Prof. Dr. Horst Bredekamp

Lexichaos as Confusion and Enrichment

Prof. Dr. Horst Bredekamp

The Hamburg momentum

Stephan von Huene’s installation Lexichaos was first shown underneath the cupola of Hamburg’s Kunsthalle. It was a great moment when the circular hall filled with people, the babble of their voices rising, and then three towers with their organ pipes, reminiscent of stalagmites, ensembles of abstract skyscrapers, began to interact with those present. This memorable situation also provided a specific moment for Hamburg’s cultural history, as the artist interacted perfectly with the Kunsthalle’s unforgotten director, Werner Hofmann.¹

I had first met Stephan von Huene through Petra Kipphoff and later encountered him again at several events organized by Klaus Peter Dencker, himself a major visual-textual artist, on behalf of Hamburg’s department of culture.² These events brought together people interested in the relationship between art, technology, and new media in the broadest sense. These connections led to the now-legendary symposium Interface 1, where scientists and artists such as Josef Weizenbaum, Friedrich Kittler, Roy Ascott, and Stephan von Huene met to discuss the possibilities and problems of electronic art.³ In 1993 these impulses eventually resulted in the then most significant undertaking within the context of art and technology apart from the leading Ars Electronica in Linz: Hamburg’s Mediale.⁴

It was an almost hysterically optimistic time, when utopias fueled by technology rocketed skywards: the book seemed to have reached the end of its reign, painting had already disappeared, even if a few living fossils still wielded paintbrushes. Art in and of itself seemed little more than an atavistic relic. Art historians had a hard time amidst this heady ambiance of electronically-inspired new media.⁵ The futuristic furor even turned against those who approached new

media with curiosity and without reservations. Stephan von Huene’s reaction was different. He was the only one to critically engage with historical arguments, convinced that it would not be the present that benefitted from history, but history that would benefit from the present. His position was that of an artist using an avant-garde position to plead the case of history, its reflection and appreciation, even if it took the shape of perceiving inner images arising from memory.⁶

Stephan von Huene is among the most important artists of the second half of the 20th century. Like no one else, with the possible exception of Nam June Paik, he managed from the 1960s onward to combine the entirety of the arts, from minimalist architecture to sculpture, painting, and drawing, with the most advanced possibilities of electronic media, creating multiple ensembles that might well have outrun technical developments for the very reason that they reached so far back. By involving voices, music, and directed aleatoric acoustics in his ensembles—such as Text Tones in Hamburg or Sirenen Low in Dresden—he created exemplary works of synesthesia.⁷ Aided by his 2002 retrospective in Munich, Duisburg, and Hamburg,⁸ a younger generation of academics has analyzed his outstanding status.⁹

Linguistic Confusion and New Composition

Language, linguistic confusion, sound generation, rhythmics— all these subjects of von Huene’s earlier works converge in Lexichaos. It stands for the individual languages into which the Babylonian protolanguage was dispersed.¹⁰ From the three sets of eight organ pipes looming over the three towers, whose height is derived from the scale of the reconstructed steps of the Tower of Babel and which rise before the viewer in an S-shaped line, the Biblical text of the eleventh chapter of the First Book of Moses is heard in Hebrew, Greek, and the German of Martin Luther. Not only the staggered simultaneity of the recitation, but also the different resonance pitches create a babble of sound from which only individual fragments of words, some murmured, some gutturally garbled, emerge.

Several times, most notably in his 1990 interview with Gottfried Sello on the occasion of the exhibition in Hamburg, Stephan von Huene insisted that this acoustic sculpture of misunderstanding was inspired by his own experiences that shaped his childhood view of the world.¹¹ As the son of a family that had emigrated to California

but spoke only German, throughout his life he derived his sense of individuality from the awareness of being unable to feel completely at home anywhere, yet doing so without any sense of bitterness. This applied both to his personal and his artistic existence. Perceived in Germany as an American, from the Californian perspective he was a renegade—like Cy Twombly, who had had a similar experience 20 years earlier when he left New York for Rome. The misunderstanding took place not only between representatives of different languages, but also within his mother tongue. For this reason, Lexichaos takes aim at the endangering of intelligibility itself, which is why its subtitle does not just read “Understanding Misunderstanding,” but also “Misunderstanding the Understandable.”

