REGINA WYRWOLL

In the early 1980s, Herbert Wentscher born 1951, like many artists of his generation, oriented himself on television, which, with the cinema, claimed to be the sole representative of visual culture but shut itself off from artistic experimentation, apart from a few exceptions. But instead of deconstructing television’s imagery and transforming it into rapid, often aggressive sequences, Wentscher targeted the stolid culture of folk-music. In ironic-treacly video songs it was his intention to crystalise the contact zones of everyday and high culture, and in this way to mark the instant in which profane turns into holy and vice-versa.

In the old German Federal Republic, and into the bargain in its capital Bonn, the founding of the video art festival in 1984 was a spirited reaction to the drifting apart of the various art scenes and their social relevance. While the painters of the “Junge Wilde” established the immediate applicability of works in the market, experimental and social-critical artists finally found themselves appropriate publicity in the Videonale and other festivals founded shortly afterwards. To this day, the stubbornnesss and openness which is necessary for artistic development, has been retained by Videonale, even if the festival itself has arrived in the museum!