"Every human being is a work of art!"

(… or, the dé-coll / age-fluxus happening hallows found phenomena of life as a work of art.) Wolf Vostell

In this programmatic sentence, Wolf Vostell (born in 1932 in Leverkusen) formulated his aesthetic and political artistic view of the correspondence "art equals life – life equals art" in the early sixties. This is the conclusion the action artist had drawn from Marcel Duchamp's "objet trouvé", extending it to elements of life as found works of art ("vie trouvée"). In view of this, the assertion that man is a work of art is complex and equivocal, as Vostell immediately explains in more detail: man is not an artist from the start; rather, he is a "unique structure" capable of creativity thanks to the aesthetic quality of his individual functions as found phenomena (Vostell refers to the eye, the sound of thoughts, and the nervous system as works of art) from which he develops. Wolf Vostell's famous example of Shakespeare comes to mind who became what he is through Hamlet and not the other way round, Hamlet through Shakespeare. In order to experience life as art, a process of aesthetisation has to be set in motion, and the artist achieves this with the happening: a personal setting of reality combined with events from found life that find their expression in his "Aktionsbildsprache" (action symbolism) and "Bildsprachaktion" (symbolic action) (Vostell).

What comes to the fore here is the fluxus and happening artist's notion of dé-coll/age, his principle of an aesthetic confrontation with the events of the day, the starting point for an appreciation of his works. Vostell sees himself as an heir to Dadaism, and like Max Ernst with the collage, he not only discovered an artistic principle in the dé-coll/age, but created the basis for a special theory of art. Its birth was the 6^th September 1954 when – in his first year at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts as assistant to A M Cassandre after an apprenticeship in lithography (1950-53) – Vostell, sitting in a café chatting, accidentally caught a piece of information from the "Figaro" about a plane crash during décoll/age (here: aircraft take-off). Further meanings, the detaching of glued-on things, separation, leaving, dying, scratching-off now formed the basis for his montages which consisted of pieces of newspaper cuttings and overpainting combined with ready-mades and photographs defamiliarised with chalk and gouache. In 1957, Vostell joined the Academy of Art in Düsseldorf where in the early sixties, he created dé-coll/ages about various socio-political subjects such as the serial arrangement and overpainting of a Life magazine with "Fidel Castro" on the cover (1963) or "Wochenspiegel/Beatles" (1961/66) assembled from layered pieces of posters. The layering of several posters with the bottom layers exposed by surfaces being torn or burnt off, and the fragmenting of pieces of text and of titles reveal Vostell's technique as a process that, while involving damage, does not represent a destructive act but lays open the fragmentary, composed into a new aesthetic form. It is of central significance that his painting was often produced in series or individually as he prepared his actions and happenings and emphasised the process as an open course of action. And the "Happening" (defined by Vostell in 1963 with Allan Kaprow), being both event and action, offered special experiential authenticity.

Wolf Vostell's first happening with TV sets and car parts entitled "Le théâtre est dans la rue" took place in 1958 in the Passage de la Tour in Paris, where he was the first artist to install a television set in one of his objects, integrating the changing, glittering outside world into his work. According to Vostell, these impulses created the basis for Nam June Paik's first experiments with video, and hence it was Cologne artists that pioneered the new medium ahead of New York.

To start with, he applied television as an information sculpture, frequently building it into his environments, but later on he also produced several video works and films in which Wolf Vostell employed and developed his technique of dé-coll/age (cf. "The Naked and the Dead", 1983, and "TV-Cubisme Liège"). The happening "Television-Dé-coll/age for the Millions" took place in Cologne in 1959. In the same year, he married the Spaniard Mercedes Guardado Olivenza, and in the following years he moved to Cologne where he had been in contact with Stockhausen since 1954 and where he saw better opportunities than in Paris to realise his work with the new media through the avant-garde activity of the Electronic Studio at the WDR (West German Radio). From the very beginning, he was therefore able to watch and help shape Cologne's rise to a centre for the arts. One of the co-founders of the fluxus movement in Germany, Vostell organised the first International Fluxus Festival in 1962 together with Paik and Maciunas which, for organisational reasons, eventually took place in Wiesbaden. In an interview with Gabriele Lueg, Vostell declared that he was taking part in the fluxus movement with reference to the American painters inspired by John Cage under the aspect of "Music by artists", stressing that each "fluxist" brought with him a concept of his own, making it difficult to give a definition of this attitude and approach to life. Like Maciunas, Vostell's approach of combining everyday life with an interdisciplinary attitude opposes all forms of separation of art and life, all artistic distinction between artist, participant and public, and this finds expression in his conscious use of anti-art forms.

