Intermedia: Enacting the Liminal

INTERMEDIA Enacting the Liminal Hans Breder arrive in New York City in the fall of 1964 from Hamburg, Germany with little but a rigorously traditional European art school education and apprenticeship. Having just seen one of Yves Klein's monochrome blue canvases in Paris, I am convinced that I am no longer able to invest meaning in or to derive it from painting (not yet aware that within the modernist realm, painting "dies" every decade or soor , that throughout the decades of intermedia work upon which I am about to embark, I will be compelled to paint as well). What a moment to land in New York City. The art community reverberates with expressive energy and experimental modes; a sense of expanded horizons; the power oftransgression and transformation; the flowering of new concepts, new media, new forms: Happenings, Pop Art, Op Art, Minimal Art, Conceptual Art. These reinvigorated expressive modes possess historical roots, but now for the first time they bloom in the relative affluence and nearly pervasive optimism of the U.S. in the early 1960s. To say this was a wildly liberating time in the arts is an enormous understatement. Like love you had to be there. In this fertile aesthetic moment, with countless other artists, my work thrives, transforms. The constructions I make are referred to as conceptual, minimalist "sculptures," emanating from my contructivist aligned background. My perennial preoccupation with the idea of collage and the concept of liminality manifest in these first American works upon which George Rickey comments, "Breder sets polished or transparent cubes over mirrors or stripes to mingle virtual with real images, and thus removes the barrier between the real and the looking-glass world."' In the fall of 1966, I leave New York City for Iowa City to devote myself not only to art but to education as well. I understand (only partially) what I am gaining and losing. I am losing an effortless presence at the center of the post-World War II art world. I am gaining membership in an intellectual community free from the pressures of the marketplace, the luxury of being able to do experimental work and to engage in interdisciplinary dialogue. During the first portion of my career at the University of Iowa, both in my teaching and in my work, I concentrate on establishing interdisciplinary links between film, theatre, music, poetry, and the visual arts. More recently, I have established and explored an interdisciplinary dialogue between the visual arts and the liberal arts. 112 0 Originally hired to teach media ofdrawing, one year later I propose the addition of a course entitled Intermedia. The entire faculty votes in favor of the idea. I am amazed and realize subsequently that the reason the proposal had been accepted with so little contention was that the faculty had a hard time understanding my accent and thought that I was proposing an intermediate drawing course. "Intermediate " was "Intermedia." Brash as I am, I realize that my linguistic deficiencies will not disguise, for long, that what seemed to be an institutional addition was, in fact, a pedagogical revolution. So, almost immediately, during the first semester Intermedia and Video Art was offered, I propose the establishment of an Intermedia and Video Art Area within the School of Art and Art History. I argue that there is a paradigmatic shift occurring within the arts. To keep pace with this shift, the conventional university emphasis on specialized practices institutionalized into academic areas should be augmented by exposure to and training in intermedia, as a way of thought and mode of practice. The proposal is accepted and in 1968 the University of Iowa becomes the first University in the country where graduate studio majors are able to pursue intermedia course work, produce an intermedia thesis, and earn an MFA in Intermedia and Video Art. My students and I launch into an intense process of exploration and experimentation producing and exhibiting earth art, body art, performance and installation work-intermedia pieces of every variety. Faced with the "reality" of intermedia, some faculty members in the School of Art and Art History look askance at our efforts and are vocal in their disapproval. To the most conservative...