And, the result of these powerful forces tended to make a condition around video which subsequently set the agenda of oppressive expectations for any later relations of video to the artworld. It is an accurate perception to affirm that an attachment which can only be defended rather than affirmed often leads to an overzealous adherence. It is even accurate to say that there is a dual desire in any act of insubordination. There is a double movement to and from subordination - a twinned desire which must mine the dominant structure in order to undermine it - which must use a version of it to perform a subversion of it. Because there is an asymmetrical aspect to all relations of power and to all notions of the modernist dialectic or binary oppositions, there is consequently an active and passive factor constantly being (re)negotiatied in any relations of power. The binary opposition so loved by modernist devotees always raises the issue of coupling, an act loaded with unequal opportunities.

Video to art in its conservative exclusionary sense is one such relation. Videos' best spokespeople and artists themselves often became confused by the sadistic demands on them and their media; in some cases giving it up entirely (Campus, Acconci) or in other cases defending it on some notion of formalist aesthetics like painting or sculpture (Lucier, Paik). Others simply made their practice a shadow version of television, implicating themselves even further in a situation smacking of dominance and submissiveness.

And, it is mostly true that video afficianados have often displayed an over-emotional relation to the medium, over-identifying with the qualities of its forms and hopes out of proportion to other media of aesthetic deliverance as though video's contemporariness alone were an assurance of its potency. This closed argument for video's inherent contemporariness, of course, only heightens resistance to it from professional sceptics with deep literary attachments and humanist traditionalists in the visual arts alike. Faced with these overwhelmingly strong perceptions from positions of power, an attachment to video was made to be seen as an extreme and ridiculous position. In a artworld which is conservative and object-oriented, the direct opposition to order posed by video practitioners was positioned as lacking: lacking the distance of critical detachment which is (mythically) available to other art forms.

Video and its interests were thus described and dismissed like the symptoms known in psychology as hysteria. Hysteria is the denigrating name which any unfamiliar attachment can be inscribed under. Although hysteria is actually nothing more than the underspoken being heard for the first time - a sound that will always have a strange shrillness and confusion to an ear unaccustomed to its tone. And in so naming it, I advertently stumble upon one of the prejudices against both the art and criticism of video. Video is, finally, 'feminine'. And with this admission of its 'weakness', or lack, can be assembled all the other attributes which attend that designation - decorative, ephemeral, theatrical, particular, reproductive, illusionistic and masquerading, deathly, etc.: a lexicon of terms utilized by patriarchial power to perform its fearful oppression wherever it is threatened.

However, to say that and then write about the work of Klaus vom Bruch is not to try to appropriate a "feminist" discourse to a tall white boy's productions. To read the 'feminine' into a production or activity is not to attribute to it the active engagement that feminism implies. Rather it is to register that at any moment in a historical discourse the shifting nature of the asymmetrical relations of power in play mimic most closely the modernist masculine/feminine opposition. Any 'abnormal' production will be proportionately devalued in terms which ape patriarchy's desperate struggle to maintain a stable image, a devaluation which must deny femininities and other pluralities. These fears always fatefully resemble the "dread of women" which attends the more direct gender relations under patriarchy. For instance, Canada can be seen as feminine to the United States of America (because her body is subjected to extreme economic and physical violences); Afro-Americans can be seen as feminine in relation to a white male colonizing culture (because of the extreme white paranoia of a possible excessive masculinity in both black men and women); gay men are seen as feminine in relation to heterosexual men (because of the extreme paranoia of the feminine within all men's bisexuality). The "feminine", in other words, is an oscillating position (missionary-like, it appears) within a sign system, always available for use and abuse in the political negotiation in descriptions and their adjectives.

However, it would be disingenuous not to mention that vom Bruch's recent installations with their equipment exposed and their deliberately absurd steel towers with echoes of Tatlin sometimes have, within the form that video installations take, a 'masculine' quality. These towers with men's heads at the top, for instance are clearly dual signifiers of the Oedipal drama which excludes women. To admit this is to sense how these terms easily shift according to the framework applied. For this text, I am using the term 'feminine' in relation to video in general, not in relation to the complex web of contents within historical video production which would flow fluidly along other axis and would have more complex moments of identification as both masculine and feminine and as combinations or splits of the two terms. And within Vom Bruch's tapes there are a complex of positions presented. Presumably, when modernism's dialectic hold is completely exhausted (as even the political scene seems to be advancing toward, however reluctantly), these terms will have less emotional power and less historical accuracy. But, for today they still contain enough vestiges of their older stakes to be useful and convincing. At the same time, and perhaps more interestingly, any complexifying and problematizing of the masculine/feminine stranglehold for metaphorical development is a deliberate attempt to erase the stability of their differences, while simultaneously applying them. It is to push at the edges of their absurdity while admitting their currency in the present climate.

