolutions, of “1968,” of experiments.290 The film departs from an object that, while essential to film production, is supposed to remain off-screen, so as to not distract from the diegesis, and one that is rarely thematized in film analysis: the Antrag, the funding application. It is usually considered to be mere paperwork, a boring bureaucratic necessity detailing costs, plans and negotiations, which is neither entertaining, nor aesthetically or politically interesting. More than simply making viewers aware of the existence of the Antrag, this film says that it is itself an Antrag: An das

Kuratorium Junger Deutscher Film. While a film about Antragslogik might seem out of place in the wake of the sociopolitical turbulence of the long sixties, it is this object that brings together questions of historiography, institutional critique and access to resources,

287 Written and spoken text in Der kleine Godard.

288 Ibid.

289 Ibid.

290 Costard was nicknamed “the little Godard” by film critics at the time. See Petz.

157 issues which were central to this time period. The quote from a Godard film about timing not only describes, in retrospect, the particular case of Le Petit Soldat, since, “by early

1963, the film’s moment had passed,” but also, when it’s translated and paired with anonymous amateur footage, asks what we do with all these dates – 1960, 1963, 1968,

1974, 1978 – when did we miss the moment and in what language do we talk about this?291 It unsettles standard couplings, such as “Costard” with “1968,” the year that his banned film, Besonders wertvoll, featuring a close-up of a penis mimicking the lips of someone (presumably a legal authority) ‘reading’ the immoral content clause

(Sittenklausel) in the latest Film Funding Act, brought the “Oberhausen Film Festival to the brink of collapse.”292 It was the troubling synchronization of image and sound in this case – a topic that will prove to be of ongoing interest for Costard – that incited half of the directors at the festival to withdraw their works in protest.293 Der kleine Godard rethinks “1968” in terms of temporal, national and material reach.294 “[W]e need to break with a well-worn chronology which unfolds like a classical French drama, respecting unities of place (Paris) and time (the month of May).”295 The pre-1968 events, like the

291 Brody 105.

292 Blumenberg 16.

293 See Dawson 5. “Since 1968, Hellmuth Costard has rated a mention in most of the standard reference books as the ‘enfant terrible’ of the New German Cinema. […] Because 1968 was a notoriously good year for gestures of protest and radical solidarity […] it might – until 1978 – have been easy to dismiss Costard as a typical child of the Sixties […]” (ibid.).

294 See Jackson 3-6. On the preference for the term “long sixties,” see Kalter 7-9; Marwick 780-781; and

Ferguson 3. For a critical perspective on the arbitrariness of decadological periodization, see Graf.

295 Jackson 3.

158

Algerian War, “[der] zum Schlüsselereignis der politischen Sozialisation zahlreicher

Aktivisten der studentischen Trägergruppen der Mai-Bewegung 1968 [wurde],” and the post-1968 era, with its failed co-ops and problematic funding models, become as important as the standard, celebrated list of 1968 events arbitrarily demarcated, reinforced by disciplinary canons and preoccupied with the Western world.296 “For the real challenges facing us institutionally are to challenge the world of established disciplines whose oppressive and violently partial forms of order produced the counterhegemonic formalism of minority knowledge in the first place.”297

If one important consequence of the so-called 68er movement was the realization that we need “to think more creatively about what institutionalization means (the balkanization of resources; impediments to producing points of comparison and alliance),” then Der kleine Godard asks that we closely examine the cultural institutional structures, conventions, and values that we’re currently employing and thus maintaining.298 This meticulous analysis is performed in the film, demonstrating the ways in which they determine which projects get made, reviewed and written into history, and which projects remain dilettantish, outside of history. That’s not to say that Costard’s

296 Gilcher-Holtey 57. See also Kalter: “What were the years of ’68? Competing proposals notwithstanding,

Algeria’s independence in 1962 and the change of government to [François] Mitterrand in 1981 are most often mentioned as the bracketing dates. […] [T]alk of the years of ‘68 solidifies the reference to the ‘hot’ weeks of 1968, which continue to be conceived as the ‘epicenter of a period that is extended backward and forward in time.’ In the final analysis, then, what continues to be inscribed is a teleology of perspectives that all converge on 1968 and block out other developments and timelines” (Kalter 7-8).

297 Berlant 131.

298 Ibid.

159 staged composition, re-working and reading of the letter to the Kuratorium Junger

Deutscher Film is valuable merely because it’s a representation of a particular historical document or because it provides special insight into the history of West German cultural politics. These are scenes of writing “in dem das Verhältnis von primärer schriftlicher und sekundärer filmischer Fixierung aufgehoben, der Zuschauer zum Zeugen der

Entstehung des Films gemacht wird,” and this makes the film simultaneously valuable as an (institutional) appeal to the future.299 “Where most reception theory fetishizes the

‘death of the author,’ relegating intention to the past,” Costard’s reenactment of institutional critique “defers its site in multiple directions – not only into the past but across complicated fields of citation that undo any linearity that would give us, securely, forward and backward.”300 Studying the institutions of the sixties that prompted experiments with various film formats doesn’t just provide a more detailed view of film history, but it can also help us better understand, and maybe even appeals for us to reflect on, the relationship between experiments with technology and institutions today, in the supposed “post-cinema”301 era when German federal film funding logic still problematically calls for “Kunst und Kasse zugleich.”302

299 Ebert 647.

300 R. Schneider 264 and 263.

301 Scholarship on this topic has been prolific over the last several years and more books, edited volumes and calls for papers are still being churned out at present. Thus, a selection: Denson and Leyda (ed., Post-

Cinema); Hagener et al. (ed., The State of Post-Cinema); Pethő (ed., Film in the Post-Media Age); and

Shaviro.

302 Suchsland. See also Peitz.

160

Within the context of the Antrag, the role of technology is no longer an irrelevant, nerdy preoccupation of those in the industry. Formats become central to the historical trajectory of dichotomous models of success/failure, professionalization/amateurism and theatrical exhibition/hobbyist production. Costard had been interested in the problems and potential of format technology long before Der kleine Godard. “Since 1967, Costard has worked exclusively on 16 mm and Super-8 (modifying the mass-produced systems with some inventions of his own).”303 And yet this last observation, in parentheses, is highly reductive. When Costard “modifies” something, it does more than insert “some” new things, a little innovation, into a component of a dominant, mainstream production system because his interventions primarily point to the inadequacy of the dichotomies underlying such a statement. This is evident in the opening of the film when he modifies the big Godard for a little home movie. In Le Petit Soldat, Bruno first begins his reflection on timing by talking about his friend, “Raoul Coutard [who] called it ‘the pain in the backside law’. Every time I was ready to fire, something happened to stop me.

Every time the coast was clear, I hesitated. And once again, it was too late.”304 “By attributing this quotation to his own camera operator [Coutard], the man who literally

‘shoots’ the action for him, Godard links the instinctive requirements of assassination

303 Dawson 5. Dawson understands Costard’s interest in these experiments with format as not necessarily dependent on a notion of success, but rather foregrounds, in her view, the impossibility of success: “[…]

[W]hile he himself was among the first and foremost champions in Germany of the idea of an ‘alternative cinema’, his films themselves – while signaling possible new directions – have tended equally to function as demonstrations of the impossibility of achieving genuine alternatives within an established political, cultural or aesthetic framework” (ibid.).

304 Garnham 56.

161 with his own concept of a spontaneous approach to film-making.”305 In Der kleine

Godard, however, Costard edits this quote, eliding the cinematographer, therein making it less about auteur cinema and more applicable to his own project of experimenting with different formats to capture the ‘right’ moment – whatever that is. A Godard quote can help understand the home movie of kids at the lake, the repeated “emphasis on ‘the moment of composition’” throughout this film and the attempt, through technological formats, to seize the moment, kairos, crucial for both rhetoric and revolution.306

If “format” not only characterizes material support, such as a particular film stock, but also, as a verb, indicates an act of erasure and/or rearrangement, then to focus on formatting means to consider not only the conditions of possibility within film

305 Martin 163.

306 Harris 165. “This description [of the diary film], formulated by David James to characterize work by

Jonas Mekas, isolates the temporal quality that distinguishes the diary. It is, perhaps, this emphasis on the

‘moment of composition’ which provides most support for an analogy between Der kleine Godard and the film diary” (ibid., 164). Harris goes on to point out that “[n]ot all of Der kleine Godard even attempts to record events at the moment they originally occur” (165). On the significance of kairos to rhetoric, see

Sipiora 9. “In Against the Sophists, his earliest known discussion of rhetoric, Isocrates identifies attention to kairos as one of the most important characteristics of effective rhetorical discourse. One of the reasons for the general ineffectiveness of the Sophists, according to Isocrates, is their inability to recognize the kairic exigencies of particular discourses. They fail to consider the right time or make the appropriate adjustments in any given rhetorical situation” (ibid.). Kinneavy, on the other hand, summarizes how kairos, in the existing scholarship, has been important for the Marxist concept of seizing the revolutionary moment: “It [kairos] certainly is closely allied to Walter Benjamin’s notion of the importance of being aware of the ‘now-time,’ the revolutionary possibilities inherent in the moment, the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live, and the potentials for change inherent in the historical situation” (64).

162 materialities, such as the documentary mode that Costard wanted his Super 8 construction to reference (“Spielfilme zu drehen, die sich selbst ausdenken”307), but which he hoped to then “implicate [...] in a montage structure using editing patterns – such as shot, counter shot – conventionally associated with narrative film.”308 It also means that one must take into account the consequences of formatting beyond the visible, material differences between film stocks apparent at the surface level.309 “Most crucial dimensions of format are codified in some way – sometimes through policy, sometimes through the technology’s constructions, and sometimes through sedimented habit.”310 It means, if not striving to erase the dichotomies that, as this film shows, are implicitly reinforcing so many political, artistic and institutional concepts at this time, then at least investigating the discourse – the policy, technology and sedimented habits – that sustains them. Der kleine Godard is not solely, or even primarily, about problematic West German funding

307 Spoken text in Der kleine Godard.

308 Harris 111. “Costard’s aspirations to edit using the footage of multiple cameras, precisely synched with original sound, suggest a challenge to […] notions of documentary ‘grammar.’ The contention that the filmed result of photographing an event from one position and with a particular framing chosen by the filmmaker is more authentic than a film constructed from editing decisions among takes shot from multiple positions and framings, also chosen by the filmmaker, is put into question by Costard’s proposed technique” (ibid., 113).

309 See Wasson, Museum Movies. Wasson similarly proposes a broader, discursive understanding of 16mm film beyond its material traits: “The designation 16mm refers literally to the width of the film gauge, yet it was more accurately an expansive network of ideas and practices, supported by an amalgam of cameras, projectors, and film stock” (46). See also Wasson, “Formatting Film Studies” 61.

310 Sterne 8.

163 conditions that served as the impetus for Costard’s ‘failed’ Super 8 experiment. “A characteristic that might first appear as the result of numb technological imperatives is actually revealed as something that had an aesthetic and cultural function,” and these functions of format – its process of selection, the rhetoric of a certain historical format and the act and politics of formatting – are made explicit in the film itself.311

While the mere focus on format as material might seem to endorse some form of technological determinism, a belief that the invention of this system can, in and of itself, give rise to “vollkommen phantasielos[e]” films, the representation of experimentation with format technology in this film, including the self-proclaimed failures with it, turns attention to the discourse on experimental systems and historiographies.312 From the opening scene, we see that what is said is not what is shown; what is said is more complicated than it seems.313 Just as there’s no one technological development that determines societal or artistic change, there’s no big Costard, no inventor-artist-genius behind a successful invention that can be nicely and neatly situated in a lineage of big names, a narrative we still have to listen to at present.314 “Alexander Graham Bell displayed his telephone for the first time. Remington unveiled the first typewriter. An early attempt was made at electric light. Thomas Edison showed an automatic telegraph

311 Sterne 15.

312 Costard qtd. in Ebert 648.

313 See Harris 119, n. 33.

314 See Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines. What Gitelman writes in the introduction to her study of the discourse on the phonograph could be applied to formats as well and, in our case, to a notion of

‘the’ Super 8 format: “[T]o essentialize them [machines] as the phonograph or the computer, is misleading and denies their history” (1).

164 and an electric pen. Imagine the wonders our country could know in America’s 250th year. Think of the marvels we can achieve if we simply set free the dreams of our people.”315 This is not how Der kleine Godard understands technological invention. Little men like to trot out the tired series of big, white men and their big dreams that they single-handedly made come true (and, now, even those that ‘failed’).316 Imagine if we realized that, historically, “eine innovative Idee weniger auf den genialen Moment eines

Einzelerfinders [zurückzuführen ist], sondern auf den innovativen Prozess eines

Teams.”317 Think of the marvels we can achieve if we simply let go of the fiction that the

“[individual and frequently idiosyncratic inventor] is the beginning of a circuit, sprung whole, like Athena from the head of Zeus.”318 A history of “great divides” isolating times, people and inventions that were successful and professional from those that were failures and amateurish is not only a history that never was. Once we can recognize in this supposed linear clarity the confusion that underlies its dubious dichotomies, then we can also accept that “these great divides do not provide any explanation, but on the

315 Trump. This rhetoric is also over a hundred years old. In the time of Thomas Edison, “[t]housands of

Americans seized upon technological innovation as an act of self-determination, upon technology as a private experience of public life. A veritable cult of inventing, with Edison as its icon, promised that having a good idea and ‘going public’ was a path to success” (Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines

16).

316 On the ‘failure’ of Edison’s electric pen, see Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines 4-6.

317 Taha 43.

318 Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines 5.

165 contrary are the things to be explained.”319 “We must question those ready-made syntheses, those groupings we normally accept before any examination.”320

II. Der kleine Godard

The ready-made synthesis we might expect from a film about an experimental format technology is one between the director and his baby, in this case his Super 8 invention. A tale nicely aligned in the long history of talking about media inventions in terms of genealogy and accumulation, through “evolutionary notions of ‘steps’ and

‘stages,’ which are separated from each other by breaks and connected by a steady intensification [...].”321 It’s a prevalent trope found in various historiographies, from contemporary inventor biopics to modern media histories, and it consists of a problematic mix of technological determinism, the myth of the artist-genius, the Western glorification of the lone individual and the progressiveness of the history of science.322 The scenes of

‘invention’ in Der kleine Godard, which, importantly, are implicated in scenes of writing, smile at such attempts at simplification through linearity, accumulation and

319 Latour, “Visualisation and Cognition” 2.

320 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge 22.

321 Schüttpelz, “The media-anthropological turn of cultural techniques” 18-20 (“Die medienanthropologische Kehre der Kulturtechniken” 101-105).

322 See, for example, Latour, “Visualisation and Cognition” 2; Schüttpelz, “Die medienanthropologische

Kehre” 101-105; C. Jones 1-59; as well as Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines 3-8.

