Tv Guide - Wolf Vostell

ArtForum, April, 2001 by Glenn O'Brien

Lately I feel nostalgic for the art-historical roads not taken, a retro yen for rebels, troublemakers, and long shots. The atmosphere today is still, the forecast unchanged. We're in the dollar doldrums. It's all too peaceful--too decorative or decorous, too in tune with the boom. Watching Attila on cable I drift into a reverie: A barbarian horde rides into Chelsea and crashes the gates, or at least graffitis the pristine white walls.

What's most interesting to me now are those other "Pop" artists: Ray Johnson, Joe Brainard, and the German Wolf Vostell--category escapists, fame and fortune refuseniks, historical footnotes now kicking all the right canonical butts. I still love Andy Warhol, but his followers pale in his neon aura. Now's the time to take another look at the Anti Warhols, the Pop practitioners who did for mass culture's dark sideshows what Drella did for celebritydom's pop pantheon. Two of them, Johnson and Brainard, have recently received substantial shows. Vostell, who was associated with Fluxus from the beginning and with the wild bohemian NO! artists (especially NO!art cofounder Boris Lurie) and their Happenings, is currently the subject of a small survey at Janos Gat Gallery in New York (April 10-May 12). Together these three artists show the drift of another Pop stream--not counter, but parallel. Vostell's reemergence in particular seems a timely antidote to today's smug, uptight scene. Warhol said "Pop art is about li king things." Vostell was more about hating things, hating them generously and spectacularly, out of love and out of necessity. He did it beautifully, serenely, even transcendentally.

Wolf Vostell was born near Cologne, in Leverkusen, Germany, in 1932. (he died in 1998), but his family managed to escape the most cataclysmic effects of the war--and the Holocaust (Vostell's mother was Sephardic)--by moving to Czechoslovakia, where they lived from 1939 to 1945. While at school the future Fluxus provocateur experienced the war directly. Later, Vostell remarked that his first Happening was an air raid: "Each child was told to hide under a different tree. From my tree I watched an aerial battle and saw the bombs fall from the sky to the ground, like great flocks of birds." At the war's end, the thirteen-year-old Vostell traveled with his mother and sister to Cologne on foot (the trip took the family three months), witnessing the wholesale devastation of his country.

Like Warhol, Vostell came up through commercial art. At eighteen he went to art school in Cologne; in his early twenties he attended L'Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, while serving as the assistant to the great poster artist and lithographer A.M. Cassandre (the inventor of the art deco supergraphic and the serial poster, designed to catch the eye from a moving vehicle). With him Vostell refined his pop graphic sense and would apply the techniques used to sell Ricard, Cinzano, and Gitane to the politics of confrontation, while studying the Talmud, Hieronymus Bosch, Goya, and Jung.

At this time in Paris, Vostell began developing an artistic process he called "decoll/age," and although the French decollagistes (Raymond Hams, Jacques de la Villegle, et al.) had been working in this vein from as early as 1949, Vostell--who innovatively applied the concept to live performance--would later claim to have coined the term, on September 6, 1954, after reading an account of a plane crash in Le Figaro: "Shortly after take off (decollage) a Superconstellation fell from the sky, plunging into the river Shannon." "I ran to the dictionary and found that the strict meanings of the term were 'to detach' and 'to die,"' Vostell recalled. "That news story unleashed in me a fascination for reality, for the complex phenomena of the age.... I felt an urgent need to include directly in my art everything that I saw and heard, felt and learned, taking as my starting point the literal meaning of the word de-coll/age--to apply that concept to the frank, distorted forms of mobile fragments of reality--that is, to happenings." Decollage literally describes the technique of Vostell's early work, deconstructing the poster--"a productive principle which employs destruction ... stands in absolute contrast to collage, which generally juxtaposes materials and objects that are not destroyed." In fact, decollage is not so different from collage in technique as in intent, presenting a vision not so much of random, ironic juxtaposition, but of the erosion of layers, corrosion, attrition, entropy. Vostell also painted, made sculpture and environments, and in 1958 staged his first large-scale Happening (perhaps the first in Europe), Das Theater ist auf der Strasse (Theater happens on the street), though its second act, which was to involve disruptively re-placing the fragmented wreckage of car crashes on the street where the accidents had occurred, was never performed.

That same year Vostell began incorporating televisions in his paintings and assemblages. Transmigration, 1958, is thought to represent the first time that a painting included a working television set--an inevitable gesture for which Vostell was perfectly suited. The television would remain an element in his work for the rest of his life, along with the automobile (Mercedes-Benz!), the jet aircraft, and the missile. In the early '60s Vostell began making Pop art, independently of Rauschenberg, Johns, Warhol, et al., although he was never considered a Pop artist--nor even by close peers like Lurie. Vostell's techniques, his palette, and even his subject matter are often strikingly reminiscent of Rauschenberg--one of the more overtly political American Pop artists--and of Warhol. At times the resonance is uncanny. Vostell painted Marilyn in 1963, a year after Warhol did. His Lenin, 1962, combined paint, pages from a magazine, and six lightbulbs. And one of Vostell's most resonant images from the '60s was the ic onic photo of a suspected Viet Cong being shot point-blank in the head (Nur die 1 [Only the 1], 1968, among others). Vostell conjured this global ghost over traffic jams and cityscapes, in Doppler shift living colors, haunting the ether of the East. At times, as in LBJ, 1967, his palette is an apotheosis of psychedelic Day-Glo.