Break down the Walls*: Subcultures in the Archives of the Inter Media Art Institute

Angelika Gwozdz

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a new awareness of art formed in the West of Germany that had been marked by the punk revolutions: ideals of beauty and gender norms were questioned; cheap and simple means of production were valorized; and taboo issues were addressed. Much like in the musical culture, video art, too, was searching for and finding independent strategies to produce, impart, and distribute it. The archive of the Inter Media Art Institute is based on one such independent distribution company, the media art agency 235 Media, which was founded in Bonn in 1982. Fans of German music of the 1980s will still remember it as the cassette distributor and store 235.

In punk and new wave, video became more than an instrument of documentation; it was also a new form of artistic expression in which music, performance, and video effects fused into a new, indivisible Gesamtkunstwerk. The punk video became a field where the young video artists of the 1980s could experiment.

In the IMAI video lounge a selection from the archives of the Inter Media Art Institute will be shown to convey an impression of how video art and subcultures dovetailed and
inspired one another.

* The song Break down the Walls by Youth of Today was released on Wishingwell Records in 1986.

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