Katja Müller-Helle: Showing Unmaking
This lecture analyses Nam June Paik's Fluxus performance "One for Violin Solo" (1962) in the context of its photographic documentation, technologization and actualization in reenactments of contemporary YouTube culture. When Paik smashed a classical violin on a table in a sonorous destruction in front of the audience at the Kammerspiele Düsseldorf on June 16, 1962, photographic cameras were already in position to transform the performance into reproducing images. The time-bound piece of destruction was not conceived in the sense of a prior performance and subsequent documentation - the photographic coding was original and the image creation of the instrument destruction was the program. This medialization between sound, object, performance and image is being updated and amplified on digital sharing platforms such as YouTube or Instagram: the Fluxus piece is being performed en masse in reenactments in private youth rooms and public galleries (e.g. León Gallery in Manila) and fed into the infrastructures of today's visual cultures, where it enters into surprising amalgamations with pop culture.
Dr. Katja Müller-Helle is head of the research unit "The Technical Image" at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and editor of the journal "Bildwelten des Wissens" (together with Claudia Blümle). From 2013 to 2019, she was a postdoctoral researcher in the research group "BildEvidenz. History and Aesthetics" at the Free University of Berlin. In 2014-2015 and 2018, Katja Müller-Helle was a Volkswagen Foundation Fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Her research focuses on the history and theory of photography, methods of visual evidence production and techniques of digital image censorship. Katja Müller-Helle's texts have appeared in Texte zur Kunst, Merkur and Kritische Berichte. Most recently published books: Katja Müller-Helle, Bildzensur. Infrastrukturen der Löschung, Berlin: Wagenbach Verlag: 2022; Das Sichtbare und das Sagbare. Evidence between Text and Image in Roland Barthes' "Myths of Everyday Life", Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag 2020 (with Peter Geimer).
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