art'otel berlin kudamm, by park plaza

After completing his study of art in Paris, Vostell staged the first "happening" in Europe in 1958. As a founding member of Fluxus in 1962, Vostell not only laid the basis for the "expansion of art" to life, but also the foundation for overcoming the classical boundaries of genres. He incorporated sounds, music, video, and the expressive forms of the fine arts into his happenings. Vostell's subject was the present, the reality surrounding us that was and still is characterised by absurdities, destruction and continuous threats.

He was witness and observer of the grey post-bellum period of Berlin, for him a symbol of violence and brutality. The Holocaust was, through its repressed presence, ubiquitous. In his often provocative works, he revealed the indignation of a critical and concerned mind in the face of the unfathomable events that had generally been tolerated. He put a stop to the street traffic costing countless lives each year with his solid concrete automobiles -- for example, with his Two Concrete Cadillacs in the form of the naked Maja at Berlin's Rathenauplatz, not far from the hotel, created in 1987 during the "Berlin Sculpture Boulevards."

Vostell incorporated the catastrophes relentlessly appearing in the news on television into his material pictures using TV monitors, leaving the viewer to make sense of the chaos of the world in the juxtaposition of contradictions. Thus, the Picture of the Wall in the lobby depicts the often recurring motif of the Berlin Wall, represented true to life with steel-framed cement and TV monitors.

His so-called event picture in the breakfast room of the hotel, The Fall of the Berlin Wall Nr. 12 from 1990, is dedicated to the fall of the Berlin wall that brutally separated people for decades. People appear to be forcing their way through a crack in a lead-covered concrete wall, their perplexed eyes peeled to a moment in the present still awaiting alleviation.