KRIWET, Campaign, 1972–3/2005. 16mm film still
KRIWET (Ferdinand Kriwet), a precocious jack of artistic trades, emerged in the postwar German Rhineland during the wildly creative 1960s. He published his first book – a mass of words lacking punctuation – in 1961, when he was nineteen and West Germany had a single national TV station (the second was launched in 1963). He made recordings, broadcasts and films; designed exhibitions; and created visual works printed or stamped on commercial materials like PVC and aluminium. In 1968 he performed with Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention in Essen.
This exhibition offers a fair overview of KRIWET’s work. Two 16mm films, Apollovision (1969/2005) and Campaign (1972–3/2005), montages of news coverage of the Apollo 11 moonlanding and the 1972 US presidential campaign respectively, are screened sequentially on opposing walls. KRIWET filmed them directly off television sets, and each is leavened with ads, football games and other noise from the American mediascape. A grid of Text-Signs (1968), concentric circles of words stamped on commercial aluminium squares, hangs nearby. Several pieces from the series Text Dia (1970), rings of words printed on clear PVC sheets measuring over three-by-three metres, are draped from the ceiling. Together they form an immersion in near logorrhoea.
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