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Hans Breder

Hans Breder

Birth : 1935-10-20, Herford, Germany

Death : 2017-06-18

History

Like Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian, for Hans Breder the task of art, as a kind of thought, was spiritual. His work articulates and evokes an ineffable power beyond reason and unreason. Against the monumental materialism of Western culture over the last six decades, Breder's sensibility was expressed in and between painting, sculpture, photography, music, installation, video and film--each expression an invitation to subversive liminality and momentary transcendence. Breder's work dissolves boundaries and manipulates perception, sometimes enticing, sometimes shocking the observer to an experience of liminality from which a realm of pure possibility may emerge. Hans Breder studied painting in his native Germany before coming to the U.S. in the mid-1960s. One of the first video artists whose work has been included in three Whitney Biennials, Breder founded the Intermedia Program in the School of Art & Art History at the University of Iowa in 1968 and directed it until his retirement as a F. Wendell Miller Distinguished Professor in 2000. The internationally regarded program built on Breder's interdisciplinary inclination for intellectual and aesthetic collision.

Profile

Hans Breder

Movies

tel-uh-vizh-uh-n

tel-uh-vizh-uh-n

Director

"My TV Dictionary: The Drill" (1986) translated through digital filtering in 2014.

Moscow Postcards

Moscow Postcards

Director

In this video diary of Breder’s trip, the viewer is given an after-hours tour of the Soviet capital. The different segments include a daylight panorama of Red Square, a scene in which Breder is handed the phone by his Russian artist hosts, a walking tour precursor of My Body Sees You, an underground performance with gas flames in a glass column, the midnight changing of the guard at Red Square, and a hypnosis session with a psychic that ends with a close up of another Russian magician on television.

under a malicious sky

under a malicious sky

Director

"The images mix fragments of the real and imaginary in a hermetic effort to express the [Breder's] quest for a visual text that is at once personal reflection and cultural criticism." - John Hanhardt, 1989

My TV Dictionary: The Drill

My TV Dictionary: The Drill

Director

"My TV Dictionary: The Drill" is one of several video works Breder created by re-editing recorded footage from cable television movies. This video conveys the violent and sexist subtext of the 24/7 stream of cable television "and thus becomes a potent metaphor for our times" - Jon Hanhardt, 1987

My TV Dictionary

My TV Dictionary

Director

In TV Dictonary, Breder gives his vision or memory of what he has seen. The television images, often recognizable from modern film classics, have been cut loose by him from the actual sequence of the original story and placed in a new, personal sequence. As a result, the storyline does not dominate (which in narrative films often gives the images their meaning/function), but the images stand more on their own as if they are treated as lemmas one by one. Details and film symbolism of the sampled images have been brought to the fore by stretching the time and reversing the sequences of the images. Despite the fact that each chapter 'written' by Breder has a clear beginning and end, a meaning is generated that stands on its own and lies outside a story or anecdote. The tension is heightened by repetitions, the complex structures in which the original is incorporated and the compelling soundtrack composed of film scores.

Anti-City: For Johannes Baader

Anti-City: For Johannes Baader

Director

This tape is a kaleidoscopic architectural and human landscape, a rotating prism of constantly shifting images, fragmented, multi-layered, ephemeral juxtapositions, a cultural collage, a cultural critique which demands participation and interpretation. It uses as its raw material television images of the built world and snippets of televised human action and conversation which exists in the world around it. These images, often entropic and chaotic, which range widely in historical time and geographic space, are de-constructed, de-contextualized and re-presented to evoke something of the true experience of perception and metropolis.

Director

This interview with a Mexican squatter in Oaxaca, Mexico is an example of the genre that Breder conceptualized as “aesthetic ethnography.” This term refers to processes and form which attempt to illuminate people and cultures in specific historical moments and places through an aesthetic rather than a scientific methodology.

Director

A slow-motion dive at 3,000 frames per second.

Director

This slow-motion film is a glass snow globe with dancers who topple and bounce off the sides of the frame. Re-purposed at a later retrospective, projected on the side of a white cup.