Land Art. Fernsehausstellung I

Schum made Land Art as part of his Fernseh-Galerie Gerry Schum. The German television station Sender Freies Berlin broadcasted this film on 15 April 1969. Schum was looking for a way to show modern visual art to a wide audience. He achieved this by broadcasting his film and video productions on television, bypassing the traditional institutions. The TV programme showed recordings of artistic interventions in the landscape by eight artists, including Jan Dibbets, Barry Flanagan and Richard Long. Schum’s own sober camera work is an essential element of the visual end result. Jan Dibbets’ contribution 12 Hours Tide Object with Correction of Perspective shows a tractor leaving behind a trapezium-shaped track on a beach. The position of the camera and the effect of the perspective mean that the viewer sees this shape as a rectangle. Dibbets was casting doubt on the reliability of representation via the camera and on the perception of the eye, as he had done previously in his ‘perspective corrections’.