The other major prejudice which attends video and its practices is one against television as THE theatrical site of popular culture and mid-cult values, terms which re-echo the dread of the "feminine", but are equally resistant to another construction of culture. This prejudice against TV is more surprising as systems of technology and their positivist histories as 'progressive' developments are usually thought of as 'masculine'. However, television as a medium has been singularly despised historically by intellectuals and artworld practitioners, with rare exceptions until recently. Television, more visibly than any other medium calls up the spectre of the masses as both disseminators and receivers. And the masses, like the feminine (and they may be the same thing in relation to modernism), are another passive abstraction (or abstraction of passivity) constructed for manipulation by cultural intellectuals as well as cultural industrialists. In textual games of power, television continues to represent for intellectuals a despised common ground precisely because as Andrew Ross suggests "The struggle to win popular respect and consent for authority is endlessly being waged, and most of it takes place in the realm of what we recognize as popular culture." It is a threat to elitist intellectual theories because it keeps upsetting those theories at the actual ground level of social testing where agents (consumers) act unexpectedly and unpredictably.

But, the abstracting of the masses is slowly being replaced by a respect for the "low theory" (Simon Firth's term) of consumption and video's history represents some aspect of that shift. Without rehearsing here all the reasons for the rupture now known as the postmodern, it is clear that efficacious aesthetic work is made and distributed precisely in relation to mass/popular cultural forms and that this distinguishes it from the autonomy of modernist work. It is further distinguished by a openess to formerly marginal voices, whether they be gender, ethnic, racial or even, cross-mediated forms. Ross, among others, has elaborated this in relation to cultural producers who are of the video period, writing that they are "the first generations to use their involvement with popular culture as a site of contestation in itself, rather than view it as an objective tool with which to raise or improve political consciousness" in opposition to "the last generation of American intellectuals to swear unswerving allegiance to the printed word and the dictates of European taste". But lest anyone think that this use of popular cultural forms of content and distribution has won over the art world, let me dig deeper into these pockets of prejudice.

Painting is still the episteme of art. Despite persuasive transgressions within modern, neomodern and postmodern impulses (of which video is but one), most institutionalizing forces such as art history, museology, connaisseurship, etc. radically tend to equate painting with the privileged term art. The conflation of the two terms is an attempt to share the exclusionary status of the general (art) to the particular (painting) in the same manner the word "we" might subsume the "I" and the "he/she" in any royal declaration of erasure. (And all uses of we, unreferenced, raise the status of author to royalty). Painting and art can be twinned in a subtle and unconscious way or they can be joined by vulgar and deliberate methods. More importantly than the method is the result. The superimpostion of the one to the other serves to stabilize both within a containable and static abstract category.

For instance, within the recent contestation for control of the term NEW art history, there is a wide-ranging set of attempts to rescue the moribund body of the discipline by the application of cross-disciplinary methods. More covertly, however, some of its adherents are dedicated to the goal of continuing to revitalize the status of painting. A formal suture of this sort takes place under the francophilic addiction of Norman Bryson, for example, where he can write his own personal justification through the underwriting of the grand litterateur Roland Barthes who, according to Bryson "felt no apparent uncertainty about his right to discuss painting (my emphasis)." And a list of other French writers and their painting subjects chosen by Bryson for an exclusive anthology further reveals the conservative agenda of his NEW art history. Like the contemporary French theory it glorifies in its role as a newly colonized academic territory, Bryson's NEW art history refuses to test its theoretical potential by an engagement with any art other than painting.

Of course, it must be remembered that OLD art history sustained a similar argument that painting was the proper subject of art history per se. Such a tautological argument was then conveniently proven to be quantitatively correct as well but its ideological base is even more questionable today. And this because every literary turn and "revisionist" exercise of imperial theory in Bryson's anthology betrays its nostalgia for fields of "fine" art objects (preferably paintings) under the supervision of artistocratic texts. Like other art world luminaries who on the one hand maintain that painting is just another sign "bathed in the same circulation of signs that permeates or ventilates the rest of the social structure", Bryson, on the other sleight of hand, carefully brackets painting out from photographic history, cinema history, design history and cultural studies in general. They are somehow outside (proper) art history just as ephemeral imagery is and video and performance and so on, and thus the singular status of painting can be slyly preserved, especially against the instrusions of popular and technological signs.

And to dig deeper, within painting particular genres are even further privileged to create hierachies within hierarchies - the standard organizational form of executive power. Louis Marin writes, for instance, as late as 1980, very unproblematically that "...historical painting is considered the most difficult and the most prestigious genre of painting" because it must "express diachrony, temporal relationships, yet can do so only through the network of a whole that generates its parts logically or achronically by its own signifying system." If Marin's further theorization of the Poussin painting in question (chosen not incidentally, because it contains "two semitoic systems: language, more specifically, writing - and painting") were applied to advertisements for jeans, would the conclusions be so different? Other than the pre-supposed "difficulty" of historical painting, could not the highly coded and topical advertisements offer the same possibility "to understand that the very time of the referential story regulates the order of the loci and finally imposes a reading order on the viewer"? Isn't Marin's "critical attempt to explore representational systems as apparatuses of power" available outside the paradigm of painting? The question is rhetorical of course as all courses in cultural studies are based in such obvious transpositions of politically inflected semiologies to a wide variety of cultural signs. But, the fact that it can be re-issued in the name of painting is a register of the investment in painting by theorticians as well as collectors.

