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Rough for Ron (1959 - 4004) | By Andrew Forster
Parachute Magazine | ParaPara 16 10 11 12 2004 P8
Artist Ron Huebner passed away in March after being struck by a car while bicycling in Amsterdam where he had lived of and off for the past twenty years. Ron was born in Edmonton, Alberta. He went to art school in Halifax, New York and the Netherlands and began exhibiting his sound-sculpture work in the early 1980’s. His work is best known in Halifax, Vancouver and Amsterdam, the cities where he lived. Early shows included “What You Don’t Know Won’t Hurt You” (Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, 1987), “Need Me Like I Need You” (UBC Fine Arts Gallery, Vancouver, 1989: Galerie Burning, Montreal, 1993, and "May the Circle Be Unbroken” (Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff, 1990). Several works were part of “Stations” at the Centre international d’art contemporain, Montreal in 1987. “The Greyhound Series” showed at St. Mary’s University Art Gallery, Halifax in 1994. Most recently exhibited were solo shows, “Ed’s Psyche Garage” in Amsterdam (Shore’s Space, 2003 and Hamburg (Kunstlerhaus, 2003). Ron was also a musician, playing piano and violin, often in the context of art events using the pseudonym Edgar Tiger.
Huebner’s sculptures made noise: electric razors were embedded in concrete, vibrating with futility; stoves emitted the sound of the wind; a windshield wiper batted a floating Walkman around a pool while it played Peggy Lee’s You Give Me Fever; tables spoke (“make a decision”); and sparks crackled around a bed made of heart-shaped electric elements. The work vibrated with living energy, it scraped and it groaned. It played blues piano loud in the hallway while you tried to read, it bent you with gypsy violin if you tried to walk a straight line, it mumbled to itself while you tried to sleep. There was an expressive “I” at the centre of each work, a parable to be turned and a soul to be encountered. Huebner placed real objects in our world that are familiar to all ( a bed, a chair, a table, a pair of shoes). They are ours, but when we look closer they have been animated by a kind of craziness. They don’t fit comfortably or quietly into our neatly ordered space anymore. The sleeping bag is made of five hundred pounds of lead - impossible to crawl into for comfort or to roll up and move on. The chair is made of chalk. The table talks back. The bed has springs that are red-hot hearts. Your bed will never be the same.
Ron had a faith in art as a practice embedded in life rather than a professional trajectory; it was a kind of balance to counteract the sometimes rough ride set to him by the world. To extend the metaphor of transit that Ron so often used when talking about his practice, each work was like one of the small weight tapped onto the wheel-rim to balance a car tire, to calm the centrifugal vibrations and allow him to move on. His sculptures existed and continue to exist in a place of immediate empathy where human presence cannot be erased. Somehow his work occupied a common ground which made it accessible to an audience outside the specialize world of art. People could “relate” to Ron’s work in much the same way as they could relate to him. I’m not surprised in communicating with many people after his passing that regardless of how long ago they last had contact, people had a vivid and empathetic sense of him. He touched people in a very immediate and profound way. I often thought of his work as akin to the blues, and Ron as a kind of sculptural blues-man. His work in it’s seemingly clumsy material persistence was elegantly tuned to a sort of intuitive “rightness.” It was decidedly more expressive than analytic, always asking “It’s like this isn’t it?” And the chorus responds in the affirmative, because we share this ground, in spirit if not in specificity. Ron’s work was not strategic or ironic,but rather a careful extension of his being into the world as an opening towards human contact. In it’s intuitive searching Ron Huebner’s work embodied an uncontrived truthfulness to which we could all aspire.
Parachute Para-Para 2004
INTERNAL FLAME - The Once and Future Sculpture of Ron Huebner by Robin Peck
CANADIAN ART - Spring 2014 Pages 104 - 109
Each art generation despairs of the next, each re-forecasting the imminent death of art. Yet art always survives. It’s the artist’s who die. This is the sadness and meaning behind Ron Huebner’s sculpture.
Ron Huebner died in a traffic accident in Amsterdam in 2004. He had just completed a series of asphalt traffic-control speed bumps in the form of reclining male and female figures. For two previous decades, he produced work characterized by such disturbing correspondences.
Consider an anecdote of a sculptor professor reviewing student works that all move in some way, mechanically or otherwise. The students sit and the professor stands. The professor asks why all the sculptures move. The students reply that movement makes the sculptures more interesting. The professor paces around the work and reminds the students that circumambulation is traditionally the role of the spectator. The students remain sitting, like they are watching television. The two attitudes seem irreconcilable. Huebner attempted to prove that they are not.
Many of Ron Huebner’s sculptures are relatively small objects resembling furniture, domestic appliances or funerary cenotaphs. Early modernist Vitalists (Sir Herbert Read’s theorizing euphemism for non-doctrinaire surrealists like Brancusi, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth) were animists of a sort, preoccupied with the reanimation of dead materials like stone and metal. However, this neo-animism was a semi-rural conceit, all fecundity, seed and eggs. Huebner’s attitude towards reactivating material was always more cynical and literal.