166 dichotomies.323 Before the first glimpses of the Super 8 invention are shown in the film,

Costard is seen at his table composing a letter about it, ending with a line he reads out loud: “So einfach wie möglich auszudrücken.”324 A typical requirement of certain templates we all know too well – for funding applications, for debates, for scholarly essays. He smirks, and sighs. What comes after this scene of writing is not so einfach. No shots of an artist alone in his studio experimenting with his tools and materials to express his divine idea. Instead, Costard is sitting at a metal press machine with other people in the fore- and background, punk music playing over the scene in a small factory. [Fig. 54]

It’s connected to a communal working room, full of graffiti, cigarette trays, paper drafts and cameras. [Fig. 55] Close-ups of a woman rolling a cigarette. Pans over a guy lying on the floor with his hands folded behind his head. The ideal working environment of the sixties, but not without some self-irony. When Costard finishes the metal plate he has been working on, he holds it up, measures it and shrugs – it apparently did not turn out right – throwing his hands up in the air and then laying it aside.

323 “It seems to me that the most powerful explanations, that is those that generate the most out of the least, are the ones that take writing and imaging craftsmanship into account. They are both material and mundane, since they are so practical, so modest, so pervasive, so close to the hands and the eyes that they escape attention. Each of them deflates grandiose schemes and conceptual dichotomies and replaces them by simple modifications in the way in which groups of people argue with one another using paper, signs, prints and diagrams” (Latour, “Visualisation and Cognition” 3).

324 Spoken text in Der kleine Godard.

167

Fig. 54 and Fig. 55. Hellmuth Costard. Der kleine Godard: An das Kuratorium Junger Deutscher Film

(1978). Screenshots.

Understanding the discourse on technology in Der kleine Godard as statements made by Costard, in a celebratory or technological determinist fashion, would be paying attention to the mere surface of things – to what is ‘said,’ which is never really just said.325 Not only because he doesn’t always make the statements himself in the film, but also because he pairs them, without explanation, with subtitles, or insists on a disjunction between the words on the soundtrack and the movement of his lips in the image, or combines them with images whose content doesn’t immediately correspond to the statement being verbalized, or interrupts the statements with self-reflexive gestures, such as a request to change the cassette tape in the camera. While Costard often explained his interest in Super 8 in terms of economic and technological imperatives, this remains in tension with his representations of these statements.

325 See Godard on Le Petit Soldat: “One always does the opposite of what one says, yet it turns out the same way. I am for classical montage and I’ve done the most unorthodox montage” (qtd. in Brody 86).

168

Fig. 56. Hellmuth Costard. Der kleine Godard: An das Kuratorium Junger

Deutscher Film (1978). Screenshot.

In the beginning of the film, when Costard presents his typed-out dream of making

“Spielfilme vollkommen phantasielos” and thereby creating, through his system, a

“perfekte Inszenierung,” he sets it ablaze while he reads it out loud. [Fig. 56] It’s a gesture that, on the one hand, evokes the revolutionary spirit of the sixties, since the spread of fire has historically “served as a model for understanding the force of ideas and their transmission through language […] [and thus] [c]ontrolling the force of fire also

169 became a model for controlling the force of social protest.”326 It insists, on the other hand, that this rhetoric be effaced – reformatted – and potentially reconfigured out of the ashes.

It’s a revolutionary and evolutionary gesture that, in 1978, embodies a pathos that nobody believes in anymore. But it is a gesture that West German audiences would have been used to seeing.

Fig. 57. David Dortort and Fred Hamilton. Bonanza (1959-1973).

Screenshot.

326 Charteris-Black 24.

170

In Bonanza, the television show that broke all ratings records in West Germany in the

1960s, the beginning of the story is also set ablaze.327 [Fig. 57] The fire that breaks out between Reno and Carson moves the audience from the original map, from history and cartography, into live action and the diegesis, as it does in Der kleine Godard when it carries us from the Antrag, from paper and sketches and plans, to celluloid, to the live action. While the existing literature mentions that this ‘statement’ is set on fire during

Costard’s reading, this rhetorical gesture is rarely ever critically read.328 The question is not: “Was heißt das: ‘Spielfilme vollkommen phantasielos drehen’?”329 But rather: What does it mean to lay out this technological dream of automation on screen, a dream with a long media history most notably incited by the development of computers, just to let it go up in flames?330

327 See Schmitt and Spieß. “1960 verabschiedet sich die FAMILIE SCHÖLEMANN von ihren Zuschauern.

Das MILLOWITSCH THEATER, WAS BIN ICH? und der BLAUE BOCK sind die beliebtesten

Sendungen, die amerikanische Serie BONANZA bricht alle Einschaltquoten” (ibid., 205). On the iconic status of Bonanza for West German media culture of the 1960s, see Schneider and Spangenberg 221 as well as I. Schneider 99.

328 Dawson cites this ‘text’ as if it were superimposed on screen, without mentioning its material status (7);

Ebert describes the ephemerality of the text but does not comment on it (640-641); and Harris reads the fire as a confirmation that “words are invested with material status” and that the film “challenges the authority of the written text” (133-134).

329 Prinzler 255-256.

330 See Johnston. “The popular press […] portrayed these new machines [the first computers developed in the late 1940s and early 1950s] not as high-speed automatic calculators but ‘electronic brains.’ […] Not surprisingly, the question of whether these electronic brains could ‘think’ soon spawned a new science, artificial intelligence” (ibid., 199).

171

The fact that Costard envisions films that can think themselves into existence in the form of Super 8 productions only adds to the confusion, as this is a format most often associated with amateur productions, such as home movies, and with nontheatrical exhibition.331 The words that one associates with Super 8 images include “low- resolution,” “rawness,” “dreamlike,” “grain and grunge” and even “magic.”332 It’s a

331 Chin argues that part of the “intimacy” associated with the Super 8 format results from its intended site of exhibition, identifying important aesthetic consequences of this as observed in several films screened at the Third Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival in New York City in 1989. These are films that emphasize the problematics of memory and memoir, for example: “While it is true that both super-8 and video […] are easily accessible, highly flexible, and readily available, there are some rather obvious technical constraints that become important when aesthetic considerations come into play. Obviously, the look that is possible in video is vastly different from the look possible in super-8. In terms of the viewing conditions, the video image is the source of light, while in film the image is projected from behind the viewer. In super-8, the length of possible projection is limited. Super-8 was developed as a home media: it was assumed that the place for viewing would be a room in a residential dwelling. The super-8 projected image is necessarily softer than larger film gauges and the focus of super-8 projection, is restricted to close range. Most of the best work in super-8 takes these factors into account, and uses these factors to consolidate the specific viewpoint. […] [For example,] [t]he intense but softened colors of usper-8 give the film [Martina’s Playhouse by Peggy Ahwesh] a fantasy aura, which helps to accentuate the childlike intimacy of the film. […] Jennifer Montgomery’s Home Avenue is a straightforward ‘confessional’ of sexual trauma. Here, the limited range of super-8 accentuates the sense of closeness to the subject. […] If the focus of Martina’s Playhouse suggested a landscape of uninhibited play, the focus of Home Avenue depicts a landscape of hidden terrors, of fearful ravages in childhood” (ibid., 79-80).

332 While these are terms that, when describing the aesthetics of the format, could generally come to mind, these specific descriptions are found in a review of a Jim Jarmusch documentary focusing on the director’s interest in the format (Rudolph). See also Williams.

172 format that represents, in most cases, the exact opposite of what this opening letter envisions. A Super 8 film that is “vollkommen phantasielos,” with an “ungestörten

Ablauf” and a “perfekte Inszenierung”? Several intentions come together in Costard’s

Super 8 dream: a fantasy of totality (more cameras means a larger frame of perspective,

“The more, the larger, the truer”); a longing for capturing unstaged events through automation (when the unison of sound and image is automated, the wholeness of lived reality is believed to be more easily maintained, and thus a script is not required); and a discourse of precision through medium fidelity (there is, importantly, in these statements a perfect staging that is presumed to exist, which a certain quantity of Super 8 cameras and technological augmentation and precision can document).333 The film we see, however, already evident in the opening scene with a home movie aesthetic about missing the moment and a manifesto that is destroyed the moment is it exhibited, is not fantasy-less, not undisrupted and not perfect. Given this, why should one take the hyperbolic language in this ‘statement’ at face value? Completely without fantasy. A perfect staging. “Jede Kamera und jedes Tonbandgerät ist mit einer supergenauen Uhr kombiniert. [...] Es bedeutet dies die restlose Verzahnung des mechanischen Vorgangs der Filmherstellung mit dem einmaligen Vorgang der Zeit.”334 Not an accurate clock. A

333 Minh-ha 95. As Minh-ha argues, discourse on the fidelity to the medium easily slips into a discourse on truthfulness: “Lip-synchronous sound is validated as the norm; it is a ‘must’; not so much in replicating reality (this much has been acknowledged among the fact-makers) as in ‘showing real people in real locations at real tasks.’ […] Real time is thought to be more ‘truthful’ than filmic time […]. […] [T]he wide angle is claimed to be more objective because it includes more in the frame, hence it can mirror more faithfully the event-in-context” (94-95).

334 Costard qtd. in Ebert 646.

173 super accurate clock. Not an intertwining of mechanics and temporality. An absolute intertwining. There is an emphatic and utopian remainder in these statements, in this belief in technology to bring about the perfection of reality, and there’s also, simultaneously, an ironic tone to this remainder, evident when Costard overindulges in superlatives, mocking this as a basic requirement in Antragssprache, in the language of funding applications.

A tension arises between focusing solely on the content of a statement and taking its discursive function into account, and thus when the material basis of format technology is directly addressed in the film, it simultaneously insists on the codification of format, on more than an “internalist” history of this format, which would entail “a sort of formalism, attending more narrowly to how things work.”335 After more than eight minutes of postponing a clarification of “[w]arum überhaupt Super-8,” Jelena Kristl, “a woman […] with a pronounced non-German accent” and cited in the credits as “die

Ausländerin,” both asks the question and provides the answer to it.336 Most of us are, like

Kristl, foreigners in this situation, but while she is able to communicate in this other language, we are not, and the foreigner doesn’t speak slowly or go easy on us. What she presents are the specifics of a complex technological system that only experts in the industry can understand, and it’s likely even too difficult for them to follow. It is through the foreigner, somebody outside our own cultural system, that we, the viewers, see that we don’t belong to that world and that we will never understand it, resulting in an

“ethnographischen Reversibilität der Autorisierung,” showing us our own

335 Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines 8.

336 Harris 152.

174 primitiveness.337 The technical explanations of the experimental Super 8 system that she narrates with the help of numerous diagrams and highly complex instruments are beyond our grasp, but it can, in fact, be “instructive to apprehend as strange those aspects of scientific activity which are readily taken for granted. It is evident that the uncritical acceptance of the concepts and terminology used by some [experts] has had the effect of enhancing rather than reducing the mystery which surrounds” their practices.338

Moreover, “[t]here are [...] no a priori reasons for supposing that [...] [the experts’] practice is any more rational than that of outsiders.”339 In fact, there’s almost a hyperbolic absurdity to the level of detail with which the foreigner describes this Super 8 setup, making one wonder if this is not, rather, a parody of the explanatory paragraphs regularly required in funding applications, in which one is instructed to avoid jargon and explain, in this case, a highly advanced experimental technology to non-experts in a way that is straightforward and goal-oriented. By marking Kristl as an outsider to his own system

(she’s not “Jelena Kristl” in the credits, but “die Ausländerin”), Costard suggests that it takes a foreigner to show the futility of hoping to be able to grasp, in a couple of paragraphs and through some sketches, an experimental setup that has taken a team years to develop. While the foreigner presents this working environment for us in all its confusion and complexity, relaying the language of the experts, the Antragssprache, noise punctuates her explanations. She repeats a sentence from the typed letter that went up in flames at the beginning of the film, namely Costard’s dream of making “Spielfilme

337 Schüttpelz, Die Moderne im Spiegel des Primitiven 355.

338 Latour and Woolgar 29.

339 Ibid., 29-30.

175 vollkommen phantasielos” and creating, through this system, a “perfekte

Inszenierung.”340 “Spielfilme, die sich selbst ausdenken” becomes a motif that is written and reiterated on screen, on the film’s soundtrack and in interviews about the film. In this motif one finds a combination of dreams and anxieties: the promise of automation through technological advancements, the fear of missing that right moment – kairos – of an unscripted reality and a growing apprehension about institutional support and bureaucracy, as one couldn’t, in this setup, plan in advance using standard filmmaking methods, such as a script.341

This results in a serious funding problem for Costard. His “proposal to the

Kuratorium in May 1977 was rejected. That rejection letter, included in the film, explains that the Kuratorium could accept ‘only fully worked out screenplays’ and not ‘treatments, exposés or outlines.’ [...] The Kuratorium had resolutely ignored that Costard’s project renounced the idea of writing a script to dictate the direction of his film.”342 Since standard institutional practices excluded projects such as Costard’s, the foreigner tells us they needed to find a way to make the film in a less expensive way. There is a brief cut to the December 1970 issue of Filmkritik, titled “Alles über Super-8,” the cover of which was drawn by Costard.343 [Fig. 58] In this issue, “[Edgar] Reitz identified synchronized

340 Spoken text in Der kleine Godard.

341 Gitelman argues that it is especially in the rhetoric of emergent technologies, in all of their excitement, apprehension and ambivalence, that one is able to trace and consider how “technology constitutes a form of knowledge. […] [And, if it does], then it can be conflicted with doubt and contradiction, with assumptions and anxieties, just like other forms of knowledge” (Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines 6-7).

342 Harris 130.

343 Costard, “Titelzeichnung.”

176 sound recording as the most serious problem. Since no Super 8 sound blimps existed on the commercial market, many filmmakers had attempted to hand-produce their own.”344

At the Hamburger Filmschau that year, Costard presented his. “Costard nennt seinen

Blimp ‘Winterhude.’ Der Blimp ist grün, aus Kunststoff und vorne, dort, wo das Objektiv sitzt, rot. In dem Film, den Kurt Rosenthal auf der Hamburger Filmschau zeigte, sah man

Hellmuth Costard mit seinem grünen Blimp und mit seinem Erlson-Gerät in einem

Schulranzen in einem Hamburger Park stehen, und lippensynchron (!) führte er dem

Zuschauer vor, wie seine selbstgebaute Ausrüstung funktioniert. Hellmuth Costard hatte sich damit als Super-8-Mann inszeniert. Sein Auftritt ist sympathisch, wenn er auch so nicht von seiner Synchron-Super-8-Technik überzeugen konnte. Costards Apparatur ist leider umfangreicher und auffälliger als eine der heute sehr handlichen professionellen

16-mm-Ausrüstungen. Der Vorteil von Costards Super-8-Montur ist, daß man ihm nicht richtig glaubt, daß er damit wirklich filmen kann. Vermutlich wird er so bei seinen

Partnern oft die Heiterkeit auslösen, die er für seine Filme braucht. (Vgl. Das Titelbild des Heftes.).”345 It seems, at least according to Edgar Reitz, that the pose of subjugation to some sovereign that Costard portrays on the cover of this issue is in fact a bow to the patrons, the “partners” of his films, his green blimp shoved forward as an offering.346 A

344 Harris 101.

345 Reitz 632.

346 The argument that Costard is in fact bowing in this image, rather than stumbling (cf. Harris 102), is also supported by the foreigner’s voiceover in this shot: “Es ist deshalb fast unmöglich, ausreichende finanzielle

Mittel für eine solchen Film zu beschaffen.” There is a history of this pose in donor paintings that secularized the prayer-response ritual by substituting it with the gift-countergift model, a model potentially referenced in this cover image drawn by Costard in which he presents a gift, his technology, presumably

177 slave, the filmmaker exhausted from his applications for funding and failed experiments, presents what he has found, his format technology, as a gift to the masters of filmmaking, to the institutions.