My intention here is not to negate the potential for painting to act disruptively and engagingly in the world but rather to quickly suggest some of the depth to which this hegemony of its importance lies. Painting, in a very material sense, is more difficult to do today precisely because of its too ready consumptability into markets sustained by just such unproblematic values of OLD discourses. It may just be that by keeping it autonomous and "difficult", such value structures are doing it the damage of not letting it breathe outside the weight of its own (art) history. It may be that painting needs to be seen as a competing sign system which does establish material and historical differences in order for its special value to be ascertained. When protected by elite devices of textual sleight of hand, painting is now in the defensive position that video once was for exactly the opposite reasons in the economy of the art world. Too acceptable, painting is now suffering a certain invisibility. As a symbolic order it may be in the same state of crisis as masculinity itself. Which could bring us back to video after all these postponements.

A friend of mine went to teach in the frontier town of Yellowknife in the North West Territories of Canada. He was instructing members of the Innuit community on methods of turning their verbal stories into narrative "dramas" for production on the national radio network. Immediately, it is possible to see a cultural contradiction in this program in which, on the one hand, the stories are made consumable for a southern white culture in its own language and codes while on the other hand the stories from this oral culture are at least being preserved. Preservation is obviously an important function to a culture whose traditional modes of oral communication are rapidly being replaced by a universalizing culture of electronic visualization. But it is a process of museumification which also signals the recognition of a loss. Such blatant contradictions are the daily manifestations of today's Arctic regions as well as other formerly indigenous cultures in formerly remote areas of the world. An anecdote tells it all. My friend and a local man went fishing one winter's day. They travelled by dog sled out onto the huge frozen lake; dug a hole in the ice and spent a luckless day fishing. When he realized that it was late and they had no food for dinner, my friend asked the local man what they were going to do for dinner. The local man reached under the exotic furs which covered the dog sled and pulled out a cellular telephone. Using this charmingly accessible state-of-the-arttechnology, he proceeded to call a pizza parlor back in the town. By the time they had returned across the frozen lake with their dogs, a hot Neapolitan pizza was waiting for them.

A postcard from Klaus vom Bruch reveals that on Easter Island, the isolated home of the enigmatic rock heads which are the very ciphers of romantic European dreams of pr-historic otherness, there is an extradordinarily long runway which has been built for the Challenger spacecraft. If the commuter spacecraft has problems re-entering the Earth's atmosphere over the Pacific on its way to its designated destination in California, the Easter Island runway is a multi-million dollar emergency landing substitute - an unheralded but important part of the military and commercial occupation of the Western Pacific in general. Another postcard from Klaus, reveals that one Jesuit priest in the Cologne Cathederal is responsible for adjusting the equalizer on the digital sound system. This system broadcasts the in-house services complete with pre-recorded music and as well as broadcasting the calls to services which are heard throughout the downtown area. It acts as a simulation or electonic echo of the medieval community of sound that religion still desires. Such examples make it possible to see how the 'primitive' and the technical are implicated in unexpected marriages in places as remote as the Arctic or Easter Island or Cologne, marriages which disavow the formerly strict autonomy of place which underlies a modernism which based in a dialectic of center/regional or urban/country. Today, everywhere is everywhere all at once.

If the world is at least neo-modern, if not post-modern with all of its attendent postmortem announcements, its most obvious signs then are in the technological communications systems which now pervade everyday life. Technologies of communication are the common denominator which insinuate themselves (visibly and invisibly) into all other discursive systems to elide difference: the local is the site of the internationl and the international is the site of the local. Today, to be local and international is not a contradiction then (the pizza is hot and has all the authentic ingredients after all). Rather it is a condition of world-wide simultaneity and a dispersed local identity which exposes all prior historical constructs of stability and unity as simply nostalgic constructions. The defensive concentration on the formal qualities of language and text as code and system within academic communities is an important index of printed language's anachronistic status in the face of the spectacle of these electro-technologies. It is these systems of communications technologies which have increased the speed of both the anziety and alienation of modernism, diluted the force of authentic cultural languages and unsentimentally dissolved the spaces of difference dependent upon a simplistic notion of Otherness. The Coca-Colanization of the post World War II environment is an imperialism of international capital at an unprecedented scale entirely made possible by an extensive techno-nervous system. Even a Jesuit priest in Cologne will know that edited and sweetened music travels faster and is more effective as myth and propoganda than the traditional diplomacy and politics practiced by outdated authoritarians of power.

