Still from TV as a Fire Place, Jan Dibbets (1969)
On the last eight evenings of 1969, WDR 3 television marked the close of transmission by broadcasting in colour the picture of a burning coal fire. There was no mention of the artist or the art character of the broadcast – and precisely this reticence enabled ‘TV as a Fireplace’ to blend into everyday life almost as if it had always been part of it. Dibbets demonstrated that TV is a collective experience. Even if lone viewers and families were in separate living-rooms, they were united, like prehistoric cave-dwellers, by a communal fire. The relaxation and diversion the piece offers is not dependent on this cultural-historical background, however, and it is hardly surprising that videotape cassettes of open hearth fires were commercially available 20 years later.
Two years ago, we made a proposal to Stedelijk Museum within the Visibly Absent project. The aim was to represent the contemporary commercial mutation of Jan Dibbet’s work. Instead, our other proposal, Les Rêves de la Perruche et de la Sirène was accepted. This post is also a commemoration to Marten Jongema, Stedelijk Museum‘s former curator, who left us last year in April. We miss you.
This entry was written by , posted on January 30, 2012 at 4:50 pm, filed under Art, Digitalization, Video. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.