Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Early video art or video poetry in Germany traces back to Nam June Paik, the world's most famous video artist by note, who exhibited and performed his first works at the PARNASS Gallery (Wuppertal, Rhine Area). Those presentations still took place without the recording medium of video (as is generally known, Paik manipulated the TV tubes and the technical apparatus), but two years later he used Sony Portapaks to produce his works.

Other leading video artists, like Gerry Schum - Wolf Vostell or Jochen Gerz - had their origins within the realm of the visual art, often tied their works into fluxus actions, performances or installations. In the late 70's mainly three women layed the path for video as an art of its own. Frederike Petzold, Rebecca Horn and Ulrike Rosenbach. Klaus vom Bruch the Cologne based artist expressed himself in a consequent way using found footage of war films by combining it with a self staging in front of the camera.

In the 80's, the expressive spectrum of German video art was considerably enlarged. It increasingly integrated the disciplines of performing and visual art, though concentrating on the artistic coverage of the extended potential of image processing technology, of image manipulation via computer-based hardware. Resorts to found-footage material from TV broadcasts, Hollywood productions, commercials and news material as well as their own images and staged scenes were the centres of the artistic production. Though I do not intend to go as far as to attribute "poetic" qualities to video technology by itself (e.g. because of the ephemeral character of the image, which has been generated by an animated light ray, or because of its high capacity of integrating "traditional" arts), still it is obvious that video art, contrary to the "everyday" image flood coming from the TV set and mainstream cinema, has developed something like a standard language of visual expressiveness. Concentrating on what is essential, it is shaped by both an iconography of a metaphoric and depicting wealth of images and by a social and political concern, without neglecting aesthetical and formal aspects.

Although German artists too face considerable difficulties in presenting their products in museums, galleries, and archives, it may be assumed that in a general comparison to other countries - where the infrastructure for video art is still in the process of construction or is even reduced again due to financial restraints and shifts of resources - their situation cannot be considered extremely bad. Concerning education and training, they have several academies, universities, professional schools and film classes at their disposal; those institutes generally own good studio equipment (though there are, of course, some exceptions), some of them are part of the promotion schemes of visual art and the film business; apart from the European Media Art Festival there are other festivals that have become open to the presentation of video art. Even a slight tendency suggesting an increased interest of public and private TV channels in video art can he noticed. Though the situation may be quite good in comparison with other countries, the individual artist faces enormous difficulties in ensuring his/her education place; it is very time-consuming and it involves several setbacks to collect the means needed for a production or to find channels of distribution for a product.

The selection of German video works compiled for the10th International Videobrasil does not pretend to be complete. It is meant to give a survey of the works of recent years, ranging from the "classical" art video via slightly different music clips or performance and body art to computer-generated works or videos of a rather documentary nature. Sometimes facetious and folkloristic, sometimes political and subtle, then again rather structuralistic-formal the compilation reflects the multifarious aspects of topics and of artistic realizations within German video art.

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL. "10th Videobrasil International Electronic Art Festival": 20th to 25th November 1994, São Paulo, Brazil, 1994.