Continental Schrift: the story of Interfunktionen

ArtForum, May, 2004 by Christine Mehring

"Who's this fascist who thinks he's an antifascist?"

With these words, as Benjamin H.D. Buchloh recalls, Marcel Broodthaers voiced his outrage at Anselm Kiefer's "Occupations" series, featured in the 1975 issue of the German art magazine Interfunktionen. Kiefer's 1969 project showed the young artist performing the Nazi salute in front of European monuments such as the Colosseum and prompted Broodthaers to withdraw one of his artist's books from publication under Interfunktionen's mantle. His reaction effectively cut off funding for the next issue and sealed the fate of what until then had arguably been the most important European art magazine since World War II. Dealers pulled their ads; curators and other artists conveyed their dismay, as did the magazine's founding editor, Friedrich Wolfram (aka Fritz) Heubach. The "whole thing wasn't legendary, it was a scandal," recalls Buchloh, who as Heubach's successor commissioned the contribution without a second thought. Although he would become a fierce critic of Kiefer's later work, for Buchloh, the artist's "Occupations" suggested "a real working through of German history. You have to inhabit it to overcome it"--precisely not the type of clear-cut, critical gesture his Belgian friend Broodthaers expected.

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What was critical could still be readily agreed on back in '68, when Interfunktionen came into being as an organ for activist art. That summer the opening of Documenta 4 had come under public attack for a conventional, market-driven agenda that was felt to represent inadequately the art of the '60s. With the exception of some "environments," neither space nor money was available for new media: An event involving performance and sound art, long planned by the local theater and Happening artist Wolf Vostell, was canceled. American Pop and Minimalist artists, hot tickets on the German art market, far outnumbered artists from any single European country, provoking critics to nickname the show "Americana" and to refer to New York City as a "suburb of Kassel." The curatorial team, headed for the fourth time by the aging Arnold Bode, was laced with prominent dealers, journalists, and directors of art academies--conflicts of interest hard to imagine today.

"We didn't sit down to create a magazine. It developed out of the context, out of the quarrels over Documenta," Heubach recalls. "We thought, we'll make a documentation." Number 1, originally available in an edition of 120 for 15DM, gives just that impulsive impression: a cheaply glue-bound collection of some seventy-five pages, made of assorted papers printed, typed, or handwritten, including loose enclosures, foldouts, and collages of news clippings with scrawled citations. In his introduction, Heubach warns that the restrictive policies of art institutions like Documenta impede the free, experimental production of art. Detailed records describing the canceled multimedia event and a general collection of news coverage follow.

Midway through the issue things heat up. "Honey-Blind Action" documents performances staged by artists during the opening press conference: Jorg Immendorff jumped across tables, waved a stick topped with the silhouette of a cute polar bear painted light blue, and smeared honey over the microphones, while his wife, Chris Reinecke, "hugged and kissed everyone," including the alarmed Bode. Vostell poured a bag of change in front of the curators as a symbolic donation, and Heubach, among others, raised a banner reading, "Prof. Bode, we, the blind, thank you for this pretty show." Newspaper articles are interspersed with an absurd correspondence between Reinecke and the city of Kassel, which officially fined her 27.35DM for the removal of honey stains from tables and carpets. Matching the city's bureaucratese, her formal reply declined responsibility and requested that the bill be sent to her husband instead at the same address, The "Manifestoes" section gathers fliers that greeted visitors at the exhibition opening, such as a poster announcing an alternative, critical realist exhibition by Dieter Ruckhaberle, which read: "What's left to do for artists of a nation that wages a criminal war such as the one in Vietnam ... other than to make Minimal Art?" Issue number 1 closes with accounts of "The Postcard Affair": Special limited editions of the magazine contained prints banned from the official Documenta book-stores, including Vostell's postcard of a fighter jet montaged over the Fridericianum and K.P. Brehmer's stamp featuring a red flag mounted over that same building.

The twenty-four-year-old Heubach was in the trenches alongside these artists, many of whom had a hand in putting together the first issue of his magazine. A doctoral candidate in psychology in Cologne since 1965, he had met Vostell and through him many other artists in a city that had emerged with nearby Dusseldorf as the center of the postwar German art world. "Heubach always scurried around," Immendorff recalls. For instance, he was an early member of the artist's LIDL Akademie, an alternative venue for artistic and political activities that grew out of the student uprisings at the Dusseldorf Art Academy and that was extensively covered in the first five Interfunktionen issues, and he cofounded the nonprofit organization Labor ("laboratory") for the "research of acoustic and visual phenomena," together with Vostell, the composer Mauricio Kagel, and the filmmaker Alfred Feussner. The idea for the magazine's title sprang from these interdisciplinary interests. "Interfunktion--that meant multimedia, audio and visual theater, and so forth. 'Inter' was in. Today one would call it 'global,' back then 'inter' was enough," Heubach wryly explains. "For example, there was Intermobel, a furniture company, and Internationis, a federal program that subsidized exchanges with international artists."