Prof. Dr. Michael Naumann

Sound and Image

It was a stroke of good fortune for the Hanseatic City of Hamburg—gateway to the world with the smallest imaginable art museum and the smartest museum directors (tempi passati!)—and for its generally humorless citizens that the American painter/sculptor/ kinetic artist and draftsman Stephan von Huene found his way to the land of his ancestors, brushed up the long-forgotten German of his childhood, fell in love with Petra Kipphoff, art critic of DIE ZEIT, got married—and stayed.

Stephan von Huene’s sound sculpture Lexichaos, first shown at Hamburg’s Kunsthalle in the summer of 1990, is a natural fit for the Berlin concert hall designed by his Californian contemporary and friend Frank Gehry—here, the playful idea of his artwork adapts to the serene character of the architecture.

During von Huene’s lifetime, the unjustly almost-forgotten “Lettrist” painters played their wordy, Kabbalist games in Paris, while the American Fluxus movement was taking over German avant-garde galleries on the Rhine and Ruhr—bringing initial attempts to convey sound and image, mysterious noise and optical din. At the time, it was permitted to laugh at openings, and the first meetings between artists and potential collectors were called happenings: shared attempts at temporarily casting off the shackles of aesthetic tradition. There wasn’t really anything to buy, but there was everything to experience. Dada was sending belated signs of life.

And in the midst of it all was Stephan von Huene. When his Californian friend Allan Kaprow, one day in the crimson hills of Los Angeles, hit upon the idea of placing a living-room sized cube made of blocks of ice in the sunshine to convey the fleeting quality of all art, the Fluxus idea had found its cool—as it were— definition: the point was beautiful transience, or, to use Karl Heinz Bohrer’s phrase, the unmitigated experience of “Now.”

What the movement was missing was the ephemerality of “sound.” Every noise, every tone melts like ice in the sunshine, its precondition and its end—as Daniel Barenboim has put it—being silence. And so perhaps it was unavoidable that the tall man from California would invent the sound sculpture. Some of them caused a national stir— the bass drum, the Tisch Tänzer—and some ended up in the depots of the country’s leading museums. The Center for Art and Media

(ZKM) in Karlsruhe, which owns most of Stephan von Huene’s works, is a glorious exception—it has not locked them away in the basement. On the contrary.

Lexichaos belongs to Berlin’s Humboldt University—quite literally. The Barenboim-Said Akademie is grateful to its director for loaning us the work. Things had become a little too quiet around this artist. We thank Petra Kipphoff and all the connoisseurs and contemporaries, but also those who keep Stephan von Huene’s works alive. We will see and hear more of him—as time goes by. Marvin Altner curated the exhibition.

Prof. Dr. Michael Naumann

Rector, Barenboim-Said Akademie