Fig. 58. Hellmuth Costard. Der kleine Godard: An das Kuratorium

Junger Deutscher Film (1978). Screenshot.

with the hope of receiving something in return. See Brubaker. “[W]hat the Byzantines presumably thought of as prayers and responses to prayers could become elided with what we see as the formula of gift and countergift. […] [D]onor portraits visualize the hoped-for process of exchange. […] [D]onor portraits, borrowing the pattern developed for visualizing submission, normally show only the presentation of the gift, with the individual donors, smaller in scale than the recipient, either kneeling in proskynesis (full-body prostration) or with bowed head presenting their gifts” (ibid., 37).

178

Now, however, several years after this publication detailing the problems of the

Super 8 format, the foreigner tells us that they are equipped with a timecoding system and a multiple-camera setup, and Costard updates his thoughts on the format technology in

Filmkritik. He explains what can be won with this technological experiment in terms of what is lost without it: “Wenn ich eine synchrone Aufnahme beginne und will dann schneiden und habe nicht die zweite Kamera – denn solange ich nur mit einer Kamera arbeiten kann, kommt entweder mit jedem Schnitt auch ein Zeitsprung oder mindestens jene zweite Einstellung ist asynchron. Deshalb sage ich, die Montage verliert ihre Kraft durch Ton.”347 Or in Der kleine Godard: “‘Each time the coast was clear, no witness…I hesitated a few seconds…and once again it was too late.’”348 Synchronization not only guarantees, ideally for Costard, the ability to catch that otherwise missed moment – kairos – but also, in the particular case of timecoding, an exchange between and a blending of medial strategies. Timecoding developed out of the necessity to more easily synchronize image and sound in video (and thus, beginning in the 1950s, also for television). The sequence of images on videotape is, in contrast to those on a filmstrip, not visually intelligible, and thus “[i]n the early days of video technology, this invisibility made manual editing complicated and subject to error. Electronic time markers on the tapes were then inscribed and read by the electronic video editing systems produced in the early 1960s. An addressing system of this type was introduced as the standard in 1969

[…] and […] it was taken over by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) in 1972

347 Costard, “Der Film hat sich auf die Seite des Tatsächlichen geschlagen” (Filmkritik 264) 665.

348 Written text in Der kleine Godard.

179

[…].”349 Although synchronous sound was possible on film before this, of course,

Costard finds that a problem arises in this method between the stages of process and storage, since the recording of images and sound in professional production often occurs separately from one another and noise is able to enter during their sequencing: “Ein herkömmlicher Tonfilm besteht deshalb aus einem, für den Zuschauer nicht mehr durchschaubaren Geflecht von Ausnahmemomenten. Ein solcher Film ist einem fast vollständig zerstörten Wandbild nach sorgfältiger Restauration vergleichbar. Niemand kann sagen, mit wieviel Ehrgeiz sich der Restaurator selbst ins Spiel gebracht hat.”350 For

Costard, the solution to this problem arrived when a sound technology institute in Munich finally developed a timecode system which he could then modify for Super 8. It was released in 1976, two years after he and his team had started experimenting with their own solutions for amateur format synchronization and the year he began producing Der

349 Müller 406.

350 Costard qtd. in Ebert 646. Harris further describes the incompatibility of a then-standard synchronization method for film material, namely edge numbers, for the format of Super 8: “Without time code, sync sound editing in 16mm requires the slow and meticulous recording of edge numbers, printed along the border of the processed film strip, to ensure the exact transfer of information from editor to printer. Super 8 film stock manufacturers, gearing their product to perceived amateurs, were late to provide even this edge numbering system. […] Even on 16mm film, the space available for encoding information (usually the area between the sprocket holes) and the method of encoding and reading that information (the transformation of electronic impulses into an optical track decipherable by a technique like that used to decode a standard optical sound track) made the development of the first time code process much more difficult for film than for video” (116).

180 kleine Godard, which summarizes these stages of experimentation and modification and chronicles their ongoing efforts.351

Costard and his team might have experimented throughout the mid- and late-

1970s with various format and synchronization methods, but the objective remained the same: to facilitate, in an inexpensive, accessible format and a multiple-camera system, a more precise stage of processing. The dream of automated audiovisual processing would eventually be realized in a different way: the application of a video-based editing method to film material through timecoding.352 Like Costard’s dream, timecoding marks

“tendencies in audiovisual processes that have increasingly taken effect since the 1970s: digitalization and non-linearity. The general functional principle of non-linear editing systems is based on a separation of the image and sound data on the one hand, and on the other hand on their temporal organization during playback, editing. Thus, preliminary decisions with respect to editing can be stored independent of the material and used for a preview, or various editing alternatives can be compared with each other and ultimately rejected if necessary.”353 While Costard envisioned a form of audiovisual processing that would, in the moment of recording, synchronize image and sound, the ultimate purpose

351 “Das Timecodeverfahren ist vom Institut für Rundfunktechnik entwickelt worden, um den

Produktionsablauf beim Fernsehen zu beschleunigen, um 16mm-Filme schneller und rationeller bearbeiten zu können” (Costard qtd. in Ebert 646)

352 “The first non-linear editing systems in the 1970s were analog-digital hybrids: access to analog image and sound material was controlled by a computer” (Müller 407).

353 Müller 407.

181 of this was to improve the mode of editing and the subsequent stage of storage.354 There’s a fear of loss at the core of Costard’s concerns about subjective editing, losing that moment that unfolds in front of the camera when the necessary sound-image composition takes place. With the development of non-linear editing systems, the claim is made that now this moment, even after intense, experimental stages of editing, can still be preserved in its original form. That’s not to say that Costard would see his project, which didn’t achieve this end result of analog processing/digital editing, as having failed. He implies that, while automated audiovisual processing, “Filme, die sich selbst ausdenken,” might have been an objective with which to initiate his project, an experimental setup is not simply meant to “generate answers; experimental systems are vehicles for materializing questions. […] It is only in the process of making one’s way through a complex experimental landscape that scientifically meaningful simple things get delineated […].

[...] They are the inescapably historical product of a purification procedure.”355 Setting up such a strict technological system is not something that is either meant to be a success or a failure for Costard, but merely a point of departure for possibilities that are, at present, unknown. “Aber ich hatte diese Konstruktion mir gewählt, daß der Film in dem Moment, wo er zu Papier gebracht ist, zerstört ist. Das ist ein Gedanke, den man ernst nehmen

354 “Es sind aber Filme denkbar, die das Bild-Ton-Ereignis während der Aufnahme als Einheit betrachten, d.h. die Synchronität unangetastet lassen und Abweichungen von diesem Prinzip kenntlich machen”

(Costard qtd. in Ebert 646-647).

355 Rheinberger 28.

182 kann, der aber auch genauso lächerlich ist natürlich. Aber ich hatte ihn eben total ernst genommen, als Spiel.”356

While the precision of image-sound synchronization, which Costard claims he is seeking, is rarely shown in the film, other forms of synchronization become more obvious, and perhaps, in the course of the film, begin to question the premise of this stated technological desire. However paradoxical it might seem to his experimental setup at first, noise becomes integral to this game. When the foreigner explains that the numerous cameras and the “documentary” approach required a high volume of film material, we’re no longer looking at a series of diagrams, instruments and sample Super 8 clips. A different stream of images appears, an unintended signal, as if the channel has changed.

Fig. 59 and Fig. 60. Hellmuth Costard. Der kleine Godard: An das Kuratorium Junger Deutscher Film

(1978). Screenshots.

356 Costard, “Der Film hat sich auf die Seite des Tatsächlichen geschlagen” (Filmkritik 263) 610-611.

183

We’re shown footage from the set of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Despair, shot in 1977 just outside of Hamburg in Mölln. [Fig. 59] Props are transported to the shooting location and the massive production team assembles. A 35mm camera system is pushed by several crew members along a rail in preparation for a tracking shot. [Fig. 60] These images are not what the foreigner is talking about. And yet they are. “I think the isolation of [West]

German film-makers, one from another, may change [...]. If you look at the way television is produced, it’s already so like mass-production. It’s so progressive, as far as the principles of montage and fast production go – like the live telephone conversation, transmitted by satellite, between [Muhammad Anwar el-] Sadat and [Menachem] Begin

[...]. When Hussein [bin Talal, King of Jordan,] visited [West-]Berlin, there was a police car with a tiny, tripod-supported camera and a very tall hydraulic aerial-mast transmitting directly to police headquarters. Equipment worth half-a-million, operated by five policemen! A team of film-makers, familiar with that equipment, and who no longer form and create, but simply transmit. Not even TV people can afford equipment like that. If you see things in that perspective, then Fassbinder and [Wim] Wenders and I are all sitting in the same…cinema boat. The difference is that Wenders, for example, hasn’t understood this yet. He thinks he’s in a different boat.”357

This is a time of media change in the filmmaking landscape, a time when television, telephone and cinema are situations that can now be described using the language – e.g., “montage” – that used to belong to one discipline alone. They are

357 Costard, “Fragments from Costard Interviews” 22.

184 situations to be thought of together. The materials of production have become more portable and no longer exclusively tailored to industry professionals, meaning that different kinds of “filmmaking,” while long having existed, are more noticeable now. The big names, like Fassbinder and Wenders, and the littler names, like Costard, might stand for different kinds of filmmakers, but they are alike insofar as they are all figuring out their place in this reconfiguration of the media landscape of the long sixties. Fassbinder is holding on to the massive crew, the expensive equipment and the theatrical release, but is only able to do so through television co-productions.358 The foreigner continues: “So blieb uns der einzige Weg radikale Kostensenkung. Deshalb Super-8.”359 This last statement is paired with an image of a Rolls Royce being delivered to Fassbinder’s set.

Rather than a sarcastic commentary on or a criticism of production excess on the film set next door, these clips paired with the foreigner’s soundtrack seem to try to draw, despite and maybe because of their outwardly apparent budgetary differences, these two scenes together, to try to bring these two moments into the same boat.

Costard isn’t only interested in the making of Despair because it’s a big-budget

Fassbinder production, the archetype of a critically and commercially successful

358 See Shattuc. “By the mid-1970s, two-thirds of all West Germans were acquainted with films only through the medium of television” (ibid., 51). Through the 1974 Film/Fernsehen Abkommen, “the socially critical and personal-expression television films of the independent Autoren filmmakers were now going to get the financial boost they needed. […] Under this agreement, WDR [Westdeutscher Rundfunk] coproduced Fassbinder’s Despair (1977) and The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978) – two of his internationally recognized films” (ibid., 52-53). See also Elsaesser, European Cinema 212-218.

359 Spoken text in Der kleine Godard.

185 filmmaking practice at this time.360 While seeking to examine the very broad themes of technology, institutions and cultural politics, he understands that this must be done specifically, that it’s not only a question of what kind of intervention one makes, but how precise this intervention is. Der kleine Godard is not interested in a blanket criticism of changes in capitalist production or the onset of neoliberal film funding politics.361

Instead, he looks at what films are being made in and around a slice of West Germany,

Hamburg, during a specific time, 1976-1978, and presents us with detailed depictions of the materials of preproduction and pre-release. We see not only a close-up of the layered

360 Despair, notably, was Fassbinder’s most expensive film to date and entailed various international collaborations, all of which provide a stark juxtaposition to Costard’s project. See Watson. “It was the first of three Fassbinder films to be shot in English and the first to be made from a screenplay by someone other than himself – it was written by the celebrated British playwright Tom Stoppard […]. For the starring roles

Fassbinder recruited two internationally-acclaimed actors, Dirk Bogarde (British) and Andrea Ferréol

(French). And as art director he hired Rolf Zehetbauer, the Academy Award-winning designer of Cabaret

[…]. A joint German-French production, the 35 mm Despair was funded at six million marks, making it by far Fassbinder’s most expensive project up to this time” (ibid., 189). See also Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s

Germany. “[Despair] represented Fassbinder’s first bid for international recognition, which necessitated a change of genre (the European art film), different financing (including a German tax-shelter company and a

French consortium), an international cast, and English language dialogue” (ibid., 73).

361 See Latour’s description of the problem of blanket claims through the example of Jean-François de

Galaup de la Pérouse’s voyages through the Pacific: “Commercial interests, capitalist spirit, imperialism, thirst for knowledge, are empty terms as long as one does not take into account Mercator’s projection, marine clocks and their markers, copper engraving of maps, rutters, the keeping of ‘log books’, and the many printed editions of Cook’s voyages that La Pérouse carries with him” (“Visualisation and Cognition”

6).

186 notebook needed in Despair for sound-image continuity maintenance [fig. 61], but also the laborious drafting of project descriptions for funding applications for Der kleine

Godard.362 [Fig. 62] While Costard drafts an application for an experiment to improve continuity in one scene, he shows us the materials that facilitate continuity in another. His dream of a precise audiovisual synchronization, of sounds and images that are ‘naturally’ combined in the recording process, isn’t what takes place in the film, and yet a different kind of synchronization, a visual-visual synchronization over time, becomes noticeable between what we thought were two distinct sets of images and circumstances.363

362 In these scenes of application writing, Costard could also be referencing the various application requirements he needed to fulfill in his other proposals prior to his application to the Kuratorium, such as to

ZDF: “The working title for Costard’s original proposal to the ZDF was Sixty-one Days. […] While the editorial staff for Das kleine Fernsehspiel was more open to a loose structure than other German television producers, the delays in Costard’s project produced concern. […] The money from ZDF along with

Costard’s own contribution was not sufficient to finish the research and to produce the film. The filmmaker decided to apply for government subsidy, a process he had previously avoided. While Costard had made four feature length films by the time he began to shoot Der kleine Godard, he had never applied for funding to the Kuratorium junger deutscher Film, an institution set up to support first feature projects. Costard’s previous long films had been produced by television. Therefore, the filmmaker remained eligible, under

Kuratorium rules, to receive support for his first ‘cinema’ film” (Harris 126-128).

363 “[T]here are various possibilities for synchronization and its conceptualization, which in turn correspond with different concepts of time: is there such a thing as absolute time, a center with which local times are synchronized? Or the other way around: are there actually heterogeneous, distinct times that, when they meet, generate something like an in-between or overlapping time where they join?” (Müller 401).

187

Fig. 61 and Fig. 62. Hellmuth Costard. Der kleine Godard: An das Kuratorium Junger Deutscher Film

(1978). Screenshots.

