Each art generation despairs of the next, each re-forecasting the imminent death of art. Yet art always survives. It’s the artists who die. This is the sadness and the 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 just such disturbing correspondences.
Consider an anecdote of a sculpture 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, seeds and eggs. Huebner’s attitude toward 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 give us clues to their interiors.
Untitled (1981) is a 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 runelike glyphs on the front, it looks like a tombstone with an electrical cord. An obscure buzzing sound comes from inside, as if there is something diligently grinding its 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 it 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 Rattenkönig (1993).
There is maybe an instinctive fear of a sound coming from within an apparently solid block. Possibly, this is an atavistic fear of the snake beneath the stone, but surely it is, as historian 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 present monstrousness may find some reconciliation.
Untitled (1984) is a table with a polished-steel surface. A circular hole in the centre 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 vibration that forms and reforms in response to the pulse 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, ether is claimed 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. They 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-metres-long steel bed frame fitted with electrified porcelain hearts. The elements glow red-hot, like a Kafkaesque torture apparatus for sizzling sex. This and some other midcareer 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, Nova Scotia. Huebner’s student years were not the halcyon years of NSCAD conceptual art; however they were the years of the ascendency 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 sculpture is obvious. For instance, one can compare Huebner’s lead sleeping bags with a similar use of the material in Greer’s sheet-lead “paper airplanes” of the early 1970s. Less obvious is the way 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 its West Coast. Even so recent a study as William Wood’s history of the cataloguing of “the move from sculpture to installation and 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 its 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 steel 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 adaption of Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf.
Invited to give a lecture on his work at the 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 in the earth), and later used peat, a very crude material, to produce a sculpture of a fashionable living room set while 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 its mountain barriers. In the 1990s, Huebner began to spend more and more time in Europe, and finally he abandoned Canada to settle permanently in the Netherlands.
Not all of Huebner’s sculptures 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 café, it rocked back and forth as it sang the blues. Wishing Well (1986), first exhibited at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, 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 1980s, “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 1980s: 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 the 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 television 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 ever only fail to reconcile sculpture with movement. He proved that the restricted movement of kinetic art is indeed a form of stasis and that the real movement of sculpture, as with architecture, is the slow movement of ruin. The sculptural body in ruin has been the theme of several sculpture histories over the course of the 20th century. Bauhaus educator László 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.
A version of this text was published in 2012 at GruntArchives.org. This article is from the Spring 2014 issue of Canadian Art. To read more from this issue, visit its table of contents. To read the entire, issue, pick up a copy on newsstands or the App Store until June 14.