Huebner’s sculptures attempted to reconcile movement with static mass. His works of sculpture allow a cautious circumambulation, continually interrupted by the faint, nearly subliminal, jagged crackle of electricity. It is as if there is something coiled within Huebner’s sculptural blocks, something threatening, and barely contained. The sound, vibration and heat of these pseudo-monolithic blocks, gives us clues to their interiors.
Untitled (1981) is a large concrete block, approximately 33-centimetres-square at the top and bottom and narrower at the mid-section, like a human torso or a single section from Brancusi’s Endless Column (1938). With three rune-like glyphs on the front, it looks like a tombstone with an electrical cord. An obscure buzzing sound comes from inside, as it there is something diligently grinding it’s way to the surface, an imprisoned sculptor carving or a rat gnawing from the inside out. It humorously recalls Michelangelo’s “Every block of stone has a statue inside and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it”. According to Huebner, inside there is a small, round grindstone attached to an electric motor. There is no way to verify this without destroying the sculpture.
Untitled (1982) is a large ring of concrete, like a toilet-bowl seat for a mythical giant, with three electrical cords protruding from the rim. These tattered power cords look like the tails of laboratory rats, and the sculpture like a mad experiment. It vibrates and moans with a tortured materiality, Supposedly, there are three working electrical razors embedded in the mass. Unplugged, it looks like a sculpture by Isamu Noguchi or an inside-out version of Katharina Fritsch’s Rattenkonig (1993).
There is maybe an instinctive fear of a sound coming from within an apparently solid bock. Possibly, this is an atavistic fear of the snake beneath the stone, but surely it is, as historical Lucy Hughes-Hallett has described, a :fear of the uncategorizable, of that which is betwixt and between”. It is a fear of monsters.
Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula and Mary Shelley’s monster in Frankenstein are both social commentaries: embodiments of the horrifying aspects of their contemporary societies. One can update Frankenstein’s monster to the glowing green monster in The Hulk, and Dracula to the hemophages in Ultraviolet, both the subjects of recent films. These monsters are all mearcstapa (the Old English word for “border-steppers”): hybrids, like mythical centaurs, gorgons and sphinxes, all mutation and adaptation, and projections of the fear of the anomalous. Monsters (from Latin monstrum, “an unnatural thing,” from the root of moneo, “to warn”) are portents of the evolving future. The construction of Huebner’s sculpture, his monster, was a sign of his discontent with present time and a longing for a future in which this monstrousness may find some reconciliation.
Untitled (1984) is a table with a polished-steel surface. A circular hole in the center gives it the appearance of a washstand. A balloon stretches over a speaker set into the hole. Bouncing on this membrane are tiny styrofoam packing pellets, producing a blurry mass of a recording of airplanes taking off and pilots talking. It is sculpture as a nervously laughing mass, like sculpture made from ether. As the fifth classical element, either is claims to be detectable only by hearing (supposedly there are invisible Hindu temple sculptures made from ether).
Untitled (1989) is a set of three two-metres-high lawn chairs constructed from welded steel. The look like chairs for tanning by the poolside, except that Huebner added heating coils to raise the surface temperature of the steel to 76 degrees Celsius. A similar work is Untitled (1983), a two-meters-long steel bed with electrified porcelain hearts. The elements glow red-hot, like a Kafkaesque torture apparatus for sizzling sex. This and some other mid-career works were documented in a tiny exhibition catalogue, Need Me Like I Need You (1993). The Lawn chair piece recalls Minimalism and is suggestive of coffins and tombstone slabs, acting as a memorial to middle-class leisure and to a tormented, pampered passivity.
Huebner was always uncomfortable in what he referred to as the “picture-postcard art scene” of Vancouver. Born in Alberta, he grew up in British Columbia and was educated at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax. Huebner’s student years were not the halcyon years of NSCAD conceptual art; however they were the years of the ascendancy of sculpture at NSCAD under faculty members John Greer, Dennis Gill and Thierry Delva. While on student exchange in New York City, Huebner was studio assistant to American Sculptor Dennis Oppenheim. The influence of Greer and Oppenheim on his culture is obvious. For instance, one can compare Huebner’s lead Sleeping Bag with a similar use of material in Greer’s sheet-lead “paper airplanes” of the early 1970’s. Less obvious is the was in which Huebner’s education in sculpture did not travel well.
Aside from a few figures, the Atlantic provinces are underrepresented in the narrative of 20th-century Canadian art history, which focuses mostly on central Canada and more recently on it’s West Coast. Even so recent a study as William Wood’s history of the cataloguing of “the move from sculpture to installation to beyond” since 1960 does not mention any art made east of Quebec. To many East-Coast artists, “Canadian art” is a misnomer for what is really art from Toronto, and now also art from Vancouver. However, when Huebner relocated to Vancouver in the mid-1980s, Vancouver was still dominated by its own provincial art cultures, each with it’s own local micro-history (of Vancouver Pop Art, of Vancouver Minimalism, of Vancouver Conceptualism and particularly of Vancouver Photography). While the curators and critics queued up to promote each succeeding generation of photographer Jeff Wall “replicants”, there was not much curatorial oversight or critical audience for Huebner’s Sculpture.