The film shows an interest in the specific materials that undergird film financing and production in this era, indicating an understanding of these materials as individual, if often overlooked, components that, together with other bureaucratic objects and practices, cooperate to form particular media infrastructures. This focus indicates a move away from essentializing singular medial forms in favor of considering their characteristics more malleable and transferrable, and while it’s not a new position, it’s one that is called for up to the present. “Sechzig Jahre später [nach Marshall McLuhans

Kritik am Begriff der ‘Massenmedien’] bleibt das medientheoretische Postulat […] unvermindert aktuell und für die Erforschung von Kooperationsmedien tragfähig: die

Blindheit aufzuheben, die es verhindert, ‘communication as participation in a common situation’ zu betrachten und durch den jeweiligen Modus der ‘basic art situation’, aber auch durch den ‘collective effort in the use of the medium’ zu charakterisieren. […] Die

188

Ausgangslage für eine Weiterentwicklung dieser klassischen medientheoretischen Motive ist uneinheitlich und verlangt daher eine jeweils andere Herangehensweise. Was die

‘Materialität der Kommunikation’ angeht, ist in der Erforschung medialer

‘Infrastrukturen’ nicht nur eine breite Forschungsliteratur, sondern auch eine aufschlussreiche terminologische Diskussion entstanden, die es gestattet, Massenmedien und digitale Medien, bürokratische und wissenschaftliche Medien, aber auch häusliche und personalisierte Medien als eine fortlaufend erarbeitete ‘kooperative Materialität’ zu erschließen.”364 The filming of the individual objects that, in this order and from this perspective, seem so strange – a leather vest, Super 8 outtakes, caked-on makeup, camera batteries, a tracking rail, technical sketches, a Rolls Royce, a watch, continuity papers, applications drafts – points to situation that is usually seen as natural in its final product, in the production of a film for theatrical release, but that is marked here as not natural, as

364 Schüttpelz and Gießmann 19-20. Schüttpelz and Gießmann include the original McLuhan quote on the problem of “mass media” from “Media as Art Forms.” “The use of the term ‘mass media’ has been unfortunate. All media, especially languages, are mass media so far at least as their range in space and time is concerned. If by ‘mass media’ is meant a mechanized mode of a previous communication channel, then printing is the first of the mass media. Press, telegraph, wireless, telephone, gramophone, movie, radio, TV, are mutations of the mechanization of writing, speech, gesture. Insofar as mechanization introduces the

‘mass’ dimension, it may refer to a collective effort in the use of the medium, to larger audiences or to instantaneity of reception. Again, all of these factors may create a difficulty of ‘feedback’ or lack of rapport between ‘speaker’ and audience. There has been very little discussion of any of these questions, thanks to the gratuitous assumption that communication is a matter of transmission of information, message or idea.

This assumption blinds people to the aspect of communication as participation in a common situation. And it leads to ignoring the form of communication as the basic art situation which is more significant than the information or idea ‘transmitted’” (McLuhan 6).

189 something different and new and that must be deconstructed. For media objects in emergence, a common historical strategy for definition is listing. “The etymology of

‘definition’ will help us here since defining something means providing it with limits or edges (finis), giving it a shape. […] At the time of its emergence, you cannot do better than explain what the new object is by repeating the list of its constitutive actions: ‘with

A it does this, with C it does that.’ It has no other shape than this list. The proof is that if you add an item to the list you redefine the object, that is, you give it a new shape.”365

The logic of the Antrag, which typically requires many forms of lists (of costs, of people involved in the project, of equipment required, etc.), is spread out over the footage of other film situations. By avoiding long-takes, a denaturalization of the film sets and situations occurs. Both glorified and bureaucratic people and objects are now replaced by an inventory of shots that steadily redefines the situation we are trying to understand, taking stock of the cooperation of objects in this emergent media infrastructure.

Paperwork and planning, the bureaucratic minutiae that precede the exhibition and experience of cinema, now infiltrate the objects of set design that might otherwise simply be perceived as adding to the historical or dramatic atmosphere of the film, resulting in strange hybrid objects. A Rolls Royce no longer stands alone, as a demonstration of Fassbinder’s financial success, but when juxtaposed with Costard’s paper trail, is an absurd part of a larger media infrastructure that now makes us ask ourselves: How many times was this car mentioned in the film funding applications?

How many pieces of paper precede and accompany this prop? Film is not a lone medium, and the expansion of it here to encompass unexpected materials of bureaucracy rejects

365 Latour, Science in Action 87-88.

190 not only single medium or apparatus-based theories of media ontology, but also the more recent tendency in theories of expanded cinema toward insisting on a range of moving image projects, or sites of moving image projects, as specifically cinematographic.366

“Selbst wenn manche den Film als eine im Verschwinden begriffene Kunstform betrachten, weil sie als Maßstab an Medienspezifik, Indexikalität und anderen

Essentialismen festhalten, wie sie die Debatte über weite Strecken des 20. Jahrhunderts dominiert haben, so glaube ich, dass der Film mehr als je zuvor präsent ist, egal wie zerstreut und flexibel, modular und flüchtig, populärkulturell und künstlerisch ambitioniert er auch sein mag.”367 Film is “more present than ever before.” But what about moving or projected images – aren’t they more present than ever before?368 Or

366 See Hagener. “Im heutigen Medienuniversum sind selbst unsere Wahrnehmung und unser Denken kinematografisch geworden” (ibid., 52).

367 Ibid., 58. Cf. Walley, “The Material of Film and the Idea of Cinema.” Although Walley is committed to acknowledging the prevalence of non-filmic spaces, he also finds in them the cinematic: “Paracinema identifies an array of phenomena that are considered ‘cinematic’ but that are not embodied in the materials of film as traditionally defined. That is, the film works I am addressing recognize cinematic properties outside the standard film apparatus, and therefore reject the medium-specific premise of most essentialist theory and practice that the art form of cinema is defined by the specific medium of film. […] The idea of cinema, then, is not a function of the materials of film, but the other way around – the materials of film are a function of the idea of cinema” (ibid., 18 and 23). Lippit notes that although Walley explicitly rejects medium-specific theories, he does nevertheless embrace a form of essentialism, which is no longer located within the medium, but, in the case of paracinema, outside of it (see Lippit 4-5).

368 See Leighton. “[I]n terms of visibility in large-scale exhibitions […], one may go so far as to say that large-scale cinematic modes of projection have quantitatively surpassed traditional mediums such as painting and sculpture […]. This dominance of the projected image is reflected in an array of installations

191

that run the gambit from projected celluloid film installations, to single- and multiple-projections of analogue and digital video, to multimedia environments, sculptural film objects, computer- and net-based installations and more” (7). Leighton goes on to explain, however, the problems of the term “projected image,” which she uses interchangeably with “moving image,” with respect to traditional notions of medium specificity. She outlines three common objections to the term: First, it’s often unclear where the

“movement” in moving image takes place (in the site of the image, as with video, or in the projector, as with film), and thus the term is often too vague; second, the ideological implications of the belief in movement, such as the problems of the index, could go overlooked when the term of is uncritically employed and widely accepted; third, this term could imply that it’s no longer necessary to pay attention to technologically- or discursive-specific dimensions of images, which would call for a more precise term reflecting these specificities. “By ‘projected images’ I mean for the most part any gallery-based artwork that includes temporal images or time-based media (for example, film, slides, video, holographic and photograph or computer, digital, real-time projections). […] It’s obvious, but significant nevertheless, to emphasise that all categories – be they ‘television’, ‘video art’, ‘the cinematic’ or other – are artificial and similarly indeterminate; their presumed boundaries are in fact permeable. To assume the stability of any artistic (or non-artistic) media is to fail to appreciate that different image-making practices frequently cohabit the same technologies: video, for instance, encompasses home movies, digital film, commercial television, internet broadcasts and video art. […] The ‘cinematic’ is problematic within this context because it indicates limits on video, Structural film, performance-based work and so on. In other words, the

‘cinematic’ proposes only one kind of relationship to the moving image in art while this book discusses many, of which some have little or nothing to do with the cinematic per se” (11-12).

192 what about television?369 Or games?370 Or the internet? Or Google?371 Or paperwork?

Insisting on the “presence of cinema” becomes banal and vague, as it’s not the presence of the medium as such that is in question, either in this specific film about changes to cinema in the 1960s and 1970s or in debates about the supposed “end” or “death” of

369 Several recent publications in both the fields of film/cinema studies and television studies have unfortunately embraced almost the same rhetorical strategy of first repeating claims about the death of their medium, often with the support of journalistic sources on the coming of the digital age, only in turn to revive the life of their medium through notions of medial expansion. Here, a selection of such publications in film studies: Dubois, “Présentation”; Niessen 308 and 319-321; and Tryon 72-76. For examples in television studies, see Strangelove 4-8; de Valck and Teurlings 7-9; and Lotz 1-3. Cf. Bordwell. The death- revival formula one sees over and over again in such publications is a means of validating research agendas and it is predictable, reactionary and often lacking historical depth and interdisciplinary perspective. For a frank, critical perspective on this, see Galloway: “Just when the nay-sayers decry the end of the written word, bookstore shelves still overflow with fluff on digital this and digital that” (The Interface Effect 1).

370 See Guins 125.

371 See two recent “desktop” performances by Lee emphasizing the role of search engines, such as Google, on knowledge production: “Aushöhlung der Austerprinzessin (1919): Ein Live-Video-Essay-Kochkurs” performed on January 12, 2017 at the Deutsches Filmmuseum in Frankfurt as part of the program Schnell wie der Witz: die Filme von Ernst Lubitsch. See Lee, “Harun Farocki Institut.” “Last Thursday I performed a ‘live video essay’ at the German Film Museum in Frankfurt. On the right side of the screen was Ernst

Lubitsch’s 1919 masterpiece The Oyster Princess on beautiful 35mm film. On the left side was my desktop showing me researching the film online, re-editing it on Premiere Pro, and chatting about it on Facebook with my friend Cristian Eduard Dragan. Cristian was watching it in Romania off YouTube while I was watching it with a full audience and live accompaniment by jazz pianist Uwe Oberg” (ibid.). The second example, Transformers: The Premake, is what he calls a “desktop documentary.” See Lee, Transformers.

193 cinema today. Rather, in both cases, it’s a question of how film is reconfigured as a result of these changes.

Der kleine Godard opens up a schema for understanding media art projects not through a nostalgic anchoring to an essence of the cinematic, for example, but through other materials altogether with which they are necessarily implicated – with methods of preproduction and paperwork required by institutions – if not often acknowledged, particularly in current scholarship on digital cinema, which favors analyses of postproduction methods.372 It suggests a productiveness to the possibility of perceiving a media object not just in terms of its specific characteristics, but also as a mutation “of the mechanization of writing, speech, gesture.”373 The funding application logic explicated in the film suggests that there is less of a clear separation between preproduction and production activities, or a linear progression from preparation methods to end product.374

This non-linear process results in situations and objects that, when given screen time at all, such as Costard’s paperwork, or when shown outside the diegesis, such as the efforts to transport Fassbinder’s Rolls Royce, appear suddenly strange and out of place, and also

372 See Vishnevetsky as well as Sperb 18-23.

373 McLuhan 6.

374 Pallant and Price make a similar argument about the need for a non-linear understanding of preproduction methods and the actual shooting of a film with the example of the misconception of the storyboard as a mere ‘blueprint’ for film production. “[T]he blueprint becomes a needlessly restricted and prescriptive analogy […]. […] To insist on a radical separation of conception and execution of the precise kind implied in the blueprint metaphor also entails positing a particular kind of film, one that is largely hostile to improvisation” (ibid., 7). See also Hayles 31 as well as Michell, “Comic

Storyboardkonstruktionen.”

194 quite influential. Nobody believes that a director, all on his own, suddenly has a genius epiphany for a film, effortlessly gains funding for it and that it then appears, in this same original form, on screen before us.375 But not many projects acknowledge the extent that paperwork, such as an application, continue to affect the kind of project being made, and rarely, if ever, does one find projects that are themselves applications, such as this film – an das Kuratorium – or, for example, Walter De Maria’s contribution to the first issue of

S.M.S., titled Chicago Project (1968). [Figs. 63-64]

Fig. 63 and Fig. 64. Walter De Maria. Chicago Project, 1968, in S.M.S. # 1. Photographs (KM) taken at

the Klingspor Museum Archive in Offenbach.

375 See Kris and Kurz 126.

195

It’s probably not a coincidence that De Maria contributes correspondence with the

Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago as work to this magazine that seeking a different relationship with institutional logic. The first piece of paper one finds in this manila envelope is an invitation from the museum’s director, Jan van der Marck, to participate in his planned show Art by Telephone, with all the specifics of his offer, including costs.376 This invitation on letterhead follows with an added note of authority and validation: a photocopy of a response from Marcel Duchamp to the director’s invitation to the show. Van der Marck explains this attachment at the bottom of his invitation to De Maria: “P.S. Marcel Duchamp, whom I asked before approaching anybody else, sent me a letter, a copy of which is enclosed; I felt that, in spite of his inability to participate, his reaction was positive and encouraging.”377 The correspondence continues. The next piece of paper one finds in the stack is De Maria’s

376 “From March 2 to March 31 the Museum of Contemporary Art plans to organize an exhibition called

‘Art By Telephone’ which will emphasize the conceptual nature of many works produced today. The idea originated, I believe, with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, who in 1922 ordered by telephone five paintings in porcelain enamel from a sign factory. He had the factory’s color chart before him and he had sketched his paintings on graph paper. At the other end of the wire the factory supervisor had the same kind of paper and took down the dictated shapes in the correct position. […] I would like to invite you to participate in this exhibition since, if you haven’t worked in this way, you would at least feel sympathetic to the idea of leaving the execution of your works to a craftsman or manufacturer. […] We would, of course, need to have a budget and an idea of who much time the work will take. Should you wish to go beyond a budget in the $200 to $300 range then we might want to negotiate sharing the costs with you or your dealer” (Jan van der Marck in De Maria).

377 Van der Marck in De Maria.

196 response, first explaining that he has, indeed, been working with such themes of automation, mechanization and medial transfers since the late 1950s/early 1960s, and he includes his proposal for the exhibition with sketches and photographs.378 Underneath these papers is van der Marck’s reply: “Many thanks for your letter of January 8 regarding the exhibition ‘Art by Telephone’ and the proposal you submitted. Much to my regret, the technical difficulties to bring this whole exhibition into focus are somewhat overwhelming, so we decided to postpone the show until later this year. […] I will be in contact with you on this subject as soon as we solve our problem.”379 The show Art by

Telephone went on at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago without De Maria, running from November 1 to December 14, 1969,380 and De Maria’s contribution to the

1969 show When Attitudes Become Form at the Kunsthalle Bern, which he called Art By

Telephone, had exactly the same premise as, and is even verbatim explained in, Chicago

Project (1968).381 Works such as Der kleine Godard and Chicago Project, which don’t

378 “In 1961 I had two wooden boxes constructed for me from written notes made in 1960. These notes for the Boxes for Meaningless Work and two other sculptures Column with a Ball on Top and Surprise Box as well as notes for imagined environment situations are published in the book entitled An Anthology, edited and published by La Monte Young & Jackson MacLow, published in 1963” (De Maria).

