[Translate to EN:]
, 1980
Shortly after the wall came down, the video artist Wolf Kahlen explained a past performance. The place is the Gallery Schweinebraden in Berlin (East), the date 01 February 1980. Kahlen, sporting mutton chops, holds a recorder to which a type of desk lamp is mounted and which he carries like a hand camera. The black/white images glide through a room full of guests and can be seen on a monitor. A. R. Penck and Jürgen Schweinebraden are accompanying with a kind of acoustic Jazz. When Kahlen says "Attention, Action!", the images freeze, as he says. The music goes silent or quieter. The monitor only shows a still. A glass pane is placed in front of it. Penck, and sometimes someone else, steps up, takes a wide brush and paints over the image on the monitor. The color works are always shown subsequently. Sometimes, they are plane structures, sometime graphic pictograms. The half-dark, blurry scenery and repetition of the progressions lend the whole thing an element of a subversive ritual. This event is considered the first artistic video performance in the GDR. Wolf Kahlen left the country soon after. Today, he operates his own museum in Bernau.