Klaus vom Bruch (1952) - Götterdämmerung

Klaus vom Bruch: Kleine Götterdämmerung, 1992

Rubber object with chrome-plated brass antenna. Ca. 10 × 10 × 13 cm. Edition of 50.

A hand-sized block of rubber with a polished brass antenna rising from it. The object has the silhouette of a transmitter — a base and a mast, the elementary form of every radio, every radar station, every field set — reduced to the point where nothing remains but the gesture of broadcasting. What it is made of contradicts what it looks like: rubber is the material of insulation and damping, the substance used to absorb signals rather than emit them. The antenna sits in a body that cannot transmit.

The title carries the same double edge. Wagner's Götterdämmerung is the burning of Valhalla, the end of an order that believed itself eternal — and by 1992 it had long since become the standard German shorthand for any collapse of a system. Klaus vom Bruch built his work from the imagery of the Cold War: military footage, aircraft, radar screens, the technological apparatus through which the two blocs watched each other and addressed their own populations. His video tapes of the late 1970s and 1980s cut this found material into short, obsessive loops, often with the artist's own face inserted into the montage, so that the viewer sees the machinery of transmission at the same time as the transmission itself.

Made three years after the fall of the Wall and one year after the dissolution of the Soviet Union — and in the immediate aftermath of the first war broadcast live as a radar and camera spectacle — this small object holds that entire apparatus in the palm of the hand. The transmitter has become a paperweight; the twilight of the gods has become a desk object. It is a joke with a very cold centre, which is characteristic of vom Bruch's work: the point is never nostalgia for the Cold War but the observation that the media infrastructure outlived the ideologies it served.

Klaus vom Bruch (b. 1952 in Cologne) studied from 1975 to 1976 at the California Institute of the Arts under John Baldessari and Bruce Nauman, and subsequently philosophy, art history and Egyptology at the University of Cologne until 1981. He produced his first videotapes in 1975 and became, alongside Marcel Odenbach and Ulrike Rosenbach, one of the defining figures of the first generation of German video art, whose centre in those years was Cologne. [Add two or three verified exhibitions and collections here — see note below.]

Signed and numbered inside from an edition of 50.

Condition: good

Provenance: Edition Helga Maria Klosterfelde