A TURNING POINT IN TIME AND CULTURE

Photo series “October 18, 1977” by Gerhard Richter (1988) compared to

Video “Daughter”/ "Tochter" from the crossmedia project “German Epitaph II”

Adelheid Seltmann/Joerg Franzmann/Stephan Mathieu (2005)

The gain of the crossmedia video format, which is particularly evident in comparison to this parallel photo series, is, apart from the content, a sensual complexity that can give the subject a great impressiveness.

Text: Adelheid Seltmann - Video: Joerg Franzmann - Sprecher: Peter Heusch - Musikbearbeitung CD "Heroin", Stephan Mathieu

Text: Adelheid Seltmann - Video: Joerg Franzmann - Speaker: Paul F. Cowlan - Music: CD Heroin / Stephan Mathieu

The series of photos edited by Gerhard Richter on Baader/Meinhof and especially on the death of Ulrike Meinhof are the result of Gerhard Richter's intensive preoccupation with the problems of the radical left-wing terrorist organization RAF, which at the time was shaking Germany. In particular, the edited photo “Erh?ngte” (Hanged Woman) is both touching and shocking.

The video “Daughter” was made in 2004, already in the style of this series and the photo. However, the image was a private photo that Joerg Franzmann edited using a special video program.

Music from the CD “Heroin”, edited by Stephan Mathieu, and the text “Daughter” from the novel “City of Hieronymus”, chapter “Epitaph” by Adelheid Seltmann, read by Peter Heusch and Paul F. Cowlan, were integrated into this video.

Thematically, there is overlap between Richter's photo and the video of the cross-media project. But the topic from which Richter developed the series was placed in a broader context here.

In the context of the 21 videos of the project it is about the situation of the daughter of a Nazi father who denied his guilt until his death, and thus about an extended context of a post-traumatic processing of the Holocaust.

The digital revolution, with its cultural and temporal changes, lies between the two projects, i.e. the development of video programs and a new understanding of how to process poetic texts. At the time, art critics (Michael G. Meyer, 2012) spoke of a crossmedia big bang.

The formal expansion and generalization corresponds to the thematic one of the treatment of the topic: Ulrike Meinhof, with her tragic end in Stuttgart prison, was politically rooted in the post-war period, which she certainly was and which justified the phenomenon of the RAF. In the cross-media video, however, this context is depoliticized, away from the concrete terrorist phenomenon, but at the same time it is also specified and justified. She was one of the “daughters” of post-war Germany.

In 2005, the first part of the Epitaph series premiered at the Gallus Theater in Frankfurt (in the former concentration camp of the Adlerwerkte), which caused consternation among the audience. This was new.

Were the 21 videos a film? And would other cinemas show them?

It was only when Steve Jobs presented the new iPad in 2010 that it became clear: the series “Deutsches Epitaph I und I (German Epitaph I and II) had found its place. Since then, many updates of the Apple Pages program have been necessary. Amazon editions followed. (Kindl)

But even if the source material of the video is technically outdated, it has retained its effect even on a 6 TK monitor from Apple.? It's not always about the number of pixels; art is not always dependent on the technical strings; it is about a new digitally inspired spirit that points to the future.

Adelheid Seltmann

#Gerhard Richter, Foto Serie 18. Oktober,1977

#Adelheid Seltmann, "The City of Hieronymos" (Chapter 7, German Epitaph II)

#Amazon.de number: D01-1380635-3314228. (interaktiv)

#[email protected]