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Gerry Schum (1938-1973) was a German cinematographer, filmmaker, cameraman, video producer, and curator known for his use of television in an art context. He was one of the first to open exhibitions dedicated entirely to video art. According to some, he was the first to establish a relationship between contemporary artists and the television public. Gerry Schum is considered one of the pioneering figures of both television and video art. Schum especially emphasized the potential of television as an artistic medium, stating that "television, thanks to the medium of film and even more to the communication system, to be eminently suited to serve visual art in the same way press and publishing serve literature and the gramophone industry serves music". Schum introduced television as a medium that could directly serve contemporary art to a public audience, rather than using it as a medium for documentation or the providing of information. From 1968 to 1970, Gerry Schum broadcast works produced by his Fernsehgalerie (TV Gallery) on German national television. Instead of producing programs about art, he wanted to broadcast art directly onto the television screen in order to remove the temporal delay of art institutions reaching their audience.

Early Life

Gerry Schum was born on September 15th 1938 in Cologne, Germany. He died in Düsseldorf in 1973. In the period between 1961 and 1968, he studied filmmaking at the Deutsche Film und Fernsehakademie in Berlin as well as television and film production at the Deutches Institut fur Film und Fernsehen in Munich. In 1966, he started working as a cameraman and television producer, creating several documentaries for broadcast television. He ultimately became known as a documentary filmmaker for West German broadcast cinema. During his studies he started experimenting with television as a potential medium for the public circulation of art through an immediate experience rather than a documentary format. In July 1969, Gerry Schum married Ursula Wevers, with whom he would be collaborating on both the Fernsehgalerie and the Videogalerie.

Fernsehgalerie (1968-1970)

In 1968, Gerry Schum and his partner Ursula Wevers opened The Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum (Television Gallery Gerry Schum), which functioned as a conceptual gallery for producing and distributing video art that was to be broadcast on television. Schum wanted to introduce television as an artistic medium. In his Fernsehgalerie, he took on the role of producer and curator. With this gallery, artists were commissioned to create works that were especially developed to be broadcast on public television.

Schum wanted to deliver what was happening in contemporary art to a wide audience, to people who would not initially be able to visit galleries. With this, he aimed to dodge the institutionalized art world by going around traditional gallery spaces and to exhibit works in a more public way. Schum started looking for artists that could make art that was meant to be broadcast on television. He was hopeful for television to become a medium that could provide a new way of experiencing art, which could help artists communicate their message and work to a large public audience. The idea behind the Fernsehgalerie built onto the shift of arts moving beyond the borders of gallery spaces and into more diverse environments, including nature. Furthermore, Schum was fascinated with the idea of multiples, meaning that large amounts of copies of artworks would be made available to large groups of people at a relatively low cost, something which he wanted to realize through the medium of television.

Land Art - Fernsehausstellung I (1969)

In the period between 1967 and 1968, Gerry Schum became fascinated with a group of German, American, and British artists that worked in outdoor locations, who developed what would later be named into "earth art". Their works were based on processes occurring in space and time, rather than finished end-products that constituted traditional fine arts. He decided that the best way to document these processes and to emphasize the liveliness of the art form was to film these processes

On April 15th 1969, Gerry Schum debuted his work Land Art on public television. Schum functioned as a producer, curator, and cameraman on this project. Land Art was broadcast on Sender Freiers from Berlin at 10.40 p.m. The work consists of eight commissioned short films made by international conceptual artists including Robert Long, Jan Dibbets, and Robert Smithson, Barry Flanagan, Dennis Oppenhiem, Marinus Boezem, Walter de Maria, and Michael Heizer. Each artist created an artistic intervention in a landscape, which was then shown without narration or contextualization in order for the audience to be in direct contact with the works. The short films were hardly edited which made for the viewer’s attention to wander directly towards the artist intervening in the landscapes that were shown. The broadcast project was conceived as a new way of experiencing art that would get rid of the materiality of art exhibited in museums. The broadcasting of the event was most significant to Schum, who described it as a “live transmission of the art object”. Yet, Land Art as a 32-minute program was shown in several traditional gallery spaces including the Institute of Contemporary Art in 1968. The works were shot at rural locations around Europe and the United States. The artists used land and water as their main artistic media and the camera functioned as an observer of these processes, filmed outside of conventional studio environments.

TV as a Fireplace (1969)

TV As A Fireplace was created by Jan Dibbets and consists of a series of eight three-minute segments of a fire in a grate. The segments were broadcast on television around Christmas and emphasized the positioning of television as a feature in every contemporary living room. The work was shown at the end of the night's programs for a week in December of 1969. Gerry Schum had commissioned the work in 1968 as part of his Fernsehgalerie. TV As A Fireplace was broadcast on WDR3.

Identifications - Fernsehausstellung II (1970)

The second full-length television broadcast program commissioned by Gerry Schum and his Fernsehgalerie is Identifications, broadcast in 1970 on Sudwestfunk Baden-Baden. He worked on this project with twenty artists from six countries, including Joseph Beuys, Klaus Rinke, Ulrich Rückriem, Daniel Buren, Hamish Fulton, Gilbert & George, Stanley Brouwn, Ger van Elk, Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Mario Merz, Keith Sonnier, Richard Serra, Franz Erhard Walther, and Lawrence Weiner. Their works spanned between thirty-five seconds and five minutes and revolved around the art of "designed action", including several interactions with the camera itself. Schum intended for the title of the work to be taken literally, stating that:

“We no longer perceive the work of art as a painting or sculpture not connected with the artist. On television, the artist can reduce his work to an attitude, a simple gesture, referring to his concept. The work of art is conveyed as a unity of concept, visualization, and the artist who provides the idea."

Videogalerie Schum (1971-1973)

Videogalerie Schum was opened in 1971 as one of the first commercial galleries that would produce and sell video art. Gerry Schum opened the gallery with his partner and collaborator Ursula Wevers. Videogalerie Schum was located in a monumental building in the centre of Düsseldorf.

The gallery exhibited video works including the works that were previously broadcast on television. As most of the works he produced before were taped on film, Schum transferred most of these onto video formats and soon switched entirely to producing on video.

Later Life

In 1972, Gerry Schum presented video art sections at Document 5 and the Venice Biennale. Following this, in 1973, Schum was given the position of curator of the first official video art studio at the Folkwang Museum in Essen, Germany. Gerry Schum died by his own hand on March 23rd 1973 in Düsseldorf, when he was thirty-four years old.

Works

• Schaustücke—Ereignisse (Showpieces—Events, 1967)
• 6. Kunst-Biennale San Marino (1967)
• Dies alles Herzchen wird einmal dir gehören (All This Darling Will Once Belong To You) (1967)
• Konsumkunst-Kunstkosum (Consumption-Art, Art-Consumption, 1968)

• Land Art - Fernsehausstellung I (1969)
• Identifications - Fernsehausstellung II (1970)