To say any of this of course is no news to anyone, or, more accurately it is old news (the oxymoron par excellence) to anyone in the Western world. But, as it is being constantly reminded, the West isn't the whole world. The middle East, the East and all the other Others have forced their way (international localism) into even the most conservative of Western media. But, the Other's representations are not yet completely lucid to onlookers caught in modernist myth. For instance, McLuhan would have found May and June's battle in 1989 between Westernized students and the old Easternized guard in Beijing a perfect example of a modernizing impulse toward visualization (the students' English placards for the TV crews) squared off against the values of an oral culture (Zhao Ziyang's public eulogy for Hu Yaobang in June). As each news report in the West began "rumour has it" or "there are rumours", the West should have known itself to be in the midst of an oral culture in which Western visual media could only be a victim of its own rhetorical instincts toward closure. Unable to understand the cultural kinesics of orality, western journalists even went so far as to predict a democratic "civil" war exactly at the moment that the only battle was already over.

Clearly, however,the oral versus visual or east versus west or mythic versus empirical are not general categories which can be unquestionably applied anymore. There can be no assumption of a perfectly stratified dialectic, the way McLuhan would have had it earlier. Similarly, in New York, Tomkins Square Park in the summer of 1989 was the site of a battle between the administrative policing of gentrification and the homeless who have staked out partial and sporadic claims to the territory. The urban homeless have been forced to become a nomadic oral tribe living in donated tents pitted against the panopticon of real estate which is the power base of former mayor Koch. And Koch could throw the homeless out again and again saying that they cannot "erect permanent structures" in the park. Only a culture which aspired to the condition of photographic reality or cartoons could consider tents to be permanent structures. And yet,today, that can became a full (unsuccessful) political campaign strategy. Thus,the widespread use of formerly dialectically opposite terms, like democractic communism and urban nomads with permanent tents attest to the conditions of simultaneity and logical disparity inside a single culture which themselves elide and elude difference. Such terms mock both historicization in conventional terms and rational intellectuality by virtue of their fit with of Orwellian newspeak. Difference, whether cultural, historical, sexual or lingusitic, is shifted swiftly along a technological barometer of communications which tries to admit to all things at all times, a kind of promiscuous desperation towards inclusion and occupation, an enclosure which flattens difference to a dot matrix screen where everything surfaces confessionally at the same register. (Satire is the loser under present conditions.)

Thus, contradicting myself is a necessity within the conditions of this argument. Contrary to all totalizing theories and all the examples of the technologically sublime existence of homogenous contemporary life, individual common experience can show that differences which make the difference do exist. They do not exist as the customs within communities now made obselete by the universalizing tendencies of visual consumerism, but in the ways that people, or "agents" receive and respond to information according to sex, class, nationality, linguistic affiliation(s) and experience. In other words, despite the overpowering theories and examples of cultural surreality or hyperhorizontality that attend neomodernism, individual people act in surprising and upsetting ways. Supercultures are transformed and resisted by subcultures which then can become supercultures which will then be resisted etc in a mantra of and to instabilities in the codes, of and to representationality as a field of insecure meanings being vied for; (in the United States of America, for instance, one student's use of the national flag on the floor in Chicago or one person's burning of a flag can threaten a whole governmental system and an exhibition of Robert Maplethorpe photographs can cause a federal congressional debate). Contrary to avant-garde traditions of value as well as the sustaining beliefs of the managers of mass media, audiences are actually very complex and they respond less predictably and less respectfully than either academic theorists or data researchers would desire. By exhibiting the same characteristics of simultaneity - of concurrent contradictions - audiences are as unforeseenly pervasive and as oriented to instability and change(of a different sort) as the techno-environment which encloses them. The same simultaneity of options which circumscribes all activity in the name of an ideology of homogenous consumption is also a profound pluralist confusion which is embraced by audiences as a limited, but profound, freedom.

For West Germans of Klaus vom Bruch's generation, the haunting of the past, a self-conscious past which visits every citizen to make of each of them a "prisoner of history" as vom Bruch calls it, is an oscillating presence in any discourse about politics or culture. As Andreas Huyssens has succinctly put it "The issue, in other words, is not whether to forget or to remember, but rather how to remember and how to handle representations of the remembered past a time when most of us, over forty years after the war, only know that past through images, films, photographs, representations". For the most famous of the recent West German artists, like Penck, Baselitz, and Immendorf, there is an obesience to an impulse like the one Huyssens describes in the paintings of Anselm Kiefer ..."Steeped in a melancholy fascination with the past, Kiefer's work makes visible a psychic disposition dominant in postwar Germany that has been described as the inability to mourn. If mourning implies an active working through of a loss, then melancholy is characterized by an inability to overcome that loss and in some instances even a continuing identification with the lost object of love". Huyssens has been singularly insightful in also identifying this drifting melancholy in West German playwrights, filmakers and painters and to show how "All of this work was ultimately rooted in the acknowledgement that the fascist past and the postwar democratic present are inescapably chained together...". As well Huyssens has impeccably recorded the kind of historical moments of reception in West Germany for pop art and for avant-garde theater as well as specific popular cultural events to establish the differences which have accompanied the dilmemma of Vergangenheitsbewaltigung (coming to terms with the past) in these forms, these artists and this national post war history in opposition to their reception in North America. Huyssens has been particularly important for English-speakers in identifying the limitations and constraints of avant-garde projects in contemporary West Germany which, by his persuasive claim, are now historical. In doing so, he, like others influenced by feminist discourse, has resurrected the notion of subjectivity and emotional resonance as important responses to aesthetic aspects of sensuality and fantasy in everyday life and popular culture, as well as art projects.

