Foreword
I Introduction: The Method
1. The Aesthetic Approach
2. The Avant-Garde Context
3. Semiotics/Semiotics of Film
4. Analysis of Film and Television
5. Biographical Method
II Concepts and Performances 1975-81
1. Historical Context
a) Minimal, Pop and Conceptual Art
I. General outline
II. Point of departure
b) Performance
I. General outline
II. Point of departure
2. Marcel Odenbach. Biographical Notes
a) Family, childhood, studies
b) Environment, development of his working method and his opting for art
c) Defining time and place. The Cologne scene
3. Concepts and Performances by Marcel Odenbach, 1975 – 81
a) Unrealised concepts
b) Performances
c) Correspondences: features of form and technique, and
the artist’s structuring of processes; subject areas
III Videotapes 1976 – 89
1. Video and Art
a) Historiography and Mythology
b) The Partition
c) Delimiting the Field
2. Historical context of the use of the medium
a) Basic technical properties
b) Artist and Technology //Medium
c) Artist and Concepts
d) Exhibitions and Art Institutions
3. The Situation in the mid-1970s
a) Television and video
b) Spectacle and Medium
c) Real and fictional
d) Artist, technique //technology and concepts
e) Exhibitions and Art-Institutions
4. Marcel Odenbach: Videotapes 1976-89
a) Individual videotapes
I. Exercises in semiotics, 1976-8
II. Single-angle videos – Questions of communication as artist’s monologue, 1976-8
III. The first videos with a dialogue structure - Homing on
Television, 1976-8
Excursion No. 1: ATV, Video-rebels, Workshops
IV. The phase of drastic cutting. From a critique of TV to the filmic structures, 1979-82
V. Delimiting the Field of Vision. From the filmic imagination to the historic sources and personal memories (1983)
Excursion No. 2: Minutes of a Take
VI Commissioned productions and the synthesis of previous formal means – the device of ‘simulated memories’, 1984-9
b) Correspondences: features of form and technique, and
the artist’s structuring of time; subject areas
IV Video Installations 1978 – 98
1. Time and Space
a) Development of theoretical function //Unfolding the function in theory
I Defining Categories
II. The ‘Art of Experience’
b) Dividing the video installations
c) Delimiting the area of investigation
2. The Historical Context and the Situation as found
3. Marcel Odenbach: Video installations 1978-98
a) Individual video installations
I. Dialogical structure from the logic of the camera’s perspective – on the emergence of initial subjects of special interest, 1978-81
II. Dialogical structure from the logic of the picture support Comparison of subjects in the artist’s own recordings; the blurring of levels, 1980-82
III. Pictorial overlap and subdivision in the spatial context: Interpolation of the parallel levels of history and imagination and their representation, 1983-6
IV. Widening the spatial effect and enhancing the focus of attention: ‘Site-specific’ Installations 1987-9
V. The Spatial Monitor-Productions – on the Division and the Unification I. (1989-91)
VI. The concerted spatial effect of large-scale image projections and monitors: on Division and Unification II. (1989-92)
VII. Darkened Spaces: BrandTrilogy, 1993-4
VIII. Irreconcilable dualism of the individual and global medium: the old/new subjects and the old/new metaphors 1995-8
Correspondences: features of form and technique and the artist’s structuring of Time-space; subject areas
V Conclusion
1. The problems of distinguishing between film and video and the concomitant problems in establishing an ‘aesthetics of video’ – on a more comprehensive aesthetics
2. Marcel Odenbach as a case in point of artistic development in working with the video medium
a) Self-portrait and Medium
b) Production: Gegen Malerei (‘Versus Painting’)
c) The receptioin of Gegen Fernsehen (‘Versus Television’)
d) Distribution: for a different tele-vision
3. Marcel Odenbach’s influence in the development of the video medium and his significance for the integration of time-dependent art forms in the art-historical context
a) Form(at)
b) Contents
c) Strategy/ies of Montage
I. Film quotes
Excursion No. 3: Goya and Beuys
II. Musical quotes
III. Text quotes
VI Appendix
1. Catalog
a) Performances
b) Video tapes
c) Video installations
d) Exhibitions
2. Bibliography
3. Unpublished writings
