Wolf Vostell

(1932-1998 )

A work from 1958 like Trasmigration sums up Vostell's poetics: to continue with painting, but to contaminate it with collage and insertions. In a slash in the canvas he inserted the first videos in a work of art. The painting suggests a conflagration: accented by burned areas evoked by black. But already the electronic eye—the screen that displays the absent gaze's reality—seems to illuminate the work even in a literal sense, almost present as a reality subjected to the art. Vostell understood that the new medium was beginning to define its own aesthetic.

Napoleon is supposed to have said wisely, and he had the experience: “There are those, who make revolutions—and there are those who profit from revolutions.” Dear Wolf, I think you will agree with me, that it is better to have been one of those who made them, instead of merely someone who profited from them! But I am sure that you are already working on the next uprising, even if the previous-one for the time being turned out has dribbled out, sunk in the sand of reaction, leaving though a little of the red stuff stained on the surface. From “the other side” you must be seeing now clearly, that flirtations with unhappy kids' late-Dada, as well as dry-bone cerebral mind-set games, mass-grown out of the ruminations of a Marcel Duchamp, or Beatles-like good-boy niceties, fail—for the ingredient of religion remains missing, and “art” without religion ain't art but athletic exercises.

I understand that where you are, there are no galleries, nor collectors nor investors, so then eternity doesn't have to be wasted in trying to deal with them, nor freedom's trading gentlemen; one may, what the art-mavens call, be constantly “creative,” and no one yells disparagingly at you “too much blood” for all the blood is being traded profitably on this side of the waters, sponsored by the best of royal and un-royal institutions, and mixed with revolutionary mile-high blooming lap-dogs, Armani-masterworks and conc-camp installations. And therefore, Wolf, you must take back your accusations and try to be a team-player from now on. Blood, dried and liquid and manufactured is being broadcast like the Mayas broadcasted the blood of sacrificial prisoners from the highest step of the pyramid of Chichen-Itza up to heaven.

—Boris Lurie