At the 1987 exhibition “What You Don’t Know Won’t Hurt You” at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, Huebner scattered bones across the gallery floor, some real, others exact cast-stainless replicas. On the walls were large negative and positive silkscreens of wolves. The sound of wind came from a small steel stove-box. It could have been a powerful work, but in the Vancouver context, it appeared like a comedic stage set, as if for a corny theatre adaptation of Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf.
Invited to give a lecture on his work at Emily Carr College of Art and Design in Vancouver, Huebner’s work and attitude excited the students. When the idea came up for Huebner to teach, the head of the studio program demurred. He accurately identified Huebner’s work as mearcstapa: a monstrosity, unsettling and unwanted.
Taking advantage of his West-Coast location, Huebner visited the Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington in 1995, where he experimented with pouring molten glass into a steel mould to produce a transparent, crystalline form like a cut gemstone, a technique he later used to create the cast-glass sculpture Trust Passion Risk Death (1998). Ron Huebner’s father was a master goldsmith and diamond setter, and at one time Huebner considered becoming a registered gemologist. Yet he characteristically used sophisticated materials (such as various types of synthetic resins) in a very crude way (for example, pouring into a mould dug directly into the earth), and later used peat, a very crude material, to produce a sculpture of a fashionable living room set when he was in Holland.
The recurring personal theme for Huebner was how to escape from Vancouver. In Vancouver, he experienced a psychological isolation that was amplified by the physical isolation of the city behind it’s mountains barriers. In the 1990’s, Huebner began to spend more and more time in Europe, and finally abandoned Canada to settle permanently in the Netherlands.
Not all of Huebner’s sculpture are grinders or fryers: some are more like living-room appliances - more stereos than toasters. Mean Old World (1986) is a concrete rocking wheel. Originally installed in a Dutch cafe, it rocked back and forth as it sang the blues. Wishing Well (1986), first exhibited at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf, Germany, is a large, cast-bronze Mercedes Benz emblem set into a steel block that conceals a speaker playing the sound of clinking coins. It recalls Sami Rosenstock in the article “Money Themes” when she says of the late 1980’s “today... the sublime if it exists at all is money”.
A very small percentage of an architectural budget is sometimes reserved for public art. Like spare change, metal sculpture is installed in front of banks. Consider Gerald Ferguson’s 1,000,000 Pennies (1980), a conical pile of one million freshly minted, borrowed Canadian pennies, which serves as a sculptural study of the economics of art exhibition and acquisition. Ferguson taught at NSCAD and influence passed both ways between him and Huebner. Compare Ferguson’s Cast Iron Fruit (1990) - solid-gray, iron sand-castings of plastic fruit sold by the pound according to the current price of that fruit - with one of Huebner’s un-built projects from the early 1980’s: he applied for and did not receive a Rockefeller Foundation grant to produce cast-gold-replicas of nuclear bombs made on a scale commensurate with cost of each bomb.
Conventional Kinetic art, as documented in Jack Burnham’s Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of This Century, is rooted in Constructivism and De Stijl. It pays homage to the science fiction of technological progress. In contrast, Huebner’s art owes more to the rickety stage sets of the British science-fiction telephone series Doctor Who, and to the post-apocalyptic, futuristic visions of J.G. Ballard, than to the pro-technology fantasies of Arthur C. Clarke.
Huebner could every only fail to reconcile sculpture with movement. He proved that the restricted movement of sculpture, as with architecture, is the slow movement of ruin. The sculptural body in ruin has been the theme of several sculptural histories over the course of the 20th century. Bauhaus educator Laszlo Moholy-Nagy charted a development from carving through modelling to linear construction and movement. Minimalist Carl Andre similarly described a disintegrative narrative history of 20th-century sculpture as: “Form = Structure = Place.”
Ron Huebner proved that sculpture does not travel well and that neither do sculptors. Huebner’s oeuvre still remains largely undocumented, uncollected and scattered, each piece now more isolated, each now better than ever.
Canadian Art Spring 2014
Ron Huebner The Greyhound Series | Exhibition Review by John Greer
1994, St. Mary’s University Art Gallery, Halifax
Ron Huebner is confirming the necessity of inter-human touch through mind objectified, confirming, if not answering, the big question. The bus, the base, the time base, the journey, the arrival and the departure again, the continuum. The driver is the timekeeper. On a bus there is precious little rest, but a lot of looking and encountering, experiencing. It appears casual at first: in fact it is rigorous - and all travelers must be vigilant. If you are to travel far, you must make contact; and the contacts must be meaningful (the necessity to exhibit); your own survival depends on it. A sense of meaning is more important than a sense of direction. The world is round and, given enough time, all places can be encountered. The destination is finite. But the big question is infinite, and can only be acknowledged. Who are the travelers? A consciousness in a universe of consciousness.
Ron’s work is compassionate, intelligent, humble and very strong. He is aware of the urgency of time (the mortal howls in a frozen land). No matter how I weave Ron’s work together, stringing piece with piece, regardless of their chronology, the works comes out with the same refrain: it never fails, and it never tires. It is a confirmation of wonderful and precious life is and yet how hard one must struggle, and what the cost of art really is. Life itself is the cost, and life itself is the reward. A life well-earned is a life well-spent. Ron deals with common humanity. He is not interested in the petty and trivial. Art need not say or teach anything, or in fact be useful in any way - but it must be meaningful. I do think it is fundamental to the sustenance and survival of human life. It is a communion with creation. This is the beginning, the journey and the terminus. Welcome aboard! We have things to share, we have things (experience/expression) in common, and by sharing (showing) we acknowledge the participation in the communion with creation. It is not just a re-enactment of creation: it is taking part in creation. We are in communion with the universe and its unfolding.
