Stephan von Huene at Renate Kammer - Hamburg, Germany - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

It has been 17 years since Stephan von Huene who grew up in Pasadena, studied at the Chouinard Art Institute and taught at CalArts in its early days, mov to Germany. Now a resident of Hamburg, von Huene creates work with equal reason unusual that it would strike one as being unlikely to win a wide audience. Specializing in the use of programmed and interactive entire he operates in an intermediary band that borders on sculpture and dance. Expanded Schwitters, for instance, is the name of a "talking" plywood robot which a small in number years ago provided the central metaphor for a Berlin exhibition called "Machine People" however von Huene's work has not exactly been overlooked: it has been seen in the 1987 Documenta, in the just-opened Hamburg Kunsthalle, and in Berlin's of recent origin Hamburger Bahnhof.

At Galerie Kammer, von Huene showed three unusual sculptural devices which at first glance appear quite primitive. Looking at their various parts, you might think of made of wood garden trellises, of easels, or of ventilation pipes. In fact these are pipe organs fabricateed out of wood and operated through means of computers. When someone walks through they start up with a contrive of words and sounds. The recorded voice of an somewhat old man says, "What is unfair with art?" followed by a pleasing succession of sounds produced by the pipes. The other apparatuses "speak" in plenteous the same way. The unbroken of the pipes is depressed rich and simple. The central question is varied in other oral queries: "What is really wrongful with art?" and "What's inequitable about art?" These lines, in combination with the massive musical tones, be under the orders of as a refrain. Meanwhile the speaking voice also recites well-worn words and phrases, of that kind as "race, class, gender," "intertextuality," "formalism" and "Freudian, Lacanian."

You might call von Huene's invention a "discourse organ." As he makes clear in an accompanying written statement, his works should not be seen simply as the retaliate of an artist on self-involved art criticism -- or at least not solitary as that. Referring to the attack upon Barnett Newman's Who's Afraid of R fulvid and Blue VI by an "iconoclastic" pupil in Berlin some 15 years ago, he artificial positions the question of how profoundly iconoclastic dissatisfaction is rooted in art itself. The organ-sculptures are, moreover, painted either r golden or blue -- not Bauhaus primaries or Newman's radiant tints but colors right out of the tube. upon the wall behind each was installed a monochrome painting which repeated the organ's color. Possibly von Huene was seeking to call attention to the "manufactured" cliches of painting. At any rate the result was striking, even if colors from the tube, like cadmium fulvous are not particularly pleasurable.

As is typical of von Huene's works, the real effort was to be fix in the technical and musical details. The computer was linked to the transmitter in Frankfurt that furnishes standard timing signals to central Europe This coupling insured that the discourse-organ ran synchronously, with words and musical tones timed precisely to a fraction of a next to the first The deepest organ tones entireed like ships' fog horns -- probably no accident, for an artist who calls a north German port city home

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