The Cologne artist Mary Bauermeister will celebrate her 75th Birthday in September 2009.
Film producer Gregor Zootzky took this occasion to artistically reflect the role Mary Bauermeister
played in encouraging the art and music avant-garde in post WWII-Cologne.

In 1959, Mary Bauermeister returned to Cologne after short student residencies in Ulm and
Saarbrücken, hiring an attic in the elegantly newly built Lintgasse 28. Here she presented
exhibitions and concerts between 1960 and 1961. The Contre Festival – presented by Bauermeister
parallel to the ‘World Music Festival of the Internationalen Gesellschaft für Neue
Musik’ (IGNM) [International Foundation for New Music] in 1960 in Colongne became legendary.
She accommodated young composers turned down by the official festival, and presented
their concerts late at night , giving the musically interested public the chance to see
top range musicians of the new music in her studio in the Lintgasse. Here guests such as
John Cage, Nam June Paik, David Tudor, Sylvano Bussotti, Cornelius Cardew, Karlheinz
Stockhausen and many other found their way to Mary Bauermeister’s studio.

The main focus of the film is an evening which went down not only in music- but also arthistory
as one of the greatest „patricides“: The Korean musician and later performance- and
videoartist Nam June Paik shampoos the hair of his great Idol John Cage and cuts of his
necktie. This attack on Cage, completely surprising and deeply disturbing, was a very important
ritual for Paik. Paik, having had a classical musical education and working as composer
up to then, decided to end his musical career because he found that he would never reach
the nouveau of his great idols Cage and Stockhausen. Cutting the necktie of Cage was so to
speak cutting his own ideals, his career as musician. All the disappointment in his own failure
finds its expression in this act.

The performance of Paik featured here also shows a second important aspect of the film: the
radical nature of the avant-garde as reaction to the experiences of the war and post-war period.
Paik initially plays Chopin, tricking the audience into a false security of the familiar. Suddenly
he jumps up, overthrows the piano and starts to attack the audience with machine gun
salvos. With this he criticizes the stubborn silence of the Germans to the violence of the section
and suppression Helms experienced as jew during the war.

With recourses to Dada Zurich, the surrealists and the Nouveau Réalistes at the start of the
film, Zootzky contextualises the Studio Bauermeister in the classical avant-garde. The Dadaartists
of Zurich also confronted the violent butchery of thousands of men and woman during
WW I with biting cynicism. The more brutal and grotesque the war became, the more bizarre
the events in the Cabaret Voltaire developed. The first sound-poetry was howled to the audience
by Hugo Ball in an absurd costume. The middle class with its stuffy view of art and its
firmly established taste was attacked and denounced in a very similar way to that of Paik in
his performance in 1960. The mirroring of the violence of the war and the happenings of the
artist remains an important theme throughout the film.

Kerstin Skrobanek M. A.
Tranls. T. Van Niekerk.