The drivers, but also reconcilers of this dissection appear on the platform bearing the pedestal of the Towers of Babel in the shape of letters of different sizes, rising black on white as if above an earthy terrain. The arrangement, in which they grow in size the higher they are placed, is reproduced on panels that are affixed to the walls and surround the Towers of Babel at a distance. The “chaos” offers a way of using the confusion of the universal language as a means of understanding its system of signifiers as a whole. Lexichaos is more radical than the Babylonian confusion of languages. It uncovers rudiments of a visual poetry in which the iconic merges with the linguistic, opening new and general forums of understanding by separating the signs from their hermetically sealed-off islands of languages.

Added to the sound of this distorted rendition of the Bible passage is the shrilling of bells triggered by the visitors’ movements. Through holes in the panels, sensors activate noises designed to startle the observers. Von Huene uses this interactive mechanism to recognize physical movements, images, letters, and sounds as basal forms of communication, shock-like. Linguistic confusion is understood here as the possibility of an opening, contextualizing disorder within a wider horizon and trying to distil from disorientation a way of conveying meaning that transcends language.¹²

Punishment as Elevation

Stephan von Huene’s double existence between Los Angeles and Hamburg made him sensitive to all forms of conscious and subconscious misunderstanding and “forked tongues.”¹³ Like few others, however, he also experienced and made use of the enhanced

understanding that comes with latent misunderstanding. This derives from an ability to react sensitively to outsiders and strangers, to contrasting and hostile elements, to transform them into intelligibility and to include them, as much as possible, within one’s own considerations and activities. This allowed von Huene himself to move through 40 years of styles and fashions between 1960 to 2000 with the independence of a somnambulist, without ever creating even the hint of an impression of adaptation.

Lexichaos also speaks to this side of the Tower of Babel motif. The nature of great works of art is that they function as a kind of message in a bottle, revealing new messages every time they bob up periodically under changed circumstances. Such an effect is also noticeable in this sound installation. It deals with the consequences of the hubris that divine regions could be reached by means of a building that represented desire as a whole. In this sense, the Tower of Babel has ever been the metaphor for a form of over-confidence that can always arise anew from human ability in the fields of art (and) technology. The history of utopias, however, is replete with the notion that punishment is not provoked by the attempt to be godlike, but by the choice of futile means of attaining that godlike state. The command to fan the divine spark inherent in humankind and to strive to reach divine regions is an aspiration never forgotten, even after the mythical experience of the Tower of Babel collapsing. On the cusp of the mechanical age, a desire arose in the 16th century to develop an understanding, through the international specialist language of mechanics, that would end divine punishment and usher in a new age of technological and scientific reconciliation with God.¹⁴

These references were no less clear to Stephan von Huene than the hubris associated with the Tower of Babel, for reasons that were partially biographical. Among von Huene’s ancestors, we find the theologian and writer Johann Valentin Andreae, whose Christianopolis of 1619 was one of the great utopias in European intellectual history and became the model for Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis.¹⁵ Andreae, a Rosicrucian, was an occultist, but also an empiricist who fought on the side of modernism.¹⁶

One eloquent example of an attempt to liberate the Tower of Babel motif from its negative consequences can be found at the Catholic church of Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza in Rome. The architect Francesco Borromini let the roof of the vault end in a spiral, like the Tower of Babel, for the very reason that the latter once had

Design concept for “The Helix” (Amazon Headquartes), Arlington, Virginia, 2021

failed to be realized (see p. 22). The current plans for the headquarters of Amazon in Arlington feature a gigantically enlarged version of this spiral.¹⁷ During the 16th and 17th centuries, the condition for the reversal of the Tower of Babel motif into a model of new efforts was to do it better, cleverer, and wiser this time around.¹⁸ This signal was the beginning of a positive association of the spiral as a motto of departure, risk-taking, and movement in general. Ultimately, the spiral became the symbolic shape of Italian futurism and the monument to the Internationale designed by Vladimir Tatlin.¹⁹