It has been said that when Matisse was asked if he believed in God he replied that he did, but only when he was working. People have been sharing their expression of this communion since the beginning of human consciousness,. It is essential to human survival. It is certainly not a frivolous activity. Ron’s contribution to the cultural voice is rich and wonderful; and I for one will be forever thankful for his efforts and realizations. A piece that comes to mind, at this point and with these thoughts, is a pair of solid cast-iron forms reminiscent of a pair of sock feet, somewhat like wooden shoes. Where the heel bones would be, there are holes - one for each foot - through the iron to the floor. In these holes, Ron places two rather flat votive candles. this is a strong and meaningful piece of sculpture for me. The weight of the cast iron feet refers to the gravity of a standing human body connected with the earth. In fact, the hole in the cast iron is roughly the size of a cross-section of a femur, and gives the feeling of connection, through gravity, to the center of the earth through the marrow of the leg bones. The heat of the flame and time of the burning of the flame. The implied passion and vulnerability of the flickering. The protection of the flame by the solidity of the iron, and the warming of the iron by flames. The warmth left after the flame goes out on the way to cooling. The humility expressed through the size and shaping of the shoes. The profound presence of the object. There is strength and, at the same time, a vulnerability in these small, almost sentient, shoe-shaped forms. These objects for me are very engaging and complex - yet so simple. They are a threshold, quietly acknowledging the infinite.
Greyhound Series
Stations
RON HUEBNER | STATIONS EXHIBITION REVIEW By James D. Campbell
Catalog , 1987 Pages 95-97, 144-45, 198
A MAGICAL RELATION to one’s environment is instituted in Ron Huebner’s work in STATIONS. Huebner characterizes his sculptures as “devices for dealing with the anxieties of living” and this touches on the manner in which the creative illusion of magical thoughts obviate the apparent separateness of objects in space. Anxiety in psychoanalytic theory is that unpleasure experienced when an object is unknown and the anticipation of being overwhelmed by an internal or external force is present. Anxiety as an affect experienced by the total personality amidst the violence and dynamism of modern life is the central theme in Huebner’s installation.
Eight elements constitute Huebner’s installation and refer to everyday functional objects. However, these have been transformed by Huebner; the function of each has been inverted. The magical relational to the environment is one dominated by the “wish”. Huebner’s transformation of everyday objects reflects the wishes expressed by magical thinking. These wishes are determined by “real” needs and are a direct response to “real” dangers of the immediate lived-environment. Huebner reminds his viewers that, in the lived-environment, self-definition always rises in relation to objects. That definition my undergo a transformation just as the objects have changed. Huebner’s objects have changed radically - their functions inverted - and since the relationship between self and object always persists, the self of the artist and viewer - must also change.
Huebner has created a sort of twilight zone: a created, magical environment that serves to overcome the hazard of an experience of total helplessness. The surreal changes that everyday environmental objects undergo in Huebner’s work are the result of a sort of magical thought: the chair made of plaster, the table that talks, the water-clock that tells no time in the fact-world, the flashlight that literally dwindles away, the composite photograph that condenses Huebner’s own biological time - the patriarchal hierarchy - into a micro-second of real time, the sleeping bag that is made of lead... Everyday functional things become magical objects as though Huebner was trying to demonstrate how form given by the ego to objects in the external environment become reflected back into the ego itself by means of identification.
Identification is central to any real understanding of the work. Arnold A. Modell, the psychoanalyst theorist, says that identifications may serve the purpose of “refinding” the object in the external world or may serve the functions of the subject’s internal world. He summarizes the functions of the internal world as follows:
1) Objects may be taken into the ego in order to preserve the external object: that is, the negation or painful attributes of the object may be assumed by the subject in order to preserve or “idealize” the object: 2) Objects may be taken into the ego in order to substitute for the gratification of external objects; and 3) Objects may be taken into the ego to remove, by means of magical control, the painful or dangerous qualities of the external objects by identification with the aggressor.
It seems to me that these functions are all relevant to the work under discussion. Whether it is a question of identification in order to idealize the object; to preserve its “goodness” by drawing its “badness’ into the self: or not to preserve the object but to control it, Huebner’s magical thinking achieves the same purpose - the mitigation of anxieties in the face of modern life.
Art for me, Huebner has said, is an attempt to deal with existence, the struggle to maintain the spirit which lies within oneself. The context content of my work comes out of a reaction to the world I live in. I attempt to transform sculptural massiveness into a medium whereby the object functions like a telephone, a mediator between the viewer and the objective. Art for me has to do with an awareness, a consciousness of the place and time in which we live whereby it functions as a watchdog which set ups a situation where the viewer can be confronted in himself. A search for navigating yourself closest to your heart.