379 Van der Marck in De Maria.

380 See “Art By Telephone.”

381 On the exhibition that took place in Chicago, see “Art By Telephone.” See also Baker. “[I]t did not occur to me when the phone rang at The Lightning Field that the artist [De Maria] himself might be calling.

He is not a person one expects to hear from. The possibility might have crossed my mind had I known then of his 1967 proposal for the exhibition ‘Art by Telephone’ at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

(His piece was never done at the MCA, but was shown two years later in the epochal Kunsthalle Bern

197 just perform institutional critique, but present the materials of institutional logic that are hardly, if ever, seen by the public, are few and far between. Antragslogik projects denaturalize the objects and practices that originate from bureaucratic frameworks and, given the current crisis of funding in the arts and, particularly in Germany, the obsession with Drittmittelgelder for the funding of higher education, projects that examine and scrutinize this logic are especially relevant, if rare, at present.382

Der kleine Godard is and presents one kind of Antragslogik and it includes, for comparison and incorporation into broader bureaucratic infrastructure, snippets of several others. We see scenes of Godard meeting with the city of Hamburg to discuss his artist- in-residence invitation. [Fig. 65] He proposes a project on whether “it [is] possible to make films in Germany today,” but the cultural committee seems more interested in showcasing him as a famous director and can’t understand why he won’t provide a

exhibition ‘When Attitudes Become Form.’) De Maria wanted a gallery empty of everything except a black telephone on the floor at the end of a very long cord. The phone would not have permitted outgoing calls.

Instead, he proposed, ‘the artist will…telephone into the exhibition and over the period of the month use

$200 worth of telephone time in conversing with whichever visitor’s fate may have been placed near the telephone, about any subject at all.’ (The show’s budget allotted each artist $200 to $300 in expenses.) A small sign on the floor was to read, ‘If this telephone rings, you may answer it. Walter De Maria is on the line and would like to talk to you’” (ibid., 105-106).

382 Although it is explicitly documenting a specific set of venture capital negotiations, one could also discuss Harun Farocki’s Nicht ohne Risiko (2004) in this context, as it clearly extends beyond the specificity of this situation and comments on broader institutional concerns and perceptions of dilettantism.

198 screenplay with his proposal.383 He delves deeper into his video phase shortly thereafter.384 We watch shots of a child actor in Moritz, lieber Moritz (1978) firing off a machine gun and Hark Bohm relying on a clapperboard to keep image and sound synchronized, along with the constant re-miking of the children on set. [Fig. 66] Bohm wanders over briefly to Costard’s crew and asks about their experimental setup before returning, dismissively in mid-discussion, to the director’s chair behind the camera to film what “would become a leading German money making film in West Germany the

383 Godard in Der kleine Godard. Brody refers to this project with the title Is It Possible to Make a Film

Today in Germany? Ibid., 399.

384 While Godard’s career is often demarcated in phases such as his New Wave projects, his work with the

Dziga Vertov group, his move away from politics and Paris after a serious physical injury and his return to cinema through experimental historiography, Witt as well as Pantenburg argue for a different understanding of these phases that is tied to his interest in format technology, particularly video. See Witt,

“Shapeshifter” and Pantenburg. “In my view, the oeuvre falls into two major movements and pivots on the encounter with video: from the post-war discovery of cinema and the early New Wave […] to the political dead-end of the early 1970s; and from 1973 – the start of the exploration of video technology, collaboration with [Anne-Marie] Miéville […] – to the present” (Witt, “Shapeshifter” 77). Cf. Pantenburg, who emphasizes that Godard’s move from Paris can also be seen as a move away from the Western European city most associated with classical and New Wave cinema, therein reflecting his interest in alternative forms of production, distribution and exhibition at this time: “Nach der kurzen Rückkehr zum ‘großen’

Film mit Stars und Geld […] und nach einem schweren Motorradunfall 1971 hatte Godard 1972 Paris verlassen. In Grenoble gründete er gemeinsam mit Anne-Marie Miéville die Produktionsfirma ‘Sonimage’ und richtete ein Studio ein, das vor allem auf die relative neue Videotechnik setzte. Insofern korrespondiert der Schritt von Paris nach Grenoble […] mit dem Wunsch nach einer Autonomisierung der

Produktionsmittel und der bewussten Distanzierung vom zentralen (Kino-)Standort Paris” (ibid., 268-269).

199 next year.”385 And we see scenes of Fassbinder being driven to the set of Despair, striding over to the 35mm camera in a leather vest and biker hat with chains and, cigarette still in his mouth, peers through the lens. [Fig. 67] The actors are already in full dress for the costume drama and, along with the horses, carriages, old cars, expensive equipment and film crew, were all waiting on him. The shot, lasting just a few seconds, can only begin with the director’s presence and ends with his validation: “Dan-ke!”386

Costard’s film is still rolling, capturing close-ups of a member of the crew recording the continuity information in a thick binder with bound pages, charts and smaller clipboards inside. Around this time, Fassbinder is beginning to arrange co-productions with major

West German television broadcasting companies.387

385 Harris 129. See also Elsaesser, New German Cinema 8-35. On the exact wording of the exchange between Bohm and Costard and his camera crew, see spoken text in Der kleine Godard. Here, a transcript.

Bohm: “Ist das die Bauer-Kamera?” Costard/camera crew: “Nein.” Bohm: “Und diese Microgeschichte hast du selbst entwickelt?” Costard/camera crew: “Nein.” Bohm: “Und die Schulterstütze – woher hast du das?” Costard/camera crew: “Eigenbau.”

386 Fassbinder in Der kleine Godard.

387 See Shattuc 52-53.

200

Fig. 65, Fig. 66 and Fig. 67. Hellmuth Costard. Der kleine Godard: An das

Kuratorium Junger Deutscher Film (1978). Screenshots.

All these people are, importantly, types for Costard, as seen in the credits: “der

Antragsteller: Hellmuth Costard […] erster Regisseur: Hark Bohm […] zweiter

Regisseur: R. W. Fassbinder […] Als Gast: Jean-Luc Godard.”388 The organizing principle behind this collection of names is not the similar content, style or politics of their films, and thus this isn’t an attempt at an additive revision to New Wave or New

German Cinema. Der kleine Godard links these projects together by recognizing that

Western European cinema is intricately involved in thinking about formats at this time and why they matter, and this is the organizing principle behind these seemingly

388 Credits in Der kleine Godard.

201 disparate models of filmmaking. Auteur biographies or filmic plot descriptions offer little or no help in addressing this question, and thus they aren’t provided in the film. More important is the function of these names as types in a series, because of the “recursive character of serial progression. Recursivity here means the continual readjustment of possible continuations to already-established information.”389 One applicant, one director, two directors, one guest. These are categories that will still be needed in the future and can be filled in time and again, and they can also adjust to shifting priorities and can be reshuffled.390 In fact, in the film, they are. While the credits tell us that “[d]ie Personen und ihre Darsteller” are listed “(in der Reihenfolge ihres Auftretens),” that is not exactly true.391 We find Godard long before we see him on screen. First, of course, in the title of the film – that place where “the author’s sovereignty ends” anyway – then in the opening

389 Kelleter 101.

390 In the introduction to The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault describes that the old tools for analzing totalities are now being replaced with questions revolving around the series: “For many years now historians have preferred to turn their attention to long periods, as if, beneath the shifts and changes of political events, they were trying to reveal the stable, almost indestructible system of checks and balance, the irreversible processes, the constant readjustments, the underlying tendencies that gather force, and are then suddenly reversed after centuries of continuity […]. […] The old questions of the traditional analysis

(What link should be made between disparate events? […] What continuity or overall significance do they possess? […]) are now being replaced by questions of another type: which strata should be isolated from others? What types of series should be established? […] What system of relations (hierarchy, dominance, stratification, univocal determination, circular causality) may be established between them? What series of series may be established? And in what large-scale chronological table may distinct series of events be determined?” (ibid., 3-4).

391 Credits in Der kleine Godard.

202 sequence via the quote about timing and once more before he shows up in the flesh, although at the time, we might not know it’s him.392

III. Der ‘große’ Godard

This iteration of Godard arrives in the middle of the foreigner’s explanation of the complex adjustments made to affordable and mass-produced Super 8 cameras, such as using mono-cell instead of mignon-sized batteries, integrating a quartz-controlled motor

(Quartz-Steuerung) into the camera which, like a Quartz watch, can more accurately synchronize sound and image between several cameras, and the infrared scanning

(Abtastung mit Infrarotlicht) of the sprocket holes. When she describes that the

Primärton of the film stock would not be used in their experiment to record sound, but merely to record which sound element belongs to which image element, we see a hand on an editing table manipulating what we hear. [Fig. 68] “Es interessiert uns weniger […] weniger […] en exchange…erm…im Tausch dieses Geldes […] im Tausch dieses Geldes

[…].”393 A woman’s voice with an echo, her sentences repeated, and a slight indication – en exchange – that she’s translating something from French. The hand flips the switches on the table. “[…] zu verbringen ein Jahr in diesem, an diesem Ort, der nicht unserer ist, der Ort, auch wenn die Konditionen, die Bedingungen exzellent sind.”394 The word order is not quite correct and the woman corrects herself as she’s speaking. The hand moves the

392 Stanitzek 33. See also Adorno.

393 Spoken text in Der kleine Godard.

394 Ibid.

203 sound forward and backward, jumping around in the film. Costard is heard briefly interjecting on the soundtrack: “Ja…”395 And the woman continues: “Vielleicht könnten wir…wir werden ein Akkord…wir werden einen…wie heißt es….”396 But Costard can’t help with the question, telling her instead: “Wir werden stoppen erst mal.”397 Rather than the hand, one now sees the director at the editing table, turning around in his chair to directly address the camera behind him. [Fig. 69] He nods to the camera and we hear the rest of his sentence on the soundtrack: “Wir mussten jetzt die Kassette wechseln, ja?”398

Followed by the woman’s acknowledgement: “Also muss ich das jetzt nicht weiter

übersetzen?”399

395 Ibid.

396 Ibid.

397 Ibid.

398 Ibid.

399 Ibid.

204

Fig. 68 and Fig. 69. Hellmuth Costard. Der kleine Godard: An das Kuratorium Junger Deutscher Film

(1978). Screenshots.

This is not an instructional or industrial film about a new technological development that we are able to understand if we are in the know, if we’re part of the industry and familiar with the complex processes the foreigner describes, or if we inform ourselves of these technical specifications. What we hear from the foreigner about the perfect synchronization of sound and image is exactly that which does not take place in the film we’re watching.

A few minutes later, one finds the image that corresponds to the soundtrack on the editing table. The woman we were previously only able to hear, the woman translating something from French, is now visible. She’s sitting with Costard over breakfast, reading a letter to him out loud from Godard and translating it on the spot. As indicated in the soundtrack we heard earlier, it’s a complicated process, one which we now get to see played out on the film. Sometimes she’s forgotten the words, and other times she says a phrase is too difficult to translate. But in any case, she’s impressed. “Ist der Brief von

205 ihm [Godard] unterschrieben? Ayyy….”400 The content of the letter, which is gradually revealed through her literal line-by-line translation and the contextual information provided by Costard, reaffirms what we might have suspected the first time we heard it on the soundtrack, namely that it’s about a business negotiation. Godard is responding in this letter to an invitation from Costard on behalf the Cultural Committee of Hamburg for an artist-in-residence stipend. As with the hand manipulating the soundtrack, in the next series of images in which Costard is hunched over a letter, pen in his hand, clearly contemplating what and how to write, we hear something that doesn’t correspond to what we see. Over his scene of writing is Godard’s disembodied voice, and the subtitles over

Costard’s face translate for those who don’t speak French: “Ich meine, wir…das schien uns tatsächlich etwas unklar.”401 In this scene, everything might seem unklar to us too. A montage of Costard writing and contemplating what to write to Godard in response to his letter that has just been translated for him, overlaid with a soundtrack of Godard’s comments about his potential stay in Hamburg, other muffled voices and glasses clinking in the background. There are shots of Costard making lunch – Bauernbrot auf Holzplatte, as German as it gets – and a flash of Godard in a restaurant, also the source of the soundtrack, where he is discussing the details of his stipend. His proposal is a production:

“Ist es möglich Bilder in Deutschland zu machen?”402 Or, “[i]ch würde fast sagen: ‘Ist es möglich Phantasie zu haben?’ Ist ein Deutscher fähig ein Bild zu machen…?”403 [Fig. 70]

400 Ibid.

401 Subtitled text in Der kleine Godard.

402 Ibid.

403 Ibid.

206

A pitch, rather than being a stable element that precedes and is distinct from film production, is an experiment itself, and thus it follows that Godard understands his proposal for Hamburg, “Ist es möglich Bilder in Deutschland zu machen?,” as an experiment in the form of a film, one that he imagines will yield results at the end of its production, in its exhibition. “Am Ende des Films sieht man dann, ob ja oder nein.”404

Fig. 70. Hellmuth Costard. Der kleine Godard: An das Kuratorium

Junger Deutscher Film (1978). Screenshot.

These scenes might seem drastically different, representing two different worlds –

Godard being pandered to in a fancy restaurant by potential financiers from whom he is requesting 500.000 DM, Costard drafting applications again and again for a small amount of funds in his apartment, cleaning up the crumbs of his lunch in his small sink. But the

404 Ibid.

207 two worlds are linked in this scene. Can a German make images? Yes. Can one make images in Germany? In this case at least, yes. This juxtaposition is not a defensive retort to Godard, however. When the French guest finally shows up for an extended period of time in the next scene, a long-winded metaphor helps us to remember that these two filmmakers are actually in the same boat. What Godard wants to talk about in this scene is not his artist-in-residency. This topic is not even raised. Rather, he wants to discuss the proportional compass he finds in the corner of the room. [Fig. 71] It reminds him of a book about the history of language demonstrating that before Greek there was Cretan

Greek, a language in which numbers came before letters.405 In the compass, Godard is reminded that, although it resembles an “A,” the first letter of our alphabet, it’s actually part of a larger system of communication that comes second, behind numbers. Today we are so eager to believe in language as being primary, whereas this compass, the proportional compass, reminds us that this is not the whole story. The tool that serves as the impetus for Godard’s spontaneous monologue is one that has long been an object of fascination. In Leonardo da Vinci’s late fifteenth-century Codice Atlantico notebooks,

405 Witt argues that Godard usually reflects on the forms of his public appearances and the institutional norms associated with the documentation of publicity, whether for promotional purposes at film festivals, for long-format interviews on television or, here, for another filmmaker’s experimental project and his involvement in the committee that Godard hopes will grant him funding. See “Shapeshifter.” He often intervenes in interviews, for examples, with monologues or “lessons” that reflect on the audiovisual format simultaneously being employed: “Towards the close of a live lunchtime TV broadcast presented by Yves

Mourousi on TF1 [té effe un] in 1985, for example, on which Godard appeared alongside Myriem Roussel, star of his then new release, Je vous salue, Marie (1985), he literally took control of direction of the studio cameras to deliver a brief lesson in the art of framing” (ibid., 84-85).

