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 Köln) studeerde van 1975 tot 1976 aan het California Institute of the Arts onder John Baldessari en Bruce Nauman, en studeerde vervolgens filosofie, kunstgeschiedenis en Egyptologie aan de Universiteit van Keulen tot 1981. Hij produceerde zijn eerste videotapes in 1975 en werd, naast Marcel Odenbach en Ulrike Rosenbach, een van de sleutelfiguren van de eerste generatie Duitse video-kunst, wier centrum in die jaren Keulen was. [Voeg hier twee of drie geverifieerde tentoonstellingen en collecties toe — zie notitie hieronder.]

Ondertekend en genummerd van binnenuit uit een editie van 50.

Conditie: goed

Provenance: Edition Helga Maria Klosterfelde