The work involves a discernible experience of time. The centre of the time perspective of this installation is the present tense - the time of day-to-day living, as Huebner phrases it - but it is a present that grows out of the past and actively directs itself towards the future. The horizon of the work is that unnoticed horizon of familiarity with the world within we actively live and the present tense of the work is the time of life.
Huebner’s installation in STATIONS brings together a number of autonomous sculptures which nevertheless are bound together within a poetic evocation of object love and reality as developed in psychoanalytic theory. But this is, of course, only one interpretation of the work this is radically open in it’s references and inferences. Arni Runar Haraldsson, in a recent review of Huebner’s installation entitled What You Don’t Know Won’t Hurt You said that work “evokes associated memories that are motivated less by the qualities of its objects than by the subject of their reception”. That is also true for Huebner’s work in STATIONS. His “sculpture-objects” - highly cathected as they are - always effect us deeply.
1. Arnold A. Modell, Object Love and Reality, New York: International Universities Press, 1980 p.50
2. Comments by Ron Huebner to James D. Campbell
3. Arni Runar Haraldsson, “Review of Ron Huebner’s What You Don’t Know Won’t Hurt You at Contemporary Art Gallery,” C Magazine, No.14, Summer 1987, p.69.
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Ron Huebner: Sculpture of a New Dark Age | By Robin Peck
C Magazine 1990 Spring Issue 25 p.28 - 31
Ignorance increases relative to the growth of knowledge. In practical terms we know less in relationship to the rapidly growing body of knowledge than at any other time. The planned obsolescence of manufactured goods is related to this increasing ignorance - this new Dark Age - and minds grow dull with the acceptance of this waster. The many do not know how to make or repair anything. They are actively discouraged from doing this. They can only consume and this consumption, in the form of changing fashion, is their creativity. The mystery of electronics is an aspect of this phenomenon. In the Computer Age, electronic illiteracy is commonplace. Electricity is used uncritically, thought of as a modern miracle, a metaphor for the mystery of life. Ron Huebner’s sculpture plus, into this thematic zone, becomes a scale model for the functioning of the culture, an aesthetic appliance of sorts. The raw materials of his art are salvage items picked up in pawn shops and scrap depots, consumer charnel fields that are like electrical midden piles, imaginatively composting debris into new circuits.
His sculpture is self-consciously hollow. It is like a musical instrument: a bell or drum filled with resonance. He transforms sculptural massiveness into electrical phenomenon and electricity into sculptural mass. Untitled, 1984, is a welded steel table with it’s top ground until it becomes a reflective surface. A circular hole gives it the appearance of a washstand. Fitted into this cavity is speaker with a balloon stretched tight over it. On this skin dance, tiny styrofoam packing pellets, a blurry mass of vibration, bouncing to the pulse of the recorded text. The nervous table is frantically energetic - sculpture as a nervous mass.
In constructing sculpture from salvage, Huebner acts as a repairman reviving a corpse, an act of healing, soldering wounded bits of the culture. The exposed wiring of some of these like stitches or like tangled intestines and brain mass - a doctor’s or butcher’s nightmare. The salvage embodies lost hopes and abandoned causes: abandoned appliances and worn out tools that we will not and, now, cannot repair.
Canadian sculpture has not shifted in character for several decades. It has waited, starving for ideas, like an impossibly patient crocodile. When it has attempted to participate in the rush of the times, it has tended to fragment and become submerged within other more aggressive art forms, turning into Performance or Video and ending up apparently lost like a country bumpkin in an urban crush. Huebner’s art expresses some of this blockheaded-ness, the obdurate, almost stunned condition of modern Canadian Sculpture. His sculpture hisses like an electric snake coiled with the Sculptural block, threatening to make it’s move, but somehow unable to, as if was imprisoned.
Most of the works are monolithic blocks or combinations of blocks that, in turn, constitute objects resembling cenotaphs, yet the theme is not directly memorial. Rather, it is a conception of a living dead, a partner to the theme of imprisonment. The sound, the vibration, and the heat of these sculptural masses clue us to a hollowness, to an interior not revealed on the surface. Untitled, 1982, is a large ring of concrete, like a gigantic toilet bowl seat, with three electrical cords protruding from the rim. The sculpture vibrates the floor. Three working electrical razors are embedded in the mass. Switched off, it looks like a Noguchi. A simpler, more interesting work is Untitled, 1981, a concrete monolith some 30 cm square at the top and bottom, narrow at mid-section, with three rune-like glyphs on the facing surface. It looks like a tombstone. It is the conventional hollow monolith of Late Modern sculpture, but an electrical cord reaches out to a wall socket. From within comes a buzzing sound, like the grinding of small gears or a shorting circuit, except the sound is obscure, like the machinations of a brain within a thick massive skull. It is as if something buried within the concrete is now diligently gnawing its way to freedom, as if there was a sculptor carving from the inside out. Michelangelo’s notion of the figure imprisoned within the block. The sound is like the toothy chiselling, the gnawing of a rat. The Neo-Vitalist, at the turn of the century, were obsessed with the reanimation of “dead” natural materials, but this was a rural conceit, all seeds and fertilization. Huebner’s attitude towards his “dead” is urban, necessarily more cynical. There is something creepy about the work’s animation, a kind of vampiric unwholesomeness related to the signalling of a nostalgic view of history, a desire for a secure artifactual aura.
There is an instinctive fear of this thing that makes sound from within the block, the fear of electrical shock, the fear of the snake beneath the stone. But this fear evaporates with humour, with the vision of a vibrating block trailing a tail and the thought of a rat, or a tiny Sculptor, bitterly carving away at the surface.
With Untitled (Lawn Chairs), 1989, Huebner turns to represent the tormented passivity which is an aspect of his imprisonment theme. There is an obvious descriptive connection to life in Vancouver - the Vancouver cut off by mountains from the rest of the continent - in the three, six-foot-long, lawn chairs. These are lounge chairs, poolside comforts, except Huebner has added heating coils capable of raising the surface temperature of the steel to near 170 degrees F. Presented - communally - in a row, the chairs suggest coffins or tombstone slabs, memorials to the middle class leisure on the West Coast in the pre-ozone era.
A similar, earlier work is Untitled, 1983, which is a love bed or a humorous torture apparatus for sizzling sex. The two-meter-long steel bed frame is filled with springs formed in the shape of hearts. These heart elements glow red, heating the air around the bed. Like the lawn chairs, it is a toaster, but it also recalls the torture machine in Kafka’s In the Penal Colony - all pain and deranged gears. Some of the hearts in the piece are burned out, their electrical failure a short cut to pathos.
Not all of the sculptures are grinders or fryers; other are more like living room appliances, stereos rather than toasters. Some play appropriated music - rock ‘n’ roll or blues - others play original music composed by Huebner. Mean Old World, 1986, is a concrete wheel that rocks. Originally installed in a Dutch cafe, it rocked gently back and forth as it sang the Blues, like an eccentric clockwork mechanism, a counter-weighted cam of some kind. Even the most musical works are like tombs or prisons: massive, anti-structural: collapsed buildings of sound.
Wishing Well, 1986, originally exhibited in the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf, is a large cast bronze Mercedes Benz emblem set into a horizontal block which conceals a speaker playing sound of falling, clinking coins. In Women Artists News, Sami Rosenstock writes of the money themes in Modern Art as having the same meaning as the conventional themes of art which she dismisses as, “War, large bodies of water and unclad women... the money themes are usually off canvas, that makes them all the more profound... today art is all chic venality, cynicism and careering - the sublime, if it exists at all, is money.” Sculpture made from metal tends to look like money, or more precisely, like coinage. Sculpture has tended to remain secondary in relationship to graphic arts like painting and photography and so it is in metaphorical terms where, if it is coinage, then painting and photography are more like paper money (conceptual art is like stocks and bonds). However, in coinage, “sculpture” refers to high relief modelling (i.e. the American Buffalo nickel, 1913-38) or to simple massiveness (the 43 pound ten daler coin of the 17th century Sweden). Coinage has security, weight and substance, a gravity that paper money cannot provide, but it is still secondary by virtue of its clumsiness, its inconvenience as a medium of exchange. A middle class art audience generally unused to material display in a steel yard is relatively easily to impress with simple massiveness. (Consider the sculpture of David Rabinowitch, the way it is usually displayed like so much loot from Scrooge McDuck’s money bin. Compare Rabinowitch’s steel “coins” to Gerald Ferguson’s 1,000,000 Pennies, 1980, a conical pile of one million freshly minted Canadian pennies, a study in economics of art display and purchase.) In Wishing Well, Huebner derides this, as well as the functionalist conceit of German industrial design derived from the decadent Bauhaus of Max Bill.
More recently, in a 1987 exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, Huebner scattered bones across the floor. Some were real, others stainless steel casting made from the originals. Photomurals of wolves skulking in a forest faced one another across the room and a stove-like box case a light and made a sound like the blowing of wind. The installation felt like a grove polluted with the scraps of a feast or massacre. It also felt like a site filled with relics of a divination rite - recall the Norse Sybil’s “a sword age, a wind age, a wolf age...” a portent of a dark illogical age, and also a requiem for sculpture in the 80’s.
Bibliography
Jorge Luis Borges, Kafka and his Precursors, Labyrinths, N.Y., 1962
Sidney Geist, Brancusi, A Study of Sculpture, N.Y., 1968
Donald Judd, Specific Objects, Arts yearbook, N.Y., 1965
Franz Kafka, In The Penal Colony.
Sami Rosenstock, Money Themes, Women Artist News, Winter 1989
Robert Smithson, Entropy and the New Monuments, Artforum, June 1966
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, London , 1922
Joachim Wilenski, Constructivism Against Modernism, London, 1988
C Magazine 1990
Ron Huebner: What You Don’t Know Won’t Hurt You | Exhibition Review
By Arni Runar Haraldsson | Contemporary Art Gallery
C Magazine 1987 Summer Issue 14 p.68-69
Ron Huebner’s installation entitled ‘What You Don’t Know Won’t Hurt You’ is poetic in nature, juxtaposing and combining element that are otherwise opposed with the intent of installing a sense of uncertainty in the viewer, leading one to question certain common-held assumptions as to our notion of comfort, security and basic survival. This ‘placing in doubt’ is achieved by way of metaphorical, rather than analogical associations, utilizing a most practical economy of materials and space.