208 there are various sketches of the proportional compass.406 Galileo Galilei invented a form of it.407 “[René] Descartes asked how it was possible for the same instrument to generate results in two such different disciplines as arithmetic […] and geometry […]. Since the principle behind the proportional compass was continued proportions, he realized that there was a more fundamental discipline […]. […] [T]his universal mathematics was a problem-solving discipline […].”408 The proportional compass infers an operation that has been at work in Der kleine Godard, already in the title, but again in the little/big

Godard text-image montage sequence. As an instrument of proportions, the compass can allow for comparison of two things that seem vastly different, two systems of communication or practice that might actually benefit from being placed side by side.

406 See Turner 82.

407 See Drake. Galilei admired that the proportional compass “could be easily understood and used by people of little education. Another [advantage] was that for many common practical problems the user did not even need to think in terms of numbers. Indeed, one of the influences that led Galileo to conceive of the sector as a universal calculator for all practical purposes was a problem he confronted that was beyond the mathematics of his time” (ibid., 104).

408 Gaukroger 8.

209

Fig. 71. Hellmuth Costard. Der kleine Godard: An das Kuratorium

Junger Deutscher Film (1978). Screenshot.

The two scenes of Godard and Costard pitching their projects are, in some respects, two extremes along the spectrum of film funding models. While Godard talks vaguely about whether it’s possible to make films in Germany, Costard, the Super 8 man, stages the format experiment in this film with such precision, often to a seemingly unnecessary degree, that he estranges most viewers. In the scenes presenting the Super 8 system, all the minor inventions are described that were needed to make the system work and that might otherwise disappear in the apparatus: the Schallschutzgehäuse, for example, that keeps the loud, constant humming of the camera from affecting the soundtrack, or the electric Funkfernauslöser with three speeds in both directions that allows access to all cameras in the system when the blimp is closed, or the idea to replace the Luftbildsucher with a Glasfaser-Mattscheibe that costs 260DM, usually only

210 integrated into professional cameras. But the placement of these descriptions of Costard’s project next to scenes of Godard negotiating with institutions about his next project suggests that they both might not only be sitting in the same boat in terms of adjusting to institutional funding requirements in this altered media infrastructure. At the same time that Costard experiments with Super 8 formats, Godard is playing around with video formats, and his experiments are also not simple by any means, described in an equally complicated, overly detailed way.

By mid-1977, Anne-Marie Miéville and Godard had been working for several years with their production studio Sonimage in Grenoble, soon moving to Rolle,

Switzerland. The focus shifted in this time period from the more direct political action advocated in the Dziga Vertov Group projects to a closer examination of the geopolitical site and financial and technological means of production that enable these political views to materialize and circulate through aesthetic forms.409 The move from Paris to Grenoble

409 While Der kleine Godard was produced between 1976 and 1978, without any explicit indication in the film as to which parts were made when, Brody notes that Godard was in discussions with the Cultural

Committee in mid-1977 and that he visited Hamburg in September 1977. See Brody 399. On the political self-reflection that occurred in the Sonimage stage, see Witt, “On and Under Communication.” “In the process of doing this [editing Ici et ailleurs (1976) between 1973 and 1974], they [Miéville and Godard] dissected the political rationale that had governed the filming of the original material, and questioned the motivations of Western intellectuals generally who were eager to project a desire for revolution onto other people in distant countries – ‘to be revolutionaries in their place,’ as Miéville puts it in the film – rather than confront the need for change at home. In addition, she and Godard severely criticized the way the

Dziga Vertov Group had imposed a political interpretation on the images via the soundtrack rather than seeking to learn from what the images and sounds actually showed” (ibid., 320). MacCabe associates the

211 not only symbolized a break with the Vertov Group and their approach to politics and enacting change, but also with the city so closely tied with classical and, for Godard particularly, New Wave cinema, itself often a reflection on Hollywood genre films.410

This corresponds with a move away from what is assumed to be the standard material format of cinema: celluloid. “Godard’s emphasis on production had moved beyond the shooting and editing of the film, the combination of sound (son) and image (image) which gave his new company its title, to consider every aspect of production. The growth of video technology seemed to offer the possibility of gaining some autonomy at every level of production and Sonimage was set up with considerable stock of video equipment.

At this time Godard seems to have considered, at least in interviews, the possibility of alternative distribution. His proposals were not for a network to be run from Paris – one of the emphases of the move to Grenoble was to work against the whole process of economic, political and cultural centralisation – but rather for an alternative notion of distribution which would operate as though Sonimage was a handcraft industry with customers ordering video programmes for particular purposes.”411 In other words,

Miéville and Godard sought two forms of autonomy during the Sonimage stage: from a filmic material and financial position, a format for moving image production that would liberate them from the funding and institutional constraints dictated by Paris and, from an aesthetic perspective, a material that would allow the images and the sounds it contained

move from Grenoble to Rolle as an attempt to further detach production efforts from Paris (24). Brody relates the move to more personal reasons, such as Miéville’s daughter attending school there (398).

410 See Pantenburg 269 as well as Sheikh 155.

411 MacCabe 23.

212 to ‘speak,’ even if this speech is ultimately silent, which would disrupt authorial primacy.

Thus, a project motivated, in part, by producing Filme, die sich selbst [mehr] ausdenken.412

The second film that Miéville and Godard produced at Sonimage, Numéro deux

(1975), thematized the problem of authorship through the perspective of film formats.413

This film was a rejection of the possibility of returning to the aesthetics of New Wave cinema in this era, demonstrating this on at least two levels. First, it was commissioned to be a remake, a “number two,” of À bout de souffle (1960) that Godard never made, ultimately disregarding this premise and, second, it further distances itself from the cinematic dispositif already in the opening scene.414 Here, Godard is surrounded by film

412 On the need to allow images more space to ‘speak’ or ‘be silent,’ especially in terms of the acoustic space afforded by a destabilization of the authorial (male) voiceover, see Witt, “On and Under

Communication” 320. On the experimentation with authorship and directorial authority performed during and prior to Godard’s video phase, see Pantenburg 264-265. “In ihrer Reihung – Stimme, Tonspur im Off,

Handschrift, Kamera – setzen sie sich zu einem Arsenal automedialer Möglichkeiten zusammen, ohne dieses Arsenal jedoch in den Dienst eines autobiographischen Projekts zu stellen. […] Die

Selbstinszenierung Godards dient eher dem tastenden Ausprobieren verschiedener Autorenpositionen, deren Aporien mit einem einheitlichen Begriff des ‘Autorenfilms’ verdeckt werden” (ibid., 265).

413 This is not to suggest that the first film produced at Sonimage, Ici et ailleurs, was not concerned with formats, as it’s often discussed in the scholarship as an important precursor to Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-

1998), but in the case of Numéro deux, there is more explicit commentary on formats concerning television and film, and it emphasizes the aesthetic possibilities within video format to allow images, especially images implicated in political discourse, to become more autonomous.

414 “In March 1975, Godard […] broke his silence in the French press to discuss this new venture [Numéro deux]: ‘To the contrary of what has been announced, the film will not be called Breathless Number Two but

213 and video equipment as he discusses the ‘narrative’ of the film while foregrounding distinctive features of video format. [Fig. 72] These features have to do, in large part, with simultaneity: its ability to simultaneously record and transmit, and thus allowing the subject and object to be seen at the same time.415 “In film, one image comes after another, and implicitly negates everything which it isn’t. […] Video permits ‘this’ and ‘that’ at the same time. This principle of simultaneity is at the heart of Number Two, and one of the primary references of the title. […] Number Two also gives us film and video at the same time.”416 In the case with the director in this opening scene, what we see is visually and

rather Number Two (Breathless). I am not doing a remake, but I am posing a reflection on the basis of

Breathless’” (Brody 379).

415 See Silverman in Silverman and Farocki. “[A]t the beginning and end of Number Two, the full 35mm image is deployed for the purposes of sketching out another ‘scene,’ one which is usually foreclosed from the cinematic text: the site of production. It shows us Godard at work in his studio, surrounded by the tools of his trade, and the material he is in the process of weaving into a film. The 35mm image also depicts something even more remarkable: a filmmaker interrogating and attempting to transform the relationship between himself and the film he is in the process of making” (ibid., 141).

416 Silverman in Silverman and Farocki 141. Cf. Farocki on Numéro deux in this same chapter: “Video editing is usually done while sitting in front of two monitors. One monitor shows the already edited material, and the other monitor raw material, which the videomaker may or may not add to the work-in- progress. He or she becomes accustomed to thinking of two images at the same time, rather than sequentially” (141). On the possibilities that the simultaneity of video images provides for a more democratic editing process, see Witt, “On and Under Communication.” “Godard welcomed the manner in which the immediacy of the new technology democratized the filmmaking process, facilitated dialogue, and helped to dissolve the divisions and hierarchies between the various technical roles in mainstream film and

214 conceptually a split entity: simultaneously the subject, mostly a body here, describing the film, its themes and his own tangential thoughts to the audience, pitching it to us while he stands next to his creation, leaning on the video monitor, and it’s also the object, here mostly a head from within the video monitor, who is narrating the film we are watching.417

Fig. 72. Anne-Marie Miéville and Jean-Luc Godard. Numéro deux (1975). Screenshot.

television production […]. […] The video image can not only be viewed by the entire crew as it is recorded, but can also be immediately reviewed and subjected to collective discussion” (325).

417 See Pantenburg: “Godard ist Subjekt und Objekt der Bildproduktion, in einer Staffelung unterschiedlicher Bildtypen ist er als Bild im Bild” (265).

215

In this opening monologue, Godard describes to the audience how he came to make Numéro deux, after the producer, Georges de Beauregard, saw all of the video equipment in the Sonimage studio and urged him to use it as a point of departure for something. “I said, ‘Georges, be honest, you need money. […] I need money too, to pay for these machines.’ […] Georges and I discussed it. Then he said, ‘I’ll get the money.’

‘How?’ I said. He replied, ‘I don’t know. I’ll push some papers.’ […] ‘I’ll get you

600,000 francs. I’ll make it happen.’”418 Beyond this production pretense, Godard also discusses themes that are addressed in the subsequent narrative portion of the film revolving around a family, as well as personal circumstances and broad topics, such as politics, literature and technology. In this monologue, he’s an applicant, a director in isolation, an actor on screen, a narrator of the upcoming film and a partner. What he is trying out, his “tastenden Ausprobieren verschiedener Autorenpositionen,” is a way of thinking about the Antrag, the pitch in this case, with all of its professional, institutional and personal details, and the finished film in a non-linear form.419 The reason that it’s difficult to pin all these details down to the diegesis that follows, or even to Numéro deux in particular, is that many of the visual situations [fig. 73420] and lines spoken by Godard

[fig. 74421] were already part of the earlier unrealized project Moi Je (1973), which has been saved in the form of paperwork. More specifically, in the form of an Antrag.

418 Subtitled text in Numéro deux.

419 Pantenburg 265.

420 Godard, Jean-Luc Godard: Documents 212.

421 Godard, Jean-Luc Godard: Documents 219.

216

Fig. 73 and Fig. 74. Jean-Luc Godard. Moi Je (1973).

In Moi Je, consisting of paperwork for an application for state-sponsored avances sur recettes (financial advances) from Le Centre National de la Cinématographie, one finds various sketches and lines that make their way into Numéro deux.422 After the trente glorieuses and the oil crisis, the mid-1970s was not the easiest time to apply for national

422 For a summary of the French film industry at this time and an overview of the challenges facing applicants, see Creton and Jäckel 212-213.

217 film funding initiatives. One might expect, in this context, an Antrag that is all those things Costard ventriloquizes at the beginning of his film: clear, explained as simply as possible, with a timeline, cost breakdown and a script. What one sees in Moi Je is altogether something different. Pages are filled with what looks like comics, sketches of a film strip or a storyboard of sorts, photo collages, mathematical diagrams and what appears to be typed code and/or concrete poetry.423 It makes sense that, a couple years later, he expresses more explicitly in relation to Numéro deux many of his thoughts about the changes occurring in institutional film funding, as well as his fellow directors’ unwillingness to acknowledge and adjust to these different circumstances: “I am amazed that people who lack ideas for new films (including some old friends like [François]

Truffaut, [Jacques] Rivette, who don’t have any more ideas than the guys whom they denounced twenty years ago), continue to adhere to the one and self-same system of filmmaking, which is easy to describe: a sum of so many million, multiplied by so many weeks, multiplied by a certain number of people.”424 Thinking about proposals, Anträge,

423 Godard, Jean-Luc Godard: Documents 195-243. See especially ibid., 203, 208-213, 216-219, 222-225,

228, 231-232 and 238. See also Pantenburg: “[D]er Text amalgamiert literarische Zitate ([William]

Burroughs, [Samuel] Beckett, [Arthur] Rimbaud) mit kybernetischen Modellen, anthropologischen

Versatzstücken (André Leroi-Gourhan) und maoistisch-politischen Textsplittern” (268). On a reading of the text-image relationships in Moi Je in terms of a theory of the storyboard, see Hüser,

“Rahmenhandlungen.”

424 Godard qtd. in Brody 382 (from interview in Le Monde, May 8, 1975). “The deceit of Numéro Deux – the failure to deliver anything that resembled a remake of Breathless – had left Godard stranded in the industry. After Comment ça va, Beauregard’s support came to an end, and other movie producers (at least, those with the money to finance a film) kept their distance” (ibid., 384).

218 their institutional politics and their interaction with the finished film became influential to

Godard’s practice during this time and in the years to come. Soon after Der kleine

Godard, he started making what are now referred to as “preparatory sketchbook[s],”

“rough draft[s] made on video” or “video essays” about this process.425 These include

Scénario de Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1979) and Scénario du film Passion (1982), for example, which were “usually conceived in part […] with a view to securing production funds” and which are in essence multimedia performances of his proposals for the

425 Witt refers to these scénarios as “preparatory sketchbook[s]” (“Shapeshifter” 80), Fox as “rough draft[s] made on video” (20) and Murphy as “video essay[s]” (10). See also Dubois, “Video Thinks What Cinema

Creates” 178 and Harcourt.

219 films.426 “Überhaupt interpretiert Godard die Gattung des Finanzierungsantrag äußerst frei; zu frei offenbar, um tatsächlich gefördert zu werden.”427

The argument underlying these projects, these Antragsfilme, is a form of institutional critique that suggests that the distinction, in institutional, critical and scholarly reception, between preproduction and production, between what anticipates a work and the work that is subsequently produced, is a practical and conceptual problem.

426 Witt, “Shapeshifter” 80. See the description by Murphy, for example, about the complexity of one of these scenarios: “He then [after making Sauve qui peut (la vie)] met actress Hanna Schygulla […] and asked her whether she would make a film with him. She agreed on condition that he would provide her with a written story, thus obliging him to develop the story idea further. […] The initial synopsis that

Godard made for Schygulla was later expanded into a collaged scenario entitled Passion: Introduction à un scénario, in which ‘a series of paintings and ideas provided a loose framework for the overall project’ […].

