Exhibitions

Moving Images

Artists & Video / Film

The Museum Ludwig will present since 30 years its first ever overview of its wide-ranging collection of film and video works. 55 installations will be presented that extend into the third dimension with substantial works, for example from Aernout Mik, Mike Kelley and Nam June Paik. Around 270 pieces will be on view at video consoles. The large-scale overview exhibition doesn't only tell the story of moving pictures in art, but also its multiple inspiration of the film. The great concen-tration of cultural activities in the Rhineland and Cologne during the 1960s in the fields of film and video created a unique situation that is reflected by the richness of the collection at Museum Ludwig. The founding of XSCREEN in Cologne in 1968 as a platform for showing avant-garde films in Germany can be seen as a milestone. What XSCREEN was for film, Nam June Paik's 1963 exhibition "Exposition of Music, Electronic Television" was for video when it opened in Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal. It set the agenda for exploring the electronic image in art.

The exhibition inquires into the influence of cinema and its narrative strategies - which can be found in highly differing works ranging from Francesco Vezzoli's mock film trailer, collages by Jonathan Horowitz using found material, or a re-release of a work by Clemens von Wedemeyer in a new context. In addition the documentary will be explored as a particular artistic approach, with examples being taken from the work of among others Renée Green and Jonas Mekas. To round off, the relationship between film and video and the exhibition space will be examined: from the "cinematic installation", which merges cinema auditorium with exhibition space, to "video sculp-ture" in which the monitors are installed as sculptural elements. And finally installations can be found that create a direct relationship between the space in the moving picture and the space of the exhibition gallery, as is shown by Aernout Mik and Guy Ben-Ner.

List of artists (choice)
Edgar Arceneaux, John Baldessari, Guy Ben-Ner, Joseph Beuys, Guillaume Bijl, Klaus von Bruch, Chris Burden, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, Bruce Conner, Michele Di Menna, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Terry Fox, Valie Export, Jeanne Faust, Jack Goldstein, Renée Green, Birgit and Wilhelm Hein, Georg Herold, Susan Hiller, Ute Hörner & Mathias Antlfinger, Jonathan Horowitz, Boaz Kaizman, Mike Kelley, Ferdinand Kriwet, Mark Leckey, Babette Mangolte, Jonas Mekas, Aernout Mik, Bruce Nauman, Marcel Odenbach, Nam June Paik, Peter Roehr, Martha Rosler, Gerry Schum, Richard Serra, Paul Sharits, Roman Signer, Bill Viola, Hannah Wilke, Mark Wallinger, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Stephen Willats, Anna Witt, u.v.a

Curator: Dr. Barbara Engelbach

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Public Tours

Information and bookings of individual tours

Symposium: From close and afar: the interweaving of art and cinema around 1970

A cooperation between the Museum Ludwig and the Kunsthistorischen Institut, University of Cologne Dr. Barbara Engelbach and Prof. Dr. Ursula Frohne

With the new technological possibilities of video projection that opened up in the mid-1980s, together with a shift in interest away from video as a means of directly recording actions to moving pictures that were specially staged or sought, the concept of the cinematic installation has truly established itself. And with this, a lot of light has been shed over the last ten years on the relationship between art and cinema. The symposium From close and afar: the interweaving of art and cinema around 1970 focuses on the period from around 1960 to 1975, when the fields of art and cinema already came in contact in special ways. The overlaps between film and art (especially video) may be observed during this period on two fronts: on the one hand, film led via "expanded cinema" to actions; and on the other an interest in the time-based media film and video was also sparked in the fine arts by works with conceptual and intermedia agendas. Simultaneously the self-reflexivity of the structural film in the early sixties led to the examination of film as material and of the conditions of perception imposed by the cinematic apparatus, which also influenced how artists approached the new medium of video. They too enquired into the specific conditions that the medium brought with it. It seems however that even today the experimental film has been unable to develop its own discursive power within the gravitational fields of art and cinema.

More specifically we can discern various lines of development in film and video in sixties Cologne and the Rhineland, where cultural activities came to be compacted in a very special way. Outstanding practitioners such as Gerry Schum, Ingrid Oppenheim, and Wulf Herzogenrath raised over the years video to a genre in its own right. Ursula Wevers's film gallery Projection and Birgit Hein's influential work as curator meant that for a short time, film could be anchored in the art context. The exhibition Film als Film, 1910 bis heute in 1977 at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, curated by Birgit Hein and Wulf Herzogenrath, marked the provisional end of this short, intensive intermezzo between art and film, which has only been brought back to mind in the last few years. Unlike London, where for example the London Filmmakers' Co-op founded in 1966 merged in 1999 with London Electronic Arts to form LUX, so that they are united in the one institution, or Vienna, where at times the film and art scene went hand in hand, in Cologne and the Rhineland a lasting attraction and repulsion reigned and still does so between the spheres of art and film.

The symposium From close and afar: the interweaving of art and cinema around 1970 takes this as its point of departure and wishes to bring the two fields of discourse together. With the help of art and film historians, film makers, artists and curators, the symposium aims to glean how far the activities pursued by film makers and artists have developed parallel and independently of one another, and where their discourses and means of communication have intersected. The chief questions are: what part has been played by authorship? How are the material/ the specifics of the media discussed as regard film/video? In what form are space, performance, actions, and audience participation themed in film/video? How is the film makers' relationship to cinema regarded, and likewise the relationship of artists using video to television as a dispositif? And what are the opinions on the distribution channels via galleries and film co-ops, as well as on the reception of the works through project spaces and exhibitions, film festivals and cinemas?

The symposium takes place the 3rd September 2010 from 1 to 8 pm in the auditorium, 1st floor in Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Talks will be in german and english.

PROGRAMME

1 pm Opening: Kasper König (Museum Ludwig)
Introduction: Ursula Frohne (Universität Köln)

1.15-2.15 pm Jonathan Walley (Denison University, Granville, USA)
Identity Crisis: Experimental Film and Artistic Expansion in the 1960s and 70s

2.15-3.15 pm Duncan White (The International Centre for Fine Art Research (ICFAR) at the University of the Arts London)
Art, Film and Video in the UK 1970-79: Divisions/ Re-Visions

3.15-3.45 pm tea break

3.45-4.45 pm Malcolm Le Grice (London)
On Performance, Material and Space

5-6.30 pm Diskussion (discussion): Wo ist er denn hin, der Film?
Wulf Herzogenrath (Kunsthalle Bremen), Birgit Hein (Berlin), Lutz Mommartz (Düsseldorf), Barbara Engelbach (Museum Ludwig, Köln)

6.30- 7 pm tea break

7- 8 pm Liz Kotz (Department of Art History, University of California, Riverside, USA)
Film & Video: Aesthetics of the Expanded Screen
Talk within the series KunstBewusst der Freunde des Wallraf-Richartz Museums/Museums Ludwig, supported by Fritz Thyssen Stiftung.

The symposium is supported by Fritz Thyssen Stiftung.

Catalogue

There will be published a catalogue.

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Additional current Exhibitions

• Russian avant-garde / project series, Museum Ludwig, Köln
• Exhibition series “Saw it, Loved it”
• Photographs from 19th Century Japan and China
• Roy Lichtenstein. Kunst als Motiv

Exhibition preview

• La Bohčme. Die Inszenierung des Künstlers in Fotografien des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts