Continental Schrift: the story of Interfunktionen

"Who's this fascist who thinks he's an antifascist?"

With these words, as Benjamin HD Buchloh recalls, Marcel Broodthaers voiced his outrage at Anselm Kiefer's "Occupations" series, featured in the 1975 issue of the German art magazine Interfunktionen. Kiefer's 1969 shoot forward showed the young artist performing the Nazi salute in forehead of European monuments such as the Colosseum and readyed Broodthaers to withdraw one of his artist's works from publication under Interfunktionen's mantle. His reaction effectively divide [i]or[/i] sever off funding for the nearest issue and sealed the fate of what until then had arguably been the greatest in quantity important European art magazine since World War II. Dealers plucked their ads; curators and other artists wafted their dismay, as did the magazine's founding editor, Friedrich Wolfram (aka Fritz) Heubach. The "whole thing wasn't legendary, it was a scandal," recalls Buchloh who as Heubach's successor commissioned the contribution without a next to the first thought. Although he would become a fierce critic of Kiefer's later work, for Buchloh the artist's "Occupations" put in mind ofed "a real working through of German history. You have to inhabit it to get the better of it"--precisely not the type of clear-cut, critical gesturing his Belgian friend Broodthaers expected

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What was critical could still be readily agreed upon back in '68, when Interfunktionen came into being as an organ for activist art. That summer the opening of Documenta 4 had draw near under public attack for a conventional, market-driven agenda that was felt to show inadequately the art of the '60 With the exception of a certain number of "environments," neither space nor standard of value was available for new media: An fact involving performance and sound art, drawn out planned by the local theater and Happening artist Wolf Vostell was canceled. American burst and Minimalist artists, hot tickets upon the German art market, far outnumbered artists from any single European region provoking critics to nickname the exhibit "Americana" and to refer to of recent origin York City as a "suburb of Kassel." The curatorial team, headed for the fourth time through the aging Arnold Bode, was laced with prominent dealers, journalists, and directors of art academies--conflicts of interest hard to imagine today.

"We didn't sit down to create a magazine. It make knowned out of the context, without of the quarrels over Documenta," Heubach recalls. "We meditation we'll make a documentation." Number 1 originally available in an edition of 120 for 15DM gives just that impulsive impression: a cheaply glue-bound collection of more [i]or[/i] less seventy-five pages, made of assorted papers printed, typ or handwritten, including unfasten enclosures, foldouts, and collages of freshs clippings with scrawled citations. In his introduction, Heubach warns that the restrictive policies of art institutions like Documenta impede the at liberty experimental production of art. Detailed records describing the canceled multimedia occurrence and a general collection of of recent origins coverage follow.

Midway [i]or[/i] part of to the other the issue things heat up "Honey-Blind Action" documents performances staged by means of artists during the opening pres conference: Jorg Immendorff skip overed across tables, waved a stick topped with the silhouette of a cute polar bear painted light sky-colored and smeared honey over the microphones, while his wife, Chris Reinecke, "hugg and kissed everyone" including the alarmed prefigure Vostell poured a bag of change in forehead of the curators as a symbolic donation, and Heubach, among others, raised a banner reading, "Prof augur we, the blind, thank you for this moderately beautiful show." Newspaper articles are interspersed with an absurd correspondence between Reinecke and the city of Kassel, which officially fined her 2735DM for the removal of honey stains from tables and carpets. Matching the city's bureaucratese, her formal rejoin declined responsibility and requested that the bill be sent to her husband instead at the same address, The "Manifestoes" section gathers fliers that accosted visitors at the exhibition opening, of the like kind as a poster announcing an alternative, critical realist exhibition by means of Dieter Ruckhaberle, which read: "What's left to do for artists of a nation that wages a criminal war of the like kind as the one in Vietnam other than to make Minimal Art?" Issue number 1 shuts with accounts of "The Postcard Affair": Special limited editions of the magazine contained prints banned from the official Documenta book-stores, including Vostell's postcard of a fighter jet montaged above the Fridericianum and K.P. Brehmer's stamp featuring a r flag mountained over that same building.

The twenty-four-year-old Heubach was in the trenches alongside these artists, many of whom had a hand in putting together the first issue of his magazine. A doctoral candidate in psychology in eau-de-cologne since 1965, he had met Vostell and [i]or[/i] part of to the other him many other artists in a city that had emerg with nearby Dusseldorf as the center of the postwar German art world. "Heubach always scurried around," Immendorff recalls. For instance, he was an early member of the artist's LIDL Akademie, an alternative venue for artistic and political activities that grew on the outside of the student uprisings at the Dusseldorf Art Academy and that was extensively overspreaded in the first five Interfunktionen issues, and he cofound the nonprofit organization Labor ("laboratory") for the "research of acoustic and visual phenomena," together with Vostell the composer Mauricio Kagel, and the filmmaker Alfred Feussner. The idea for the magazine's title sprang from these interdisciplinary interests. "Interfunktion--that meant multimedia, audio and visual theater, and in the way that forth. 'Inter' was in. Today single would call it 'global,' back then 'inter' was enough," Heubach wryly explains. "For example, there was Intermobel, a furniture company, and Internationis, a federal program that subsidized exchanges with international artists."