© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn ; photo © ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, photo: ONUK
- Artist/s
- Wolf Vostell
- Title
- Hradschin Prag
- Year
- 1969
- Edition / Serial number
- 100
- Copy Number
- 5
- Category
- Collage
- Format
- Screen Print
- Material / Technique
- color silkscreen on bristol board
- Dimensions / Duration
- 50 x 70,5 cm
- Collection
- ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe
- Description
- A trained photolithographer, Wolf Vostell used various graphic techniques in a virtuoso manner and created numerous serigraphs based on photomontages. In the case of Hradschin Prag [Hradčany Prague], an oversized CRT TV sits atop Prague’s Hradčany Castle Hill, while at the foot of the hill the Vltava river flows under the Charles Bridge. With this surreal object graphic, for which Vostell used a postcard motif of Prague, Vostell comments on a possible reality, not without sarcasm: the monumental TV set becomes a building with a gigantic projection screen. Vostell had the idea that such screens could be used to present artworks or news to the public in 1971 with his collage Autobahnkreuz TV [Highway Interchange TV], in which he placed two oversized televisions at a freeway interchange. Vostell’s work exemplifies the contradictory effect of the emerging television culture on artists. Equally attracted and repelled by the social and aesthetic power of television, Vostell engaged intensively with the new medium from the 1950s onward, in which disruption of the television’s function or even its destruction were among the central motifs.
Author
Julia
Images
Wolf Vostell, »Hradschin Prag«, 1969, color silkscreen on bristol board, 50 x 70,5 cm, ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe.© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn ; photo © ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, photo: ONUK