If these painters (and other well-known artists) deal, successfully or unsuccessfully, with a repression inherent within postwar German culture and politics, they still stand within an authorized discourse of the proper name of ART - a discourse with its concentration on theories of materials, stylistic innovation (or regression) and, always, noble subjects. These West German artists' high visibility is still due to a system of canonization of materials, gender bases, and conservative distribution systems. It is, after all, a prescriptive list of men (only) who are all ambitious in the heroic sense by virtue of subject matter, scale of works and allegiance to the patriarchial history of the grand machine of painting. Their place is still the museum and the homes of collectors through a regulated market system. And, they continue to work within the separated dualisms which make of modernism a logic of progress with a potential synthesis: myth/history in the works Kiefer (as Huyssens argues); up/down in the works of Baselitz; East/West in the works of Immendorf; primitive/sophisticate in the works of Penck or even mass culture/art in Polke or abstract/figurative - painting/photography in the strategies of Richter.

But there is of course another kind of repression operative in the artworld itself; a repression of the temporal and technological arts in general - what the Canadian video artist and theoretician Tom Sherman has called an attempt to maintain museums (and by extension private collections and all sites of art consumptions) as "technology-free zones". For it is only by eliminating the time of the present and its technological signs that painting can maintain its relation to the past which is clearly both a strength and a weakness. A repression within a repression then exists in the case of West Germany. By repressing the work which is in and of technology, the distribution system for paintings by the list of those above, for example, can maintain clear ties with traditional forms of both production and reception and remain clearly and comfortably within the safety of an aesthetic discourse of individuals (regardless of the artists' or critics' motivation for a different effectivity). But,there is another, more modest, less proper and therefore more potentially effective history from a group of artists in West Germany including, for instance, Ulrike Rosenbach, Rebecca Horn, Astrid Klein, Marcel Odenbach, and Rosemarie Trockel, among others, whose work in video, film, photography, performance and installation during the same period of production formulates the questions and considerations differently. This is because their work exists in a different time of representationality and by direct implication it exists in the marginal but unoccupied space between art and entertainment and thus, in the space of unrealized audiences. This is not to necessarily make a claim for them or their works as having the status of the avant-garde which is a claim for a certain conditions of historical production anyhow as Huyssens has argued. Rather it is to recognize that the unconsumated spaces of audiences is more vulnerable, shifting and undetermined around media with less defined reception systems. These artists have explored the real repressed materiality and subjects of contemporary life in manners, methods and media in which split subjectivity and the cultural conditions of gender and differentiated relations to mass culture are equally important. This places them centrally in the discourse of mourning as well as in a discourse on contemporary power per se (as more is at stake in postwar culture than national identities or ethnic mythologies).

Klaus vom Bruch's work is exemplary of this lesser known, but significant contribution to the issues of contemporary identity beyond national concerns but includes those assossiations inherited by a generation whose fathers went to war for Germany. In an early video tape, The Allieså Tape, for instance, vom Bruch literally edits himself into the tape, superimposing himself onto and into the very film documents of the American bombing of Aachen, the Krupp factory and Cologne, documents of which are crucial to the continuing representations of victory broadcast today by the media in the 'Allied' West. Vom Bruch's presence in the tape is as both victor and victim, bomber and bombed, anonymous and specific - the ambiguous possessor of a voyeuristic history of guilt-laden images. Accosted by these images, his body, like the body of Cologne, is fragmented and destroyed; the remnants of civilization are only images, and, like vom Bruch's thoughts, are unavailable - left to the imaginative associations of the viewer. The images in the Allies tape are specific - a particular day and a recorded moment of American bombing with the famous Cologne Cathederal prominent in its specific historical role as aerial military landmark (saved by Roosevelt for that reason alone). The film footage has the nostalgic aura of such black and white film's facticity; its material presence.

