Peter Roehr

Filmmontagen I + II + III, 1965

The slender Roehr œuvre includes text and typo-visual montages, floor, object-, and photomontage, as well as film and audio-montages, all untitled and uniformly numbered. Among the first montages are the typo-montages – quadratic fields of single letters, numbers or punctuation marks, typed without any spaces on an ordinary typewriter. From the perspective of historical development of art during the early 1960s, Roehr’s typo-montages represented a radicalization of the serial structures of ‘Zero’ art and the texts of Concrete Poetry, as well as offering a counterpart to Carl Andre’s Typewriter Drawings which were being developed at the same time in New York. Roehr’s Filmmontagen [Film montages] are characterised by a complete lack of dramaturgical composition. Instead, Roehr appeals to the conscious perception of selective details, and an analyses of movement, sound and grey values through a principle of repetition. In the context of experimental art-films of the early 1960s, a correlation can be traced to Andy Warhol’s film works of that time. The stretched nature of Warhol’s films created an entirely new time structure, an effect akin to that created by Roehr’s repetitions.