Godard juxtaposes photos of the film’s principal actors with images of paintings from the canon of

European art. The accompanying text synopsizes the film’s narrative. An audiocassette that similarly experimented with musical themes and motifs was also produced. […] Godard spent almost half of

Passion’s 12-million-franc budget, which he had obtained on the basis of the cast he had assembled to appear in the film, on what he called the ‘production of the visual screenplay’ […]. […] The initial version of Passion’s video scenario was remade, after the film was completed, as Scénario du film Passion. Godard explains […] that the reason for remaking the video was because Television Suisse Romande, the co- producer, felt that the loosely collated assemblage of video footage could not be shown without further explanation, ‘so we synthesized it more and made something that could be more readily shown’ […]. The resulting video thus provides a retrospective view of the creation of a screenplay, affording Godard the opportunity to show the viewer both the images in which the narrative originated and the final images as they appear in the film” (14-17).

427 Pantenburg 268, n. 22. Pantenburg is specifically referring here to Numéro deux, but his remark on the

Godard’s broad interpretation of the Antrag genre is nevertheless relevant to his subsequent scénarios.

220

It not only results, for example, in practical challenges for filmmakers such as Costard and Godard, or Fassbinder and Bohm and Wenders, but also in conceptual misunderstandings and impediments to innovation. “In jedes moderne ‘Fach’, in jede spezialisierte Kompetenz ist die Forderung der Kompetenzerweiterung eingebaut: die geforderte Veränderung, die ‘Innovation’ […]. Und alles Neue muß, wie ich bereits andeutete, erst einmal ‘dilettantisch’ anmuten, ‘nicht fachgemäß’ […]. […] Das

Interessante ist, daß hier eine Blindheit vorliegt, mit Notwendigkeit vorliegt, und daß man diese Blindheit ausnutzen kann, indem man beide Probleme miteinander koppelt: das Problem der Innovation und das Problem des Novizen. […] [D]iese Blindheit kann man ausnutzen, und zwar nicht, wie in der ‘klassischen Avantgarde’, um sich selbst als

Innovation zu produzieren oder zu plazieren [sic], als der Erfinder, der Meister ist […], sondern indem man die Blindheit selbst ausnutzt, und etwas herstellt, das die Barriere zwischen Produktion und Rezeption, also das Gesamtsystem, das Symptom, in dem man selber steckt, in dem aber jeder stecken bleibt, vom Meister bis zum Novizen und zum

Rezipienten, zum Thema macht.”428 Now is not the time to start claiming that Costard should be acknowledged as one of the first Super 8 heroes or Godard as the pioneer of the video essay. Antragsfilme, in thematizing the pitch, address this blindness and this gap between dilettantism and professionalism that one believes can be overcome, strictly delineated, by finding the ‘right’ keywords in an Antrag, those that show that the applicant is serious and knows what she is talking about.

Understanding Antragsfilme as resulting from within this Blindheit or Barriere helps one question ready-made categories and tendencies within both institutional and

428 Schüttpelz, “Die Akademie der Dilettanten” 51-53.

221 disciplinary structures, such as the constant tendency to associate, also in scholarly texts on Godard’s extensive work with video formats, Godard first and foremost with cinema – as working solely on, if not within, the medium of cinema, even going so far as to claim properties of video as “cinematic.” On the one hand, for example, Michael Witt, in an article titled “Shapeshifter: Godard as Multimedia Installation Artist,” notes that a

“glance at a filmography is sufficient to complicate straightforward identification of

Godard with cinema, at least in the sense of feature films shot on celluloid and projected in darkened theatres. In the past three decades, he has made nearly twice as many works on video as on film […].”429 Building on a critique by Colin MacCabe, Witt also makes

429 Witt, “Shapeshifter” 76. “Godard’s career has unfolded in close parallel with that of video: under development from 1950 (year of his earliest critical article); in commercial use from 1956 (date of his initial foray into fiction, Une femme coquette); on sale for domestic use since 1963 (launch date of the first

Sony VCR, when he turned his sights on television for the first time in Le Grand Escroc); used for rapid recorded broadcast playback from 1967 (year of the introduction of the portable black and white Sony

PortaPak, when he toyed with the idea of using video as tool for auto-critical political analysis in La

Chinoise); developed in U-Matic cassette form in 1969 (commercially available from 1971, distributed widely by Godard and his collaborators to political and workers’ groups in the early 1970s, and central to his own practice from 1973); and as colour VHS from 1976 (the year of his and Miéville’s first television series). The proliferation of domestic VCRs in the late 1970s and rapid spread of camcorder culture from

1982 – reflected with interest in the saccadic motion of France/tour/détour/deux/enfants and Sauve qui peut

(la vie) (1980), and with increasing contempt in works from Prénom Carmen (1983) to Meetin’ W. A.

(1986) – was accompanied by Godard’s systematic accumulation of the raw materials for Histoire(s) du cinéma: the stacks of images culled from magazines and books, and the thousands of videotapes that constitute his personal videotheque and which are sampled so extensively in his work of the past two decades” (ibid., 76-77).

222 an argument for a closer consideration in Godard scholarship of video, of Miéville and

Godard’s extensive experiments with the format in the Sonimage studio, in a later essay, published just a few years ago: “Between 1973 and 1979, Godard and Miéville completed almost 19 hours of material for television broadcast or cinema release: three films […], a short video clip based on a song by Patrick Juvet (1977), and two monumental 12-part television series […]. […] [I]n spite of the quantity of critical writing devoted to Godard, the Sonimage work (again, the television series in particular) still remains comparatively understudied and in my view underrated. […] In an article published in 1980, MacCabe noted that for viewers perplexed by the forms and concerns of Godard’s Sauve qui peut

(la vie) (1979), the Sonimage work constituted the crucial ‘missing step’ in his activities; three decades on, the same remains largely true for viewers of his subsequent output.”430

Yet, in the middle of his text on Godard as a “multimedial” artist, Witt relates Godard’s extremely diverse periods of artistic production back to cinema, discussing his “large and varied body of graphic collage work that is best considered an expression of cinema, in the expanded Eisensteinian sense of creative thought through montage, in materials other than celluloid.”431 Rather than allowing cinema to truly interact with other media, to move in between them, without necessarily having to colonize them, Witt’s argument about multimediality is really about a search for a concept that allows the term “cinema” to hold on to the multimedial territories into which moving images are expanding. While proclaiming that more scholarly recognition of Godard’s work in other media destabilizes standard hierarchies, a consequence of which “accords equal weight to all manifestations

430 Witt, “On and Under Communication” 319. See also MacCabe 112.

431 Witt, “Shapeshifter” 80.

223 of the project, irrespective of budget or format […] and renders redundant any meaningful distinction between research, work in progress, or finished artwork,” this privileging of the cinematic is a means of keeping “Godard” and his projects primarily within film studies.432 It helps maintain a certain distance between this author-name and screen, television, art, moving image or media studies – disciplines which could help shed light on the complex relationship between cinema and other medial forms appearing in Moi Je, for example, and which could contribute, in a broader sense, to a better understanding of the discourse on intermediality and the hopes for different moving image formats during this time.

Perhaps the clearest example of this unwillingness at present to let go of the cinematic as the format to which all others are to be subordinated is the cited title, in Witt and others, of the transcription of Godard’s 1978 ‘lectures’ at the Conservatoire d’art cinématographique in Montréal as Introduction à une véritable histoire du cinéma. While this is the title afforded to the publication of the lectures in 1980, “[t]his book had various projected titles, the most apt of which, the present publisher [of the 2014 English translation] believes, is Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television, as

Godard refers to it in his Preface.”433 In fact, “[t]he most important early document to have come to light […] is a twenty-page English-language collage made by Godard in the mid-1970s under the title ‘Histoire(s) du cinéma et de la télévision/Studies in Motion

Pictures and Television’ […].”434 Et de la télévision. Yet this recent publication, which

432 Witt, “Shapeshifter” 87.

433 Barnard 73.

434 Witt, “Archaeology of Histoire(s) du cinema” 21.

224 finally acknowledges television in the title, the preface and the introductory texts, seemingly understanding the significance of Godard’s use of and commentary on video and television during these lectures, ultimately forgets about this fact. Here again, we have the standard abbreviation for Godard’s project that elides one medium in favor of another: “Throughout the 1970s, we find regular allusions to the embryonic Histoire(s) du cinéma in interviews and working documents, including the script of his major abandoned project of this period, ‘Moi je’ (‘Me I’), the closing five pages of which are presented as ‘a few as yet very incomplete fragments’ of ‘a true history of cinema’, and include what would become over the ensuing decades a central strand of reflection on

Eisenstein’s and Vertov’s montage theories.”435 Not fragments of “a true history of cinema.” But a true history of cinema and television: “Qui écrira un jour une véritable histoire du cinéma et de la télévision? En voici déjà quelques fragments encore bien incomplets.”436 [Fig. 75437]

435 Ibid., 20-21.

436 Godard, Jean-Luc Godard: Documents 238.

437 Ibid.

225

Fig. 75. Jean-Luc Godard. Moi Je (1973).

226

This is clearly written in the third paragraph [fig. 75], in the last five narrative pages of the proposal, that key place in Moi Je where une véritable histoire […] is referenced so early on, just before the appendices. You can’t miss the different formats and implied sites of exhibition for moving images in Moi Je: video, film and television.

Video comes first, and not necessarily against television.438 “Ayant dans les pages qui précèdent […] donné un aperçu tel qu’il peut s’apercevoir à l’heure actuelle de la deuxième partie du film, je puis maintenant mieux montrer en quoi il me semble intéressant, et même nécessaire, de tourner cette deuxième partie […] en utilisant les techniques impliquant un matériel vidéo. Il faut d’abord séparer ici les deux lieux sociaux principaux de projection et de diffusion des images et des sons […] que sont aujourd’hui la télévision et le cinéma.”439 Cinema, yes, of course, but also video material and television, sites of projection and diffusion, appearing next to arrows that redirect us to earlier thoughts and reconnect us to words somewhere else on the page. “Were the cinema to disappear, I would simply accept the inevitable and turn to television; were television to disappear, I would revert to pencil and paper. […] The important thing is to

438 See M. Newman. “The new meanings for video in phase two [when the discourse on video in the late

1950s/early 1960s began to shift, understanding the format as no longer synonymous with television] included ideas about the media audience’s relationship to technologies and institutions. Video promised to liberate and empower viewers and to democratize mass media. […] In popular imagination, video was figured as the revolutionary solution to many of the perceived problems of television, in particular the sense of television’s economic and ideological power over its audience and the society it was understood to be shaping. Video might save the medium reverse its decline” (ibid., 20-21).

439 Godard, Jean-Luc Godard: Documents 236.

227 approach it from the side which suits you best.”440 The side that we still seem to hang on to, the side we’re afraid of losing, is the cinema side: the big Godard with his acclaimed

New Wave films and histories of cinema reinforcing it as the medium of the century.

Godard’s pitch for Costard and the Cultural Committee was a question about the possibility of making images, films, in Germany in the late 1970s. A look at unrealized projects and format experiments in the time of their emergence make one question whether it’s possible to make images, films, without these failed pitches, to ever think of them as separate from sketches on paper, negotiations in fancy Hamburg restaurants or on a Super 8 filmstrip with equipment that, while once revolutionary, is now part of a history that one is always on the brink of nostalgically memorializing.441

440 Godard in Witt, “Shapeshifter” 75.

441 See, for example, the remarks made by well-known filmmakers about the release of the new Kodak hybrid Super 8 camera at International Consumer Electronics Show last year (“Kodak Launches Super 8

Filmmaking Revival Initiative”).

228

Afterwork

The projects discussed here were about “works.” While interested in disrupting ideas of a Leitmedium, rethinking media access with the necessary counterpart of media excess and understanding emergent media through a consideration of institutions and infrastructure, these case studies were nevertheless about “works.” If one were to summarize the materials: a performance-TV-photo work by three-plus names (Beuys,

Vostell, Brock, Tischer); multimedial boxes made by names we’ve forgotten (Johnson) and containing big (Duchamp, Cage, Sontag, König) and overlooked (Reitkopf, Braden,

Bergtold) names; and a film about formats and institutional functions by a smaller name

(Costard) featuring names we likely know (Fassbinder, Bohm, Godard, Miéville). More specifically, these case studies were about visual and moving image artworks. But if an objective of this project was, through various media theories and alternative media historiographies, to rethink, in terms of these complex inter-/multimedial works, notions of authorship, then another consequence of this project, an appeal that it ultimately makes, is to rethink the idea of a work itself. Not all the materials presented here were well-known, if known to any great extent at all in the literature, but they were, if one were to have to categorize them, works of art. “Beuys” and “Vostell” are names we’re used to seeing in contemporary art museums and the former has been gaining scholarly and critical attention of late not only because of the growing number of copyright battles all over Germany, but as a result of a new documentary shown in the competition section

229 at this year’s Berlinale.442 While Aspen isn’t new to museums, both it and S.M.S. have been on display more frequently over the last few years, appearing in art exhibitions in the U.S. and in Germany.443 And although there are clearly not as many monographies devoted to Costard as to Fassbinder, for example, a growing interest in film co-ops and

West German underground cinema in recent years could likely lead to further publications about Costard and/or experiments with film technology around this time.444

But if the focus here was about “audiovisual media” and its “unhinging” in the

1960s and 1970s, then there are many other objects which are affected by and affect this unhinging process, and which could be taken into consideration. They don’t typically, or that easily, fall into a “work” category, and maybe that’s why they often get forgotten in such media histories. “[I]f some have found it convenient to bypass the individuality of

442 In Germany and the U.S., works by Beuys are standard acquisitions in contemporary art collections, as are, to a lesser extent, those by Vostell, whose “dé-coll/age” mixed media work (e.g., Sun in Your Head,

1963), for example, received renewed attention in the context of a recent exhibition on Poetry of the

Metropolis: The Affichistes, which ran from February 5 to May 25, 2015 at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt.

On the attention paid to Beuys’s copyright cases, see Bosetti, Woeller as well as Forbes. On the recent

Beuys documentary, see Veiel as well as Seeliger.

443 S.M.S. was on view at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of

Virginia from September 2, 2013 to January 5, 2014; at the Dorothy Johnston Towne Gallery at Wellesley

College from February 10, 2015 to June 7, 2015; and at the Klingspor Museum für internationale Buch- und Schriftkunst in Offenbach from May 20 to June 28, 2015. Aspen is more frequently found in the context of art exhibitions, most recently on show at the Whitechapel Gallery in London from September 11,

2014 to March 2, 2015.

444 On the increasing significance of co-ops in film scholarship, see Windhausen, Zryd 392-401, Gerhardt as well as Bruno 109-125.