Yet, the tape's presentation is also post-war in its contemporary intrusion of the youthful vom Bruch himself who becomes a living actor in the present time of a contemporary technological space by virtue of the colour video image. The essential difference between the quality and materiality of the kinds of images (old black and white film and newer colour video) is the major material and emotional register which sustains the tape's registration of a gap between then and now, between accuracy and doubt, between fact and fiction, between construction and reconstruction. The formal movement between the two media cancels nostalgia without cancelling history. Vom Bruch himself is both there in history and in the nowhere space of contemporary television. The tape's unrelenting repetition (a vom Bruch obsession with obsession) of the same bombing footage appropriated from an American network document drowns out potential narrative (the male progressive 'realist' and Hollywood trajectory from conflict to climax and denouement) in favour of a highly-charged insistent, what I will call, techno-contemplation. It also references the (now unavailable) landscape tradition of painting as it recalls, recapitulates and remembers and dismembers in the form of the only mnemonic talisman available; (Huyssen's "that past through images, films, photographs, representations"). The past is presented through a violent surgical archeology of mediated representations which literally cut the walls of history and re-open the individuals in it into bits of impassioned information.

In Propellerband, a similar relay of military men readying a prop plane is juxtaposed with a Japanese mother and, again, vom Bruch's face being chopped by the rapid editing. His attentive facial reactions are visualized so quickly as to remain only as afterimages like the effects of violence itself on memory. Or in The Duracell Tape, the ending to an advertisment for the storage of power in a battery is juxtaposed with children in a formation which appears as a dance but which is actually a Japanese training rehearsal film for air raids. The implications of power, the power of war and the power of representations are frozen in an edited tango of their own via the memory of a mass media mode. Vom bruch is participating in a contemporary version of Surrealism where a logic of irrationality is used (like Rebecca Horn's films and installations) to recover specific images of the collective psyche. And this pscyhe is not a Jungian myth, but, according to vom Bruch and Huyssens, instead is a media data base. He forces its forces to the surface of the screen - a primal screen which is simultaneously imposed by larger cultural systems and recieved in the privacy of a viewer's own head. Like vom Bruch's own coming to terms with these representations, which the audience literally "sees through", the tapes' mechanized repetitions allow no escape, no heroic identification, no immediate intellectual responses. An audience is positioned like vom Bruch himself in an inescapable history - experientially within the network of telecommunicated images, a system which is unavailable to passive contemplation or textual exegisis.

The works avoid easy reduction to description in language, a tenet of modernism; instead they leave only the imprint of their effect, the surplus of their impact. The relentless grinding and never-ending contemporary visual echo of these image "bites" provides an afterimage of death and power which promotes a release from fascination by burying through mechanized ritual the only body available - the social body hidden in and through the technology of representations and the representations of technology. As a prisoner of history, vom Bruch digs into and, finally, out of the archives of mediated images. Firstly overwhelmed and then finally imploded into the data bank, his video performance is paralleled in the hypnotic viewing scene where the audience finally also escapes from the relentless drumming of the edits. Vom Bruch does not resort to elite literary references like Kiefer to reverberate a question of national identity (which is a 'pure' modernist concept whose sustenence is the very core of the unavaoidable history), but rather turns the issue inside out. He relates individual subjectivity to the enclyclopedia of media images to mourn the misuse of power which attends the specific historical events depicted. He also mourns the misuse of the television experience itself, the technology of choice today which perpetuates distortions and disinformation of history. By issuing both history in the form of document and metahistory in the form of technology itself, vom Bruch provides a way of working through the walls of the prison of history, walls built at the depth of popular images. This imaginative deconstruction offers a mourning which is beyond melancholia to a healthy re-encounter with the tension and aggression of the actual experience. It simulates as it reproduces a painful engagement with a complex social guilt to be experienced as a private deprivation which can be overcome.

Without simply listing a tape-by-tape explanation of meaning through vom Bruch's productive career, this short synopsis is meant to show how vom Bruch's use of a technological experience of images and sound in time takes advantage of the popular media of film and television to incise an equal response. I,m trying to show how he uses an emotional and overwhelming assault on the senses which re-awakens and re-opens a place for individual experience, but within the forms of popular media. He warily respects the "spectacular" aspect of popular media because as Ross has written "In fact, the power of the 'spectacle' depends upon its success in addressing and intersecting with deeply felt everyday needs and anzieties, and its articualtion of an incomplete circuit of desire is one in which we recognize ourselves and which we therefore want to complete by acknowledging its power."

Vom Bruch's methods duplicate the violence of war and the blitz of television's ongoing attack on the body to offer recovery of the private and subjective under duress from both spheres of power. Such a method takes advantage of the shorter history of the medium of television to subvert it to the possibility of individual response without recourse to a prior institutional safetynet of aesthetics. The video experience produces authentic experiential memory rather than the distance of a fetishized object; produces a process rather than a product and, importantly, produces the effect of a lament rather than a discription of a continuing distress.