From 1961, Vostell was working increasingly with dé-coll/age smudging and organised "Cityrama: 26 sites in Cologne" with the telling subtitle "Permanent Realistic Demonstrations", a drive through Cologne streets where he had found ruins, fire walls and dé-coll/age posters that were now to be presented within their context as "ready-mades". He carried out several of these forays into the city, into the sphere of everyday life (In Ulm, um Ulm, und um Ulm herum, 1963; Paris 1963, and Wuppertal 1964), for instance in Paris where a participating public went to various points in the city by bus and spent a moment of their lives together.

Since 1961/62, Wolf Vostell who speaks five languages has been living in four countries simultaneously (in Germany, Italy, France, and Spain), and in 1968, he founded "Labor e.V." together with Mauricio Kagel, Feussner and Heubach, an interdisciplinary society for research into acoustic and visual events which, unfortunately, only existed for a single occasion at the "Five-Day-Race" in the underground car park below the Kunsthalle Cologne. A year later, Vostell carried out a provocative "Bread Survey", measuring the Opera House in Cologne with bread during a happening, and under the title "Stationary Traffic", he set a car in concrete that originally should have been in a parking space in front of the old Wallraf-Richartz Museum, for which permission was refused at the last moment. The temporary closure due to protests against actions by Nitsch and Muehl during the exhibition "Happening & Fluxus" at the Kunstverein Cologne in 1970 clearly demonstrates the existence of counterproductive forces in Cologne. In 1970/71, shortly before he moved to Berlin, Wolf Vostell conceived two important train happenings: "Salad" which took place on the train between Cologne and Aachen, and his Vietnam Symphony on the bicentenary of Beethoven's birth (1970) which was not realised, but envisaged that for 72 hours, passengers arriving on platform 7b of the main station in Cologne from all kinds of trains and directions would carry out various activities such as ironing, exchanging goods, laying wreaths, frying eggs, etc. The motif of travelling, of moving in various directions, as well as the train play a central role with Vostell. This is also evident in 1981 when Vostell sends a fluxus train with his "Mobile Museum Vostell" through the Ruhr area to Cologne, Bonn, and Aachen. One wagon each is furnished with an "environment" by the happening artist: in one of them, a "black fluxus concert" was staged with sounds created by the public walking through the container, another showed the "isolation of man" in a concrete living-room, yet another the "overstimulation by the media" with an old Daimler Benz fitted with twenty TV-sets. In each city, a special supporting cultural programme was mounted under its own title in line with Vostell, as is clear from a discussion with contradictions in Aachen or the critical debate of the media in Oberhausen (examples: Aachen – the critical way, Oberhausen – the medium way).

On the occasion of the 9^th of November 1989, Vostell demonstrated the misery of human existence with a 6 x 3 metre screen littered with television monitors and with a near human concrete figure covered in acrylic and lead that was, however, not devoid of hope. In "Box for Millions" of the same year, he movingly illustrated the horrors of the post-war days with an assemblage of Trümmerfrauen photographs and found objects (colour television set and bricks).

In the eighties, after "environments" furnished with ready-mades, assemblages ("Digging", 1970, "Lipstick Bomber", "Yuste", 1975) and screen prints with ironic titles ("Now the Germans Are Number One in Europe Once Again", 1968), Wolf Vostell returned increasingly to drawing and painting in oil. Since he had already dealt extensively with examples from art history in the fifties, he produced several drawings based on famous pictures in 1983, for instance on Leonardo's lost Battle of Anghiari, Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon, and pictures by Barnett Newman.

Vostell also created several monumental sculptures such as "Two Concrete Cadillacs in the Shape of the Naked Maja" for the Berlin Sculpture Boulevard in 1986/87 or the large sculpture "VW for Zen" in connection with the 1988 Olympics in Seoul. For the "Festa di un'altro Mondo" held in 1996 in Milan, Vostell created a sculpture 18 metres high from a Russian Mig, cars, concert pianos, and television sets.

The fluxus artist has been a professor since 1992, and his museum, the Museo Vostell Malpartida in Cáceres, was reopened in 1994. Wolf Vostell died in Berlin in 1997.

Lilian Haberer