230 the writer or his status as an author to concentrate on work, they have failed to appreciate the equally problematic nature of the word ‘work’ and the unity it designates.”445 In this context, “work” has designated those objects that still, despite complicating traditional ideas of authorship and creation, are associated with some idea of art, often defined in the negative – against those things we don’t think should be considered alongside objects of art. Nobody would likely write, in their project descriptions about performance art, installation art or experimental film, that they are writing about certain objects and against others, but it’s evident in terms of what they think belongs to the media environment they’re observing, and it’s most evident in those projects that are purportedly concerned with medial expansion. Most contemporary scholars of expanded cinema in the 1960s and 1970s predominantly focus on the relationship between the cinema and the gallery. For them, medial situations which involve domestic television, video game consoles and radio programs, for instance, do not appear relevant to the landscape of expanded cinema during this time. One reason for this could be an increase in the scholarship on medial expansion over the last decade and a subsequent stabilization of this scholarship. This is evident in the coining of numerous terms by scholars who seek to mark their research territory, from “expanded,” to “relocated” cinema, from “para-,” to

“quasi-” to “ex-” cinema.446 A certain collection of disciplinary objects have come along with this stabilization and one could argue that they function similarly, here, to an author- name, entailing similar consequences. “[A]n author’s name is not simply an element of speech (as a subject, a complement, or an element that could be replaced by a pronoun or

445 Foucault, “What Is an Author?” 119.

446 See introduction (Einstieg).

231 other parts of speech). Its presence is functional in that it serves as a means of classification. A name can group together a number of texts and thus differentiate them from others. A name also establishes different forms of relationships among texts.”447

The ubiquity of expanded cinema has led it to close in on its objects of investigation, to limit, in fact, its own range and reach.

In the case studies in this project, the range was limited to art objects. But if one wanted to seriously consider an earlier understanding of expanded cinema by Gene

Youngblood – although some have derided his work as evident of “an unapologetically funky, tie-dyed, star-child ethos”448 – one would find that it was concerned with processes, and not necessarily objects, that were taking place within a certain environment, and not necessarily an environment of ‘art’: “Expanded cinema does not mean computer films, video phosphors, atomic light, or spherical projections. Expanded

447 Foucault, “What Is an Author?” 123.

448 Uroskie 9. This is how Uroskie characterizes Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema, comparing it at one point, in a highly biased passage, to Krauss’s “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” which he understands, in contrast to Youngblood’s project, as “a palpable yearning for something like a scientific model of art criticism” (9). While both Youngblood and Krauss are considering objects of art in their work on medial expansion, Uroskie’s reading of the two scholars is yet another instance of the privileging of ‘art’ over other objects that belong to a broader examination of medial expansion. This is especially evident when, without explanation, he juxtaposes the cover of Youngblood’s book, probably as evidence of this “funky, tie-dyed, star-child ethos,” with a diagram from Krauss’s text, clearly suggesting that Krauss’s writing was more scientific, rigorous and/or based in verifiable evidence than Youngblood’s book (ibid., 10). See

Youngblood, Expanded Cinema and “Since Cinema Expanded” as well as Krauss, “Sculpture in the

Expanded Field.” Cf. Strauven for a more nuanced reading of Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema.

232 cinema isn’t a movie at all: like life it’s a process of becoming […]. One no longer can specialize in a single discipline and hope truthfully to express a clear picture of its relationships in the environment. This is especially true in the case of the intermedia network of cinema and television […].”449 For an exploration of processes of unhinging in media environments of the 1960s and 1970s, assuming this position on expansion would be productive, as it would lead to a consideration of a broader range of audiovisual reconfigurations, incorporating non-canonical materials and interdisciplinary perspectives. It would take the medial spectrum of this expansion, both then and now, seriously, and present case studies in which single medium or apparatus-based theories fail to account in full for the complexity of the medial situations at hand.

One theme running through these chapters that could benefit from such an approach is a certain ‘looseness’ that has been observed in the relationship between materials and media objects in these environments – the loose relationship between television, photography and performance in Das Schweigen, or between the various audiovisual objects contained in Aspen and S.M.S., or between film, video and television as presented in Der kleine Godard. While Niklas Luhmann describes “medium” this way, in terms of lose or rigide Kopplungen, this idea of “loose couplings” could help here to better understand the fluctuating presence of and constant negotiation between

Verbreitungsmedien themselves in such environments.450 It’s not for a lack of theory,

449 Youngblood, Expanded Cinema 41.

450 See Luhmann 53-56. “Medium in diesem Sinne ist jeder lose gekoppelte Zusammenhang von

Elementen, der für Formung verfügbar ist, und Form ist die rigide Kopplung eben dieser Elemente, die sich durchsetzt, weil das Medium keinen Widerstand leistet” (ibid., 53).

233 however, that analyses of loose medial couplings commonly include certain medial objects and exclude others. Lynn Spigel, for instance, argues that there is a sharp and strictly disciplinary, rather than historical, divide between television and video, leading the former to be analyzed in communications departments and the latter in art history departments. “While TV is studied mostly as a communications medium and/or sociological object […], video art is pursued mainly through art historical questions of context, media specificity (or dissolution), and philosophy. Journals that publish essays on TV […] rarely if ever publish an essay on video (or digital) art while the opposite is true for art journals like October or Grey Room. Similarly, TV text books and readers are typically silent on issues of video or digital art, while the new academic interest in ‘visual culture studies’ almost entirely elides some sixty years of television by jumping from the visual technologies of nineteenth and early twentieth-century culture (stereoscopes, panoramas, cinema) to digital art. Yet, these splits and antagonisms say more about the way disciplines in the academy divide their objects of study than they do about the actual history of the media. If, as so many critics assert, these lines were blurred with postmodernism, this is not the case with television.”451

This is not the case with other media either. If one were to take Youngblood’s argument seriously, that one can no longer “specialize in a single discipline and hope truthfully to express a clear picture of its [expanded cinema’s] relationships in the environment,” then one would explicitly, when planning a larger project on audiovisual expansion or unhinging, choose materials that are not all anchored in film studies or in art

451 Spigel 295.

234 history, for instance, but that disturb these disciplinary divides.452 While television isn’t absent in the case studies presented here, it has a broader significance than its role as a dissemination medium for performance and film in the U.S. and West Germany in the

1960s and 1970s. While sound objects also appear in these case studies, the emergence of alternative distribution channels for sonic forms deserves more attention. Examples include Revue Ou (1963-1974), a magazine published by Henri Chopin that was focused on distributing, in a loose, unbound arrangement, sonic forms – vinyl records, sound poetry and acoustic art – which would serve as an important comparison to Aspen and

S.M.S. and their interest in auditory objects.453 Moreover, “free form” or “anti-format” radio programs in the 1960s and 1970s, often based at universities, are another example of loose arrangements of audiovisual materials within a media environment. These were programs that were testing which kind of cultural objects could be integrated into program segments, experimenting, to different degrees, with ‘translating’ literature and film through words on the radio, for example, alongside a variety of music, news and interviews, acknowledging that order in programing plays as meaningful a role as individual content.454 Finally, while my previous research has touched on the relationship between ‘ephemeral’ performance and computer games, the latter is absent in the case studies presented here.455 Scholarship in media archaeology has drawn attention to several important affinities between games and cinema, from modes of interactivity to

452 Youngblood, Expanded Cinema 41.

453 See “Henri Chopin and the Revue Ou.”

454 See, for example, Faber and Hochheimer.

455 See Michell, “Anstehen mit Foucault.”

235 apparatus structures, but “the field of cinema studies has only recently taken heed. Video games completely fell through the cracks of television history, even though home consoles altered the way we received and interacted with television prior to the transformative entrance of the VCR.”456 If one is committed to chronicling and theorizing the expansion of the moving image and audiovisual media in its wide variety of forms in the 1960s and 1970s, then video and computer games would be essential to this study.

Let a final example suffice to demonstrate the kind of objects that could potentially be included in such a project and that would both broaden and trouble the previous privileging of ‘artistic’ materials. Just a few years after Serielle Formationen, the pioneering 1967 show of minimalist, Land and Conceptual art in the Studiogalerie of the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, which sought a corrective to the biases of art institutions, there was a project being undertaken at another university, at Irvine, that was also interested in bringing something to the public, outside the realm of traditional institutions. While Serielle Formationen was interested in a concept it observed throughout art, music, performance, literature and architecture, this project in California was interested in pursuing a concept found through television, text, code and comics, and later animated and live-action film series. The works put together at the university in

Frankfurt [fig. 76457] and the one put together in Irvine [figs. 77-78458] don’t look, at first glance, all that different from one another: black-and-white squares as content and

456 Guins 125. On media archaeology scholarship thematizing the relationship between cinema and games, see Strauven, “The Observer’s Dilemma” and Huhtamo, for example.

457 See Bartels et al.

458 See Nomad. For a detailed history of this code, see Birken.

236 background, repeated geometric and recognizable forms (lines, shapes, numbers) throughout the space of the frame, a lack of representational imagery for the most part, grids as a formal organizing principle, some sense of symmetry.

Fig. 76. Serielle Formationen. Exhibition at the Studiogalerie at the

Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, May 22-June 30, 1967. Bartels, Siegfried,

Peter Roehr, and Paul Maenz, eds. Serielle Formationen. Frankfurt am

Main: Stiftung Studentenhaus, 1967. N. pag. Print.

237

Fig. 77 and Fig. 78. Star Trek. Code created by Mike Mayfield. 1971. Screenshots.

Just two years after Star Trek (The Original Series) was canceled on NBC, but before the show had gained its unprecedented success through syndication, a student brought it back to life in another form.459 “He had access to a Sigma 7 computer at the

University of California, Irvine, and he wrote the game in BASIC during the summer of

1971. The game delighted almost everyone who saw it, and it was ported (transferred from one system to another) and modified to run on many different computers. [Mike]

Mayfield produced a version in HP BASIC [Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction

Code] that Hewlett-Packard put into the public domain and made available on tape. DEC

[Digital Equipment Corporation] also distributed their version of the code, which became the basis for versions of Stark Trek that ran on personal computers […].”460 It was an unlicensed, simulation strategy text-based game, requiring a teletype terminal and many

459 On the syndication success of Star Trek, see Geraghty 32-33.

460 Hey and Pápay 175.

238 reams of paper, set up with the “Sigma 7 minicomputer, a device that required as much space as several refrigerators.”461 Playing this game meant, essentially, rearranging the position of the USS Enterprise, “E,” on the 8x8 quadrant grid, representing the galaxy

[fig. 78], by entering long, specific commands. Once transferred to the public domain, it received various modifications, disseminating to newer platforms and, over time, engaging a larger community in debate and experimentation with how to code a television show.

A review of a recent edited volume on Star Trek claims that it “achieves something very difficult: it has something new to say about Star Trek.”462 Indeed, this book, published in 2014, offers a wealth of new insight not only into the show itself, but into the history of the television industry and television scholarship, given that Star Trek has, as the editors explain in their introduction, “almost certainly inspired more scholarly publications than any other television program.”463 What also seems difficult to say is something about Star Trek that takes into account its more encompassing and complex relationship to audiovisual media environments in the early 1970s. Not just to film, but to its animated series, to the comics series, to the board games that are so reminiscent, both in their appearance and protocols, of this “first video game based on a movie or television series.”464 As film or television, it would be easier to situate Star Trek as a “work,” as an

461 Montfort and Bogost 125.

462 Bestor 127. See also Pearson and Davies.

463 Pearson and Davies 8.

464 Montfort and Bogost 125. The film series include The Original Series films (1979-1991), The Next

Generation films (1994-2002), Star Trek (2009), Star Trek: Into Darkness (2013) and Star Trek Beyond

239 art object with, if not a singular author (e.g., the director), a series of authors that nevertheless fulfills the author-function (e.g., actors or producers).465 But what happens when one takes those works into account that don’t, in the circulation of discourse at least, have this author-function? To whom should we attribute this first Star Trek game?

To the creator of the show? To the designer of this specific code? Or to the designers of the code in which it was written, BASIC?466 Moreover, without the necessary processing apparatuses and dissemination formats, it never would have been able to be modified in the first place. “It is obviously insufficient to repeat empty slogans: the author has disappeared […]. Rather, we should reexamine the empty space left by the author’s disappearance; we should attentively observe, along its gaps and fault lines, its new demarcations, and the reapportionment of this void […].”467

The demarcation, evident in this case, is between certain kinds of moving image work (in Spigel’s terms, for example, between television and video), as well as between those objects that we can more clearly classify as “works.” It’s not as if there is a non- relation between this game, or computer games more generally, and other audiovisual

(2016); the Animated Series ran from 1973-1974; and there have been various publishers for the Star Trek comics from 1967 to present.

465 The roles of actors and producers are two key points of interest in Pearson and Davies, for example.

466 BASIC was created in the 1960s “in order to help all undergraduate students at Dartmouth – not just science and engineering students – use the college’s time-sharing computer system” (Sample). For a list of

BASIC games from the early 1970s, see Ahl.

467 Foucault, “What Is an Author?” 121.

240 media of the time period, such as film, installation art or television.468 As a game, Star

Trek was a project taking place outside of standard institutions, at a shared university space rather than at commercial game laboratories. It is visually reliant upon grids and series, concepts and forms long found in analog games and becoming more prevalent in the visual arts. It is based on writing, or text, which, as part of a computational medium,

“wants to take a walk, not sit on a couch to be analyzed,” exemplifying a shift in the function of text embedded in non-print contexts.469 And it consists of a language of code, resulting in a series of protocols that achieve “voluntary regulation within a contingent environment,” encouraging one to “attempt to read the never-ending stream of computer code as one reads any text (the former having yet to achieve recognition as a natural language), decoding its structure of control […].”470 While the life cycle of Star Trek has, up to this point, been preoccupied with film, television and fan merchandise, perhaps, to say something new about it, to say something generative rather than merely additive, one can look at the old games that might now, at least to us, seem new.471 Objects such as

468 While this might sound similar to arguments made in Spreadable Media, it should be clear that the focus here is not on popular acts of circulation surrounding one object as such, but on the relationship between objects, regardless of brand, in a certain media environment and on the disciplinary divides that prevent a wider range of objects associated with television, film, art and games, for instance, to be simultaneously studied as key elements of moving image culture. Cf. Jenkins et al.

469 Sample. On the shifting role of Schrift during this time, see Krautkrämer.

470 Galloway, Protocol 7 and 20.

471 “In their introduction, [Lisa] Gitelman and [Goeffrey] Pingree account for the unfixed and uncertain state ascribed to an emergent medium’s uses and functions until familiarity, habit, and experience begin to shape our commonplace understanding and acceptance. […] The afterlife of video games, on the other

241 these which, on the one hand, were contributing to the medial expansion and processes of unhinging discussed in the case studies presented here and, on the other, challenge the unity and totality of a “work,” could potentially help us get us out of the disciplinary divides within which we now find ourselves working – those fault lines and confined spaces that remain when the author supposedly disappears. “I was just thinking about how to get outta here.” / “There may be a structural flaw that would allow us to escape.” /

“Right…” / “[…] There is a way out of every box […]; it’s just a matter of finding it.”472

In this case, the way out the box may, in fact, be to work our way back in, unpacking all the objects we find in there instead of just those we already know.

hand, demonstrates that such resolution is not as settled as suggested. […] The phase of ‘novelty’ is not just tied to initial and uncertain adoption, but can occur again over time, any time a medium is placed well outside of our habitual understandings, or when its status changes” (Guins 295-296, n. 45). Cf. Gitelman and Pingree.

472 Jean-Luc Picard (The Next Generation) in Sagan.

242

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