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

Abstract

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 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.