Wolf Vostell
«Grasshoppers»

Two photos confront each other on a large screen: on the left, a lesbian couple making love, on the right a newspaper photo of Russian tanks rolling into Prague. The two topical subjects – sexual liberation, and the untimely end of the Prague Spring – are juxtaposed as antitheses. Arranged above the photos are signs from a meteorological chart of the USA, below them a row of 20 monitors that show the face of any viewer who happens to fall within the video camera's field of view. On the floor is tar with residues of hair, shoes, bones – allusions, according to Vostell, 'to the bombing of Dresden during which, I read, the tar got so hot that people got stuck in it. You see different processes of modern history in one image, in one visual environment – Prague, New York and Dresden.’