Two identical photo-silkscreened canvasses, depicting a pack of wolves scrummaging in a forest, face each other from opposite walls. One is in positive and the other is in negative. Scattered across the gallery floor are an assortment of animal bones interspersed with exacting, stainless steel copies. Also on the floor, midway between the two canvasses, stands what appears to be a box-like heat generating contraption concealing a speaker emitting the sound of wind whistling across a barren landscape. Huebner has also designed a book to accompany this minimal setting of debris. Essentially an artist’s book, it is devoid of text other than its rhetorical cover-title: Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf. Inside, the image of the wolves goes though a sequence of subtle alterations from positive to negative.
The images of the wolves, combined with the presence of the bones, relates to a theme of life and death in nature. The copied stainless-steel bones, along with the synthetic 'tape’ sound, draws in the man-made, industry. Here the act of creating is seen as being at odds with nature - the already-created. The real bones represent, and partake of reality, but it is an entirely other reality that is in direct opposition to that which stainless-steel represents. The eventual decomposition of the natural may be said to be determined, whereas the life-span of its copy, in this case, is not - it will ‘live on’ as it were. The real bones contain a truth that only gives rise to a condition of doubt; within this setting, becomes one simulacrum among others.
Although lacking narrative, Huebner’s book work, nevertheless, suggests a sequential reading - however, one that remains a mystery for the reader to unravel from the clues given by its repetition and manipulation. Taken together its details defy any one single reading but create an eerie mood. Huebner, by way of repetition, directs our eyes from light to darkness: instead of bringing the image to life he brings it towards death. The recognizable wolf is gradually transformed into a dark beast, with hollow penetrating eyes that, like the historical wolf, induces fear by staring down its assailant while striking at the heart of the unconscious.
As the images regresses into its negative, the background upon which it rests (approximately one-eighth of each page) simultaneously changes from dark to light as its blotches of dots become less dense. This framing device acts as a means of concretizing the image as image, and suggests that the unknown is simply a product of the imagination, that there is nothing to fear but fear itself.
It would seem that Huebner wishes us to link our organic, instinctive feeling powers to our thinking powers, as our vision of the world must be extended to encompass the invisible energies derived from nature with which we have lost contact. 'What You Don’ Know...’ conveys more the sense of an indication or suggestion that a cohesive reading. There is ;more here whose aim is to appeal to more than what interpretation or understanding might offer. We are left with rather distant traces which are only the perceptible edges of something other: the setting as a whole has only the character of a hint. And as such its objects fail to transfer a message but they may move a viewer. Remaining ‘open’ in its reference(s), ‘What You Don’t Know...’ evokes associated memories that are motivated less by the qualities of its objects than by the subject of their reception.
C Magazine 1987
Need Me Like I Need You | Exhibition Review by Robin Peck
University of British Columbia Fine Art Gallery
Parachute Magazine Issue 57 1990 p.49-50
The Fine Arts Gallery at the University of British Columbia is below ground, a windowless chamber beneath the main library building, made from concrete reinforced with steel, like a blast shelter or survival bunker of some kind. Steps lead down through a series of progressively narrower hallways. There is a sensation of penetrating a great mass, like entering a cavern or tomb. The gallery hall proper is large, but appears even larger approximately twenty by seventy feet square, but appears even larger because of the low ceiling that has the effect of compressing and further spreading and flattening the space. The concrete floor and the walls are painted a medium grey. This and the distorted proportions of the gallery amplify the sensation of being deep underground, the sensation of massive compressive pressure being exerted by the bulk of library books stacked several floors deep high overhead. Penetrating this dense negative volume, like piston rods in an architectural motor mechanism, are rows of rigid vertical structural steel reinforcing members. The effect is theatrical, dramatic, like a subterranean grotto folly, the roots of a crystalline of petrified forest exposed by erosion or the hypo-style hall of some obscure religious sect. One expects to hear the sound of splashing water but instead there is a current of vibration, a humming sound overlayed by a steady audio pulse, like a heart beat.
Ron Huebner’s installation is three nearly distinct works. The floor is scattered with swollen grey concrete forms, like sacks of hardened liquid, varying in size from one foot in diameter to nearly twice this, each molded into a hilly landscape of sensual concavities and convexities. This is a representation of Sculpture as a condition of Wear, a parody of Auguste Rodin and Henry Moore or the human concretions of Jean Arp; a cliche of biomorphic form recalling the forms of water worn stones but more significantly recalling as well the submarine like desolation, the dream forms found in the paintings of Yves Tanguy. Each concrete stone has a tail, an electrical extension cord that plugs into the tangled network of cables leading to electrical outlets on the ceiling. With their tails and in this gloomy chamber the concrete masses look like overfed rats, too plump to move. The vibration and the pulse are subtle, almost subliminal, barely sensible, but the electrical cord tail gives each mass the status of a domestic appliance or a power tool and provides a clue to the source of the phenomenon. We touch them to confirm our suspicions. They are smooth and vibrate, purring like living things. For a small inset speaker comes the steady pulse. The room fills with an etheric resonance. Huebner transforms the traditional massiveness of Sculpture into an electrical phenomenon and transforms the electricity, the feel, of the place into a Sculptural massiveness.
The pulse is represented again on an end wall where a life size silhouette of an astronaut outlined in brilliant acidic neon plants and replants an anonymous flag-stabbing and re-stabbing the shaft into some jaded optic nerve. Opposite this, on another wall, is a large photographic enlargement of a microscopic view of a nervous system. It looks like an abstract expressionist painting, greenish, like water in an aquarium or a swimming pool. One understands the weave of electrical cords and concrete lumps, vibration and pulses, as representation of Nerve, recalling the occult tradition of building as a construction of the divine corpse or ethereal body, the heartbeat in stone.
On two walls are hung a series of blueprints, copies of famous works of art, Paintings. They are familiar, even friendly, arranged in chronological sequence from Cave Painting through decorations for Egyptian tombs to The Raft of the Medusa and The Dream of Henri Rousseau, among numerous others. In comparison to the neon they are visually uninteresting, each an almost colorless hazy blue as if seen at a great distance or through a thickening atmosphere. It is The History of Art as The History of Western European Painting, the same fiction that is still taught straight faced to College art History Survey classes.
The exhibition is very much like a painting by Tanguy viewed from the inside, the atmosphere thickening and becoming fluid. For a time one remains calm, appreciative, and then the subtle pulse becomes more than intriguing or annoying, and there is the sensation of drowning, suffocating in the mass. The image of the avant-grade artist, the astronaut, continues his manic unreasoning planting of his little flag on yet another unknown world. The banal Fictions of Science related to the equally banal Histories of Art. Our room is compressing, the dream of historical achievement, o progress, is collapsing into claustrophobia. The blueprints blur.
Inevitably, as with every other exhibition, one gropes towards the exit, drawn less by will than be the instinct of self preservation. One flees down hallways and up stairs through doors, forcing oneself out from under the deadening mass, out from under the weight of History, away from memorial sculpture and the morbid art of the tomb. One emerges like a swimmer in a pool, but remains a collaborator within Huebner’s Sculptural fiction.
Parachute 1990
Ron Huebner: Western Front Vancouver | Exhibition Review By Robin Peck
VANGUARD Magazine 1984 Volume 13 Number 7
Huebner’s sources are in John Greer, in the early work of Hans Haacke and the later work of Dennis Oppenheim. Huebner studied with both Greer and Haacke at NSCAD and later in New York with Dennis Oppenheim. His intention seems to be to transform sculptural massiveness into electrical phenomenon and electrical phenomenon into sculptural massiveness. Huebner conceives of sculptural mass a literally a bundle of nerves. I believe that he has considerably extended the work of his influential predecessors in the direction of projected body awareness.
Five works by Huebner fill the relatively small Western Front Gallery. Each piece is approximately the same size: each is made to a roughly human body or Furniture Size, a size that has become the norm for much sculpture being made today. Some of the acceptance of the particular size as the standard is surely its generally unacknowledged relationship to the conventional size of furniture along with the attendant signification of domesticity and body relaxation and comfort. In one sculpture, Untitled, the sculpture is actually a piece of furniture. With the exception of this piece however, Huebner tends to use the scale as an accepted framing device (in Two Kids Drumming it is literally a base) to give all the works a degree of uniformity.
Platform for Losing Your Fathers Steps is a squarish, slightly octagonal steel box, with an upper surface of expanded steel mesh. It’s painted a dull green and looks like a Judd. Cut through the mesh top is a single track of footprints that circumambulate counterclockwise at the surface perimeter.
Beneath is visible another surface spinning clockwise this time. It flexes wavelike as it spins like a warped record. On an adjacent wall surface are three photographs: the artist, his father and his grandfather, and a quotation by philosopher John Brockman (something about life as navigation). Above the platform a large Furniture Size speaker vibrates with the sound of Hank Williams... “Son-of-a-gun we’ll have some fun...”
The Brockman quote trivializes the work, but the other elements of the piece conspire to invoke a rich sense of past time, spinning and re-spinning. This is Huebner’s prodigal son piece, coinciding with his return to the West coast. It is comfortable, nostalgic and rich in familial memory.
Untitled is a table constructed from steel plate ground raw and reflective in a faceted crystalline way. A circle cut from the centre of the top surface gives the table the appearance of a wash stand or sink. Fitting into this hole from the bottom is a speaker with a balloon stretched tightly, drum-like over its surface providing a floor for the sink. On this vibrating integument dance styrofoam packing pellets, blurring into sub-atomic with each pulse of the recorded text. The text also blurs out with static: its more or less incoherent, like the sound of fighter pilots in conversation. This is a nervous table. It is energetic: a work surface. The sculpture effectively confronts the conventional Furniture Size scale with a fresh sense of body/mind mass as a bundle of nerves.
Two Kids Drumming is not such an easy piece initially. There are no styrofoam packing pellets to play with. The sculpture is simply a small ceramic drum, an inverted pot hollowed from a beaten/drummed block of clay. It does sit on an appropriately Furniture Sized pedestal and is backed by a large and unnecessary photo-text from the history and social significance of drumming. The text limits the work in a way completely opposite from the way the title functions. Its use is an unnecessary apology. This is the most cerebral work in the exhibition. The missing electrical component is replaced by the functioning of mind and of memory.
Vanguard 1984
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