Continental Schrift: the story of Interfunktionen

ArtForum, May, 2004 by Christine Mehring

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The magazine had stumbled on its voice. It would be committed to critically engaged art, to contributions by artists, to impromptu coverage of the most current developments, and to projects drawn from a variety of disciplines and media. In the expanding world of European art periodicals, shrewd reporting on the art of the day was hard to come by. Flipping through Das Kunstwerk or Cimaise today feels like touring a junkyard of editorial, critical, and artistic efforts; Heubach justly deemed most of them "indescribably stupid, putting their money only in pictures." Events like the Documenta performances or the LIDL Akademie were routinely relegated to the news sections as juvenile curiosities; artists' voices were limited to the occasional sound bite or interview; and artistic projects in publication format were unheard of. Heubach wanted something "more authentic," an artists' magazine like Vostell's decollage but without its limited attention to Fluxus and Happenings.

The magazine was the medium: Layout on a printed page had to be integral to the submission. Whether authors collaborated with the editor or had a free hand in the design, the visual and conceptual integrity of a contribution always guided the final product. If this entailed making facsimiles when artists did not provide enough original paper, if it meant hours of folding oversize sheets by hand, if it required accepting staples, illegible scribbles, or typos--the editor's attitude was "so be it." An open-minded selection process enhanced the fresh, hodgepodge flavor. Today Heubach laughs off frequent compliments for his good eye: "I simply followed my curiosity and the advice of artist friends," especially Vostell and, later, Dan Graham. That's why the pages of Interfunktionen are a kind of raw history, suspended in an exciting zone somewhere between the messy present and sure-footed predictions of an art-historical canon. It was all about instinctive reaction. When Heubach heard about the cancellation of Hans Haacke's 1971 Guggenheim retrospective, he immediately solicited partial publication of its controversial centerpiece, the Shapolsky real-estate project. And if he took a shine to the work of young artists that had never been shown before, such as Lothar Baumgarten's explorations of nature and culture or Rebecca Horn's body extensions, he let them introduce themselves in a section entitled "New People."

By issue 3 such sections began to provide structure and focus. Under the mantle of "Information," the editor presented a myriad of short submissions, ranging from a public letter by Joseph Beuys and others protesting the Cologne art fair to the amusing, pseudoscientific correlation made by Heubach between an evening's television program and average toilet-water usage. The more substantial "Theory" section appeared long before that wave hit the '80s art world. "Theory meant parallel productions, a kind of read experience," Heubach elaborates. "It didn't necessarily have to do with art, it provided another perspective on reality." For example, it was in this context that structuralism found its way into German art via the figure of Michael (aka Mark) Oppitz. Another member of the Heubach circle and an accomplished anthropologist trained under Claude Levi-Strauss, he penned semiotic reflections on non-Western architecture and Broodthaers's use of the eagle image, and influenced artists like Baumgarten, whose work, in Buchloh's estimation, "is unthinkable without Oppitz."