Continental Schrift: the story of Interfunktionen

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The "Theory" section advanced Heubach's conceptual vision for the magazine, with essays and lecture manuscripts straight from his own typewriter. As a psychology student, Heubach says, he "could easily relate to art which was conceived mentally, which dealt with the experience and construction of reality and self." This was understood always through the lens of the viewer, not the artist. Freud's psychobiographic take on Leonardo was a definite dead end; Heubach favored the various uncertain paths down which artists sent their audience. This approach surfaces in treatises on psychological aesthetics based on empirical studies for his doctoral work, as well as in discussions of art forms he considered symptomatic of a crisis of experience brought about by developments ranging from consumer culture to space travel to futurology. For Heubach, Pop art situated itself dangerously close to the world of consumption, and only in the later work of Lichtenstein and Oldenburg did it defamiliarize its objects. Happenings and Fluxus were more acceptable in triggering both distancing and participatory experiences of the everyday; Land art complicated the experience of our surroundings and our selves through strategies of ambivalence; body and performance art fore-grounded the tension and fluent boundaries between experiences of self and outside; encounters with Beuys's signature materials like wood and fat alternated between appalling simplicity and multivalent psychological and historical meanings.

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These favorite topics appeared prominently in Interfunktionen under Heubach's editorship between 1968 and 1973. Beyond individual contributions here and there, extensive space of