Humanity, however, has not become wiser, but has merely refined and expanded its technical tools. It believed that the barriers of nature could be pushed back by technical transformation, turning the world into a village where all distances were made obsolete through media-based forms of communication. The consequences,

alas, were the climate crisis and the pandemic fueled by a lack of distancing.²⁰ It has tried to heal or cover up linguistic confusion by making English a common property, used as a universal language. But this process has led to no less than the opposite problem, inasmuch as the diversity of communicative abilities is lost within this monolingual communication option. From today’s perspective, it is diverse languages in particular that maintain the richness of communication. Against this background, linguistic confusion is not a punishment at all but a gift, enabling us to express different contents in differing linguistic continents.²¹ In the face of the endangerment of diversity of language cultures, Lexichaos can be reinterpreted as an installation that conceives the murmuring of different languages not as a call to overcome their diversity, but to protect and maintain individual idioms. Thus, Lexichaos looks and speaks to two sides: against a hubris that causes the punishment of language confusion, and against a dominance of monolingualism that reduces diversity. To each side, it appears as the proverbial writing on the wall.

The Berlin momentum

Stephan von Huene always saw himself as part of the tradition that connects the academic realm to that of art. Because of his fondness of Hermann von Helmholtz, whose Lehre von den Tonempfindungen he studied extensively,²² he followed the considerations that led to the founding of the Hermann von Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik (HKZ) at Berlin’s Humboldt University in the 1990s with profound interest, contributing his own ideas to its development. On June 20, 2000 he explained his plan to create two sculptures entitled Die Rückkehr der Stochastiker and Helmholtz-Portrait and to donate them to the institute in a speech given during the inauguration of the Helmholtz-Zentrum at the university’s main auditorium.²³ He reminded us of conversations he had with the mathematician Jochen Brüning and myself, recalling that the subject was “to dismantle the walls between the disciplines—to stimulate free movement—which would then also offer room for other planes of thought. I experienced this as FREEDOM OF THOUGHT.”²⁴

When the exhibition Theatrum Naturae et Artis, which was dedicated to the Humboldt University’s historical collections and organized by von Huene and Brüning, opened at Berlin’s Gropius Bau at the end of that year, von Huene’s Tisch Tänzer dominated

the main hall, and it was charming to see how visitors were affected by the interactive movements of the dancing lower bodies. By then, however, the artist had passed away; he had died on September 5, 2000 after a short, severe illness.

All of this helps explain why Lexichaos has found an appropriate place at the HZK, together with four related mind maps. It is, also, a document of a unique new beginning that took place during the 1990s. To Stephan von Huene, the installation of Lexichaos at the Barenboim-Said Akademie would have signified a new and precious momentum.

Horst Bredekamp is a professor of art and image history at Berlin’s Humboldt University. A member of four national and international academies, he is the author of 30 books, which have been translated into a number of languages.

1 Hamburger Kunsthalle (Ed.), Stephan von Huene, Lexichaos. Vom Verstehen des

Mißverstehens zum Mißverstehen des Verständlichen. Eine Klanginstallation im Kuppelsaal der Hamburger Kunsthalle vom 8. Juni bis 8. Juli 1990, exhibition catalogue, Hamburg 1990. 2 Cf. retrospective in: Klaus Peter Dencker, AHA. Textlandscapes 1969–1975. Ed. Editione

Studio = Rivista Foglio n. 5, Rome 2021. 3 Klaus Peter Dencker (Ed.), Interface 1. Elektronische Medien und künstlerische Kreativität,

Hamburg 1992. 4 Thomas Wegner (Ed.), Mediale Hamburg, Hamburg 2003. 5 On this situation: Horst Bredekamp, “Metaphern des Endes im Zeitalter des Bildes“, in: Heinrich Klotz (Ed.), Kunst der Gegenwart. Museum für Neue Kunst. ZKM – Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe, Munich and New York 1997, pp. 32–37. 6 Petra Kipphoff von Huene and Marvin Altner (Eds.), Stephan von Huene, Die gespaltene

Zunge. Texte & Interviews. Split Tongues. Texts & Interviews, Munich 2012, p. 154. 7 For an overview of his works in German collections see ibid., pp. 192–194, including the works mentioned. 8 Christoph Brockhaus, Hubertus Gaßner, Christoph Heinrich (Eds.), Stephan von Huene.

Die Retrospektive. The Retrospective. Tune the World, catalogue of the exhibition at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum Duisburg, and the

Hamburg Kunsthalle, Ostfildern-Ruit 2002. 9 Jesús Muñoz Morcillo, Elektronik als Schöpfungs-Werkzeug. Die Kunsttechniken des

Stephan von Huene (1932–2000), Bielefeld 2016; Alexis Ruccius, Klangkunst als Embodiment.

Die kinetischen Klangskulpturen Stephan von Huenes, Frankfurt am Main 2019. 10 On this and the following, some of it verbatim, Horst Bredekamp, “What’s Wrong with Culture? Die Kunst der Experimente Stephan von Huenes [The Art of Stephan von

Huene’s Experiments],” in: Parkett, No. 54, 1998–99, pp. 15–19, 20–24. Cf. Ruccius 2019, pp. 215–219.

11 Conversation between Gottfried Sello and Stephan von Huene, April 1990, in: Stephan von Huene (see Fn. 1), without pagination. 12 Martin Warnke, “Lexichaos oder der Weg zurück nach vorn“, in: „What’s Wrong with Culture? Die Kunst der Experimente Stephan von Huenes [The Art of Stephan von

Huene’s Experiments],” in: Parkett, No. 54, 1998–99, pp. 61–66, here: 64. 13 Stephan von Huene in: Kipphoff von Huene/Altner 2012. 14 Ansgar Stöcklein, Leitbilder der Technik. Biblische Tradition und technischer Fortschritt,

Munich 1969, p. 79. 15 Wolfgang Biesterfeld (Ed. and transl.), Johann Valentin Andreae, Christianopolis,

Stuttgart 1972. 16 Frances A. Yates, Aufklärung im Zeichen des Rosenkreuzes, Stuttgart 1975, pp. 108f. 17 Ill. in: DIE ZEIT, February 11, 2021, No. 7, p. 47. 18 Ulrike B. Wegener, Die Faszination des Maßlosen. Der Turmbau zu Babel von Pieter

Bruegel bis Athanasius Kircher, Hildesheim, Zurich, and New York 1995. 19 Stephen Edwards and Paul Wood (Eds.), Art of the Avant-gardes, Chicago 2004, p. 362. 20 The supreme manifestation of this utopia was Marshall McLuhan’s statement:

“The medium is the message” (Transl.: Die magischen Kanäle. “Understanding Media”,

Frankfurt am Main 1970). 21 Jürgen Trabant, Sprachdämmerung. Eine Verteidigung. Munich 2020. 22 Morcillo 2016, p. 27 and p. 336, Fn. 3. 23 Ibid., pp. 259–261. 24 Petra Kipphoff von Huene and Marvin Altner (Eds.), Stephan von Huene, Speech for the Opening of the Helmholtz Center for Cultural Techniques, Humboldt University,

Berlin (2000), in: idem, Die gespaltene Zunge (see Fn. 6), pp. 178–180, here: 178. 25 Petra Oelschlägel (Ed.), Stephan von Huene. TischTänzer, Ostfildern-Ruit 1995.

Stephan von Huene, Lexichaos, 1990 (detail), one of 27 wood panels, 100 x 70 x 4,7 cm

Stephan von Huene, Lexichaos, 1990, as seen at the Pierre Boulez Saal, March 2021