The TV as Gallery

In April 1969, works of the international avant-garde appeared in an unexpected place: on the television screens of German living rooms. The filmmaker Gerry Schum and the art historian Ursula Wevers had transformed television into a space of exhibition for art. With the Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum and the later videogalerie schum, they were among the first to seek to establish television and video as artistic media in their own right.

The exhibition The Television as Gallery. The Archive of Gerry Schum and Ursula Wevers tells the story of this now legendary project. It takes us back to a time when the artwork was being called into question as an object. Processes, actions, and site-specific works could not easily be collected or exhibited. The response to this situation was as simple as it was radical: this art required a new medium.

On April 15, 1969, the Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum was broadcast for the first time: ARD aired LAND ART, the first exhibition conceived for television. A second television exhibition followed on November 30, 1970, on Südwestfunk, under the title IDENTIFICATIONS. All films were conceived specifically for television and existed essentially only in the moment of broadcast. These productions—now part of the international canon of video art, land art, and conceptual art—were realized in collaboration with around thirty artists, including Joseph Beuys, Daniel Buren, Jan Dibbets, Richard Long, Mario Merz, Richard Serra, and Lawrence Weiner. In addition, television interventions such as Self Burial by Keith Arnatt and TV as a Fireplace by Jan Dibbets interrupted the regular programme without prior announcement.

“One of our ideas is the communication of art instead of the possession of art objects,” as Gerry Schum put it. In fact, the project aimed not only at a new medium, but at a different public sphere for art and a new economy. The Fernsehgalerie functioned as a counter-model to the exclusivity of the museum, the gallery, and the art market.

Yet the structural limits of this critique of art as a commodity soon became apparent. When television broadcasters refused to continue the collaboration, the project had to adapt to precisely those structures of the art market it had originally sought to escape. In 1971, Schum and Wevers founded the videogalerie schum in Düsseldorf, thereby establishing a new and pioneering model—the first gallery in Europe dedicated exclusively to the production and distribution of video editions.

Drawing on the extensive archive, the exhibition tells a story of utopian aspirations, of success and failure—from Schum’s first films in 1967 to his suicide in 1973. At the same time, it resists reducing this history to a single protagonist. From the outset, the project was shaped by collaboration: initially with Bernhard Höke and Hannah Weitemeier, and above all with Ursula Wevers, who, from October 1968 onward, played a decisive role in shaping the realization of the Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum and the later videogalerie schum.

The exhibition is based on the extensive archival material preserved by Ursula Wevers over more than fifty years. On view are not only the well-known film and video works, but also original 16 mm films and videotapes, historical video equipment, as well as correspondence, production documents, photographs, printed matter, and certificates. These materials offer insight into the conceptual work behind the projects, into institutional conflicts, and into the practical conditions of production.

The legacy of the Fernsehgalerie and the videogalerie continues to resonate today. The projects demonstrate how a new medium transforms not only the form of art, but also its modes of production, distribution, and ownership. With each technological shift, these questions are renegotiated.
 

Artists / Contributors

Giovanni Anselmo, John Baldessari, Joseph Beuys, Alighiero Boetti, Marinus Boezem, Stanley Brouwn, Daniel Buren, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Gino De Dominicis, Walter De Maria, Jan Dibbets, Barry Flanagan, Hamish Fulton, Gilbert & George, Michael Heizer, Bernhard Höke, Gary Kuehn, Richard Long, Mario Merz, Dennis Oppenheim, Klaus Rinke, Ulrich Rückriem, Reiner Ruthenbeck, Gerry Schum, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, Keith Sonnier, Ger van Elk, Franz Erhard Walther, Lawrence Weiner, Hannah Weitemeier, Ursula Wevers, Gilberto Zorio.