Prof. Dr. Martin Warnke

Lexichaos—or the Way Back Forwards

Prof. Dr. Martin Warnke

Stephan von Huene’s spatial installation Lexichaos features three object areas: a Lettrist one consisting of alphabetic characters, an iconic one consisting of sculptural elements, and a musical one made up of vocal sounds. These are the elements of an artistic program developed from Chapter 11 of the Book of Genesis:

“And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men built. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.”

Three identical wooden sculptures symbolize the Babylonian city and its tower. A pedestal bears a box at shoulder height containing an eight-part group of towers. It is reminiscent of the skyline of an American city. These “high-rises” are arranged in groups of four,

the first or foremost rising to approximately half the height of the second one, allowing the eye to climb upwards as if in a spiral staircase.

History is full of attempts to visually imagine the Tower of Babel. Usually the towers were envisioned as stacked-up pyramids or monumental cones made accessible by diagonal ramps, far surpassing in height any actual buildings ever seen; they were imaginary. Lexichaos, on the other hand, offers a glimpse of American quotidian life, beyond which our imagination hardly ever rises anymore, and which appears to us as the epitome of the human quest for height and hubris.

God considered Babel, this great communal effort by all of humanity, an attack on his heavenly sovereignty. He toppled it by destroying the people’s common language, leaving them incapable of action. The protolanguage was smashed to pieces: Hebrew, or so the belief has been since the Middle Ages, disintegrated into 72 languages of clans and nations. In European intellectual history, this catastrophe has been examined and interpreted over and over.¹ Stephan von Huene calls this catastrophe Lexichaos, and he takes it beyond its known dimensions: here, not only languages, not only syntactic structures disintegrate, but even the words, the most important units of meaning; they are scattered into their smallest elements, into letters. Words are un-spelled and lose all meaning. Letters are liberated from the words and painstakingly isolated. Consonants and vowels no longer unite like good neighbors; they fail to create harmony or meaningful connotations and instead remain strangers, so that they might stand for themselves as graphemes. Here, “Babel” means the eclipse of all communicative signal-bearing. Ever since Dadaism, artists have experimented with the acoustic and visual quality of letters. In von Huene’s case, letters also reject each other as calligraphic beings: as if on an ophthalmological chart, letters occur in different font weights, thick against thin, large against smaller, inverted against reversed.

Once the observer has learned to forego endowing the letters with their everyday linguistic messaging function, his or her perception can glean a new basis for a more generalized experience. The work offers a course in how to wrest a new language from chaos, using different approaches: 27 panels mark a wide horizon within the space, ever leading the eye back from the towers’ vertical impulse to a plane that is entirely of this world. All the letters on the panels are black, and they are all set on a white, neutral background. The letters also belong to the same typographical class, the Futura typeface. They are all aligned, not tumbling over each other as they do in Dadaist pictures and collages, but rather aligning in vertical parallels;

they respect the classical margin space. On the panels, which are distributed independently of the towers throughout the space, the uppermost rows all feature three, the second rows four, the further rows different numbers of letters, but this does nothing to create disorder among the body of writing. Within the unified organization of the panels, the letters appear in ever new roles and ever new constellations. They form relations across lines, as rhymes do in poems or antiphons in liturgies: the last line of one of the panels contains the sequence “RZEHA T E,” which then occupies the first two lines of the following panel; the fourth line can also be rediscovered there, almost completely, albeit varied within itself. Such slurs from one last line to the first of the next panel can be found within a distinct group of panels. Accordingly, within the lettered charts, combinatorial imagination will be able to construct and discover an infinite number of bridges, interrelations, contractions, unravelling, contradictions, expansions and withdrawals, symmetries and asymmetries—in brief, structures of “visual poetry.”

Throughout history, there have been attempts to reverse the confusion of languages after Babel. Pentecost has been called a “Babel in reverse.” Polyglot skills have pursued such intentions, for example Emperor Charles V, who recommended that “one should pray in Spanish, address princes in Italian, speak French with women, and talk to soldiers in German”.² Esperanto is another reflection of this ambition to reverse Babel. In the 18th century, gestural language was developed into a universal idiom which then resulted in sign language for the hearing- or speech-impaired. Stephan von Huene also explored such nonverbal languages of signals and gestures in other works.

Redirecting our visual experience into a more general structure grows into an acoustic event for the viewer: while moving around in front of the panels, he or she will notice that approaching or leaving a panel triggers a bell sounding like a primitive rattle, through sensors installed inside each panel. Every one of the viewer’s movements is thus endowed with an acoustic cue and postlude, a kind of acoustic rhyme that is continuously updated through each movement. This results in what von Huene refers to a “Babel Acoustic,” which offers an initial physical foundation for another form of communication.

Expanding these newly established means of communication into the area of sound is aided further by the towers. Their pedestals have loudspeakers installed under each of the eight square tubes,

broadcasting the Bible text quoted above in three languages—Hebrew, ancient Greek, and Luther’s German, each of them assigned to one of the three towers. These different linguistic utterances are adjusted and mixed through the resonance effect of the tubes’ interiors, which differs according to the length of the square tubes. Only the occasional articulated word fragment of each of the three languages is intelligible. Von Huene learned from a study by the ethnomusicologist Erich Moritz von Hornborstel that different cultures have varying standards for the relationship between instruments and expected pitches. Such an interrelation has been implemented here: the acoustic material is determined by the length of the tubes. In the proportions of the sculpture, whose tower elements now function as sound media, culturally determined sound relationships are embodied.

Amalgamated into a single noise, the processes of speech result in a linguistic color in which the Babylonian catastrophe of language confusion is reversed. The filtered notes that contain the Biblical story are also expressed as a sculpture, in synesthetic interplay. Since these processes lead to the same acoustic result, the same system of pitch, in all the towers, the basis of a common language can thereby be symbolically re-experienced. After having eliminated all the regular means of communication, the artwork establishes the preconditions for a fundamentally new understanding through the use of modern technological operations.

Martin Warnke (1937–2019) held professorships in art history at the universities of Marburg (1971–78) and Hamburg (1979–2003). In 1991, he was awarded the Leibnitz Preis and founded the Research Center for Political Iconography at the Warburg-Haus in Hamburg, where he was instrumental in the preservation and study of the Aby Warburg Archive.

1 Arno Borst, Der Turmbau von Babel. Geschichte der Meinungen über Ursprung und

Vielfalt der Sprachen und Völker. 4 volumes, Stuttgart 1957–1963. New edition Munich 1995. 2 Borst, Vol. 3, p. 1146

Stephan von Huene, mind map for Lexichaos, 1990, pencil on paper, 21 x 29,7 cm, Humboldt University Berlin, Hermann von Helmholtz Center for Cultural Techniques

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