To reduce vom Bruch's work simply to this process of mourning however is to overlook his important work on the nature of personal desire in relation to technology as well, a subject beyond the scope of this short essay. Although they are outside of this introduction, it is noteable that such tapes as The West is Alive or Relatively Romantic similarly appropriate the cliches of film and television's climatic narrative structure to redit them in favour of a refraction of their meanings to an individual subject's responses. Vom Bruch wryly acts as an alter-ego for an audience to exemplify the possibilities of securing meanings back to a sphere of choice and agency. Humorously, as in 1000 Kisses, vom Bruch twists the strands of the technological weave back to the undetermined and unprotected sphere of audience resolution allows for a process which vacillates between art and popular television. Such work coincides with Ross' description of other work complicit with popular forms..."Committing critical speech to common, vernacular ground doesn't mean giving up politics, only a sacred, theoretical attachment to political essences."

Using the techniques of a media bricoleur, vom Bruch actually demonstrates how television, usually considered as a centralized power and determining cultural force, can be personally embraced and used as a one-to-one system of communication. Defying its institutional role and its commercial allegiances, vom Bruch literally sets up a television station in his newest museum installations. Complete with transmitter and receiver, a self-enclosed or closed-circuit system is established withich, although dependent upon technology, subverts it to subjective and aesthetic play. This displacement (which is actual and not just metaphorical) acknowledges the possibility of individual power and selection and overcomes traditional forms of television's expansionary capacities. A transmission becomes a mission of transference - the artist to the public as a potential against the suppressive qualities of overauthorized communications. The installations offer both a way in and a way out.

Although earlier installation work concentrated on his own relation to his father or his father and brother (as in his Documenta 8 work with Klaus and his father as tv monitor prisoners of Benjamin Brittain's kitschy "Requieum" music), vom Bruch's most recent installation in Sweden focused on the audience as direct subject. The self-portrait has disappeared but the artist's voice has continued to emerge and evolve. Vom Bruch is no longer a prisoner with a "problem", but a willing subject who has entered a community of speakers speaking more equally in the space of dialogue. Vom Bruch's first gesture toward that new voice was generous in the extreme. The installation literally created the space for dialogue by making the audience the ironic target of art. A radar system which itself represents the most sophisticated military and economic data gatherer used by all political systems was more modestly used in the installation to register abstract patterns which initiated from both the local landscape and from museum visitors. The object of both art and technology -the individual under surveillance - became a migh lighter subject in a work which also obliquely parodied the notion of a contentless abstract art. The museum visitor is made aware of his or her own visible presence in real time within a panoptic system of radar - one which is used vernacularly by fishermen to find "fish". Vom Bruch continues to research the artist's function; the "fishing for an audience" has the clarity and confidence of a subject who speaks his own voice, not that of the fathers'. And, again, awareness at a subjective level is returned to an audience which can literally understand its own place within both the politics of war and the politics of art. A mutual space has been created by vom Bruch in the museum for a dialogue to begin in which both the interchangeable speaker and listener can be respectful of each other in a search to understand and misuse technology.

Bruce W. Ferguson
July 16, l989

1. The first sustained and influential argument around video from outside its own tight circle was Rosalind Krauss' which labelled early video as "narcississtic", a label of overattachment if there ever was one. See "Video: the Aesthetics of Narcissism", October, no. 1 (Spring, l976), pp. 51-64. It set the psychological terms and tone for the the debate ever since; one then, not surprisingly, characterised by a seeming defensiveness on behalf of video's proponents. This seems especially unfortunate when October as an institution since has claimed to be in favour of the "theatrical" and against the "autonomy" of art in its editorial stance. But, October's is a complex and contradictory editorial position upon examination which, departing from its original closeness to practices, has gradually evolved to a narrower and narrower canon of names and media, not expanding its theorical involvement outwards to any wider body of practices beyond the European definition of an artistic historical avant-garde (with rare exceptions ie. the Aids issue.)

2. Once seen, the feminine/masculine 'opposition' can be found at every level of discursive practice. ie computerese with software/hardware hierarchies; bankese with its deposit/savings/ interests/ withdrawal procedures of performance; plumbing and electrical equipment salesmanship; etc., etc. and a whole history of poetry and jokes predicated on the double entendre (the two-backed word) and the euphemism. In a langauge like English which is supposedly unsexed (pas comme en francais), there's a whole lot of gendering going on anyway.

3. See Andreas Huyssens, "Mass Culture as Woman", After the Great Divide, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1986. Huyssens argues persuasively that "The autonomy of the modernist art work, after all, is always the result of a resistance, an abstention, and a suppression - resistance to the seductive lure of mass culture, abstention from the pleasure of trying to please a larger audience, suppression of everything that might be threatening to the rigorous demands of being modern and at the edge of time." (p. 54) and that "The fear of the masses in this age of declining liberalism is always also a fear of woman, a fear of nature out of control, a fear of the unconscious, of sexuality, of the loss of identity and stable ego boundaries in the mass." (p. 52). Huyssens makes this argument a techno- trope in "The Vamp and the Machine" in the same book, a discussion of the role of Maria/robot in Fritz Lang's Metropolis - a techno-trope which could be updated by an analysis of Cronenberg's films, for instance.

4. Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture, Routledge, New York and London, 1989, p.13

5. Ibid. p.11 It must be mentioned that this unswerving allegiance to European values and text is not simply generational as Ross hurriedly suggests. Its long history and institutional placement assures it as a force of institutional resistance, regardless of the age of its adherents, for some time to come. See, for instance, footnote l, re: October.

6. Norman Bryson, ed., Calligram: Essays in New Art History from France, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988, p.xiv. And Barthes himself begins one of his essays with the remarkable statement, "So we must take a painting (let us keep this convenient name, even if it is an old one", p. 166. Of course, he wants to keep it because in his discussion of Twombly's work, he will register his real interest which is that the works are "a frequent recourse to a mixture of writing and painting". This desire for text, for reading, is at the center of all resistances to art forms which deliberately deny such logos.

7. For an extended harangue on this pull towards text in contemporary French thought, see my "The Eiffel Tower, Only Morceaux", C Magazine, 21, Toronto, March l989, p. 12-34

8. For an alternative to Bryson's approach see Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign 1907-14, The University of Chicago Press, l988. In it, ephemera overlooked in traditional art history is put to the forefront of a reading of an iconographical battle. For a critique of canon foddering in general, see The New Art History, eds. A.L. Rees and Frances Borzello, Camden Press, London, l986

9. Op Cit.., Louis Marin, "Towards a Theory of Reading", Calligram, p.67

10. In a recent account of some new works by Gerhard Richter, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh uses the word painting(s) eight times in the first paragraph alone and history (ical) six times to buddy-buoy one another up with an exchange of prestige from word to word echoing Marin's concern for the status of such work. In order for Buchloh to account for the departure of Richter from "the taboo against remembering this particular episode of German history", he must, like all serious art historians, erase all popular fictional representations like Margarethe von Trotta's film Marianne and Juliane in order to re-establish the "contemporary difficulties in the production of historical representation in painting", although he at least recognizes the difficulty as a "crisis" rather than as an unproblematized positive value like Marin proposes. See October 48, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., l989, p.88-109

11. A sign of this change can be seen in the new "Innuit art"; videotapes by independent producers who have emerged from the Innuit Broadcasting Corporation.

12. For a good account of the deaths announced by the advent of those of post-modernism, see Dick Hebdige, "Staking out the Posts", Chapter 8 in Hiding in the Light, A Commedia Book, Routledge, London and New York, l988

13. Andreas Huyssens, "Anselm Kiefer: The Terror of History, the Temptation of Myth", October 48, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachussets, Spring, l989, p.30. Huyssens' work on Kiefer is an antidote to Buchloh's interpretation of Richter's work which centers on trying to establish certain events (recent rightest atrocities) and methods (the distanciation of modernist painting) as proper to a construction of of a realistic "history". Huyssen's work seems more aligned to a notion of history like Hayden White's where" It now seems possible to hold that an explanation need not be assigned unilaterally to the category of the literally truthful on the one hand or the purely imaginary on the other, but can be judged solely in terms of the richness of the metaphors which govern its sequence of articulation" and that "to recognize that there is no such thing as a single correct view of any object under study but that there are many correct views, each requiring its own style of representation." in "The Burden of History", Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, l978. p. 46-47

14. Ibid. p.39

15. Ibid. p.27

16. see particularly, Andreas Huyssens, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism,Indiana University Press, Boomington and Indianapolis, 1986. in which four essays deal directly with a "politics of reading" in works by German artists.

17. A female student in Berlin told me recently that George Baselitz still teaches at the Akademie that "women can't paint", a statement which seems unconsciously parodic in relation to his own work.

18. This idea of a male oedipal journey available in all "Hollywood" narrative is put into significant question by Tania Modleski in The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory, Methuen, New York and London, 1988 19. For the most useful and comprehensive text on the relation between the technology of TV and the technologies of war, see Joyce Nelson, The Perfect Machine: TV in the Nuclear Age, between the lines, Toronto, l987 where she develops the thesis that "As technological cataract, television has been at the forefront of disseminating an ideology of technological omnipotence, the sign of which is surely the bomb itself. By uniting North American society around television, the dominanat military-industrial powers subtly united the populace around all technological advance, including the perfection of nuclear weapons". p. 26

20. Andrew Ross, Op Cit., p. 111. In this, Ross is in agreement with Huyssens in his description of the unprepardness of the left for the success of the West German television broadcast of "Holocaust". See Huyssens, After the Great Divide, Op Cit., chapter 6.

21. Andrew Ross, Op Cit., p. 9

22. One of the earliest examples of this was the work done for the exhibition "The Impossible Self", curated by Sandy Nairne and myself for the Winnipeg Art Gallery in April, l988, entitled "Up on the Rooftop".