In a break from its usual programme, which tends to include showings of new work by gallery artists and like-minded con­tem­por­ar­ies, the Modern Institute is showing a col­lec­tion of pieces by Ferdinand Kriwet, the pi­on­eer­ing mul­ti­me­dia artist and poet, best known for his ‘Bild-Ton-Collage’, or sound-picture-collages, matching a set of new pieces with a focussed ret­ro­spect­ive, sampling the Dus­sel­dorf-born artist’s activity in the 1960s.

The show opens with the seminal Apol­lo­vi­sion, an attempt to fuse together the media sources Kriwet en­coun­ter­ed on a trip to the US during the hubbub sur­roun­d­ing the Appollo 11 mission to the moon. Grainy tele­vi­sion footage is cut and pasted together, paired with a soun­dtrack­ of radio broad­casts, sometimes allowed to flow, at other times cut down to single repeated words and looped an­n­oun­ce­ments, to mesmeric effect.

Kriwet does not limit himself to sounds and images of the Apollo 11 mission, though, also homing in on the ad­ver­t­ising slogans of broadcast sponsors (including, neatly enough, Brillo, a brand im­mor­tal­ised by Andy Warhol some five years earlier), allows the re­lent­lessly American Superman through his filter and overlays recorded images with boldface single-word inter-titles, flashed up for just a split second: GAS, LSD, LAW, ORDER, VIET, and so on. The repeated compère’s in­tro­duc­tion of Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew and the Apollo as­tro­n­auts to some cel­e­b­rat­ory function sees Kriwet complete a complex picture of the moon landing as glorious sci­en­ti­f­ic adventure, all-American hero worship, and ad­ver­t­ising-laden cap­it­al­ist pro­pa­ganda victory.

It is this com­bin­a­tion of the ab­sorp­tion and present­a­tion of mass media with pointed com­ment­ary that allows Kriwet’s work to seem ab­so­lutely current, even if he is doc­u­ment­ing a moment in history, and even if his tech­n­iques have been used before and since. William Burroughs extended his literary cut-up and fold-in ex­per­i­ments to tape, adding a veneer of hokey mysticism to the com­bin­a­tion of existing texts and randomly inserted re­cord­ings, John Oswald’s plun­der­phon­ic manglings of hit songs might come laden with theory but remain a one-note joke, like the more recent micro-editing efforts of Cas­set­te­boy, and Double Dee and Steinski’s feverish Lessons in the musical heritage of early hip-hop are confined to a single musical scene. Kriwet stands out from these fellow media collage artists not just for being a pioneer of the form, inspiring those that followed, but because his efforts seem to form a complete, coherent essay offering a genuine un­der­stand­ing of a period of past time. Those text overlay’s might hover dan­ger­ously close to agitprop, but Kriwet keeps a cool head, engaged in a genuine attempt, like David Bowie’s Newton in The Man Who Fell To Earth, to absorb the welter of images, sounds and texts tran­s­mit­ted over the airwaves.

The merger of the political, populist and com­mer­ci­al continues in a pair of works from 1968, both titled Textsign. Both are stamped in aluminum, their circular texts high­lighted in red on a green back­ground, with the look of shop signs or ad­ver­t­ising hoardings, and both contain sets of ellided words, fusing cele­brit­ies with allied or un­ex­pec­ted concepts, new coinages that prompt dense sets of images. ‘Mar­lone­some’ fuses Brando with Elvis, ret­ro­spect­ively doubling the fame-inspired reclusive nature of both men. ‘Rober­tar­z­an’ does a similar job on RFK and the King of the Apes. The more cryptic texts - ‘He­m­an­cip­ate’, ‘Jun­gleleis­ure’, ‘Men­t­ala­m­ode’ - seem in hindsight to presage the absurd attempts of today’s ad­ver­t­isers and political pollsters to slice and dice de­mo­graph­ic groups, from Soccer Moms to Fifty Quid Blokes.

The ten prints that make up Run­d­scheiben - literally, Round Discs - are not so easy to read. Each one is like a little big bang, with letters, words and phrases spinning out from an empty core. A bid to disrupt the usually linear progress of writing, these are not quite concrete poems (the circular display of words does not seem to enhance their meaning) but build a rhythm through jux­ta­pos­i­tion, as in the print which lays mean­ing­less syllables - ‘Stot, kin, tin…’ - around lengthy, complex compound nouns.

Kriwet changes tack with the recent series Trans-Script. While still working with language and text, his focus seems to have shifted even further towards the means of tran­s­mis­sion, in this case the book. Three museum-like cabinets are set in the centre of the Modern Institute’s main gallery space, each bearing ‘book objects’, open for perusal, but under glass. Beneath the exposed editions are more of the same, but boxed and placed with some reverence on a set of shelves, ac­com­pan­ied by a stern warning that visitors should not touch them. Instead, the books - perfect bound, with rather lavish in­ter­leaves pro­tect­ing each Xerox-copied page of often illegible text form­a­tions - can be read on a set of video monitors hung on the opposite wall. This is no in­ter­act­ive in­stal­l­a­tion to flick through, though, with Kriwet testing the viewer’s patience by screening each page of each book in turn, including those blank tran­s­par­ent leaves. It’s a strangely fet­ish­ist­ic in­stal­l­a­tion, the complex, almost un­fri­endly archival present­a­tion serving to shift focus away from the content of the books, offering them up instead as artifacts to be con­sider­ed. The presence of texts mediated via digital media hints that Kriwet might be con­si­d­er­ing the future of the book as a medium, a dystopian future where books are not objects from which an in­di­vi­du­al can glean knowledge, but relics to be studied at one remove, scanned and displayed on screens.

By way of contrast, a much more generous 1967 work hangs beside the Trans-script display. This ‘poem painting’ has white text in a friendly serif display font set against a black back­ground, the letters butting right up against the frame, as if the work has been cut from a longer dialogue. As it is, the poem consists of a single word: Du. After the cool, stand-offish in­stal­l­a­tion that dominates the room, this short welcome comes as something of a relief.

This is a concise show of just eight works, then, but it is just as sa­t­is­fy­ing as any full ret­ro­spect­ive, offering a snapshot of Kriwet’s 1960s work, while revealing the breadth of his ongoing practice, from the early, in­flu­en­ti­al mul­ti­me­dia collage ex­per­i­ment­a­tion of Ap­pol­lo­vi­sion to the fusion of print and digital media of the Trans-script in­stal­l­a­tion.

This review was first published in The Herald on June 6th, 2008.