Wolf Vostell

Museum Vostell

His concept of Dé-collage differs from ‹collage› in that it stresses the aggressive, destructive aspect of found structures and visuals…

Sun in Your Head (Television Decollage)

Vostell works on the black piano keys with a spatula, takes each of them off individually, and pours milk over the keyboard. In the course of the concert, he sets the keys in concrete and, like the piano, gets covered more and more in pine branches cut from the tree by the woman. On the piano, the radio is on, and every so often Vostell changes the station. His wife Mercedes creates acoustic sounds with a bamboo stick piercing the animal skin stretched over a vase, and calls out words in Spanish at irregular intervals…

After an education as a photolithographer Wolf Vostell studied at the Academy of Arts in Wuppertal from 1954 to 1955. He travelled extensively and in 1954 he developed in Paris the concept of the ‘décollage’ out of torn billboards, which in transferral onto the process of events determined his later oeuvre. After a further course of studies at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris and followed by a disappointing return to the Academy in Düsseldorf. Wolf Vostell decided in 1958 that art takes place in the street and he integrated the audience into his first happenings…