Wolf Vostell

The publication is dedicated to the work and thinking of Wolf Vostell and presents his practice as a radical fusion of art, life, politics, and media critique.

At its core is Vostell’s understanding of art as an intervention in real social conditions: destruction, disruption, noise, speed, and everyday reality function not as themes, but as operative tools of artistic inquiry.

Through texts, images, and documentary material, the book reveals Vostell’s work as a process-based practice in which painting, objects, happenings, film, television, and language intersect. His strategies of décollage, deliberate disturbance, and the appropriation of mass-media imagery are examined as fundamental contributions to Fluxus, the happening, and expanded postwar art practices.

Rather than offering a retrospective ordering, the publication concentrates on key conceptual and methodological constellations. It presents Vostell as an artist who consistently understood art as a field of social action, whose work remains strikingly relevant through its political intensity, critical engagement with media, and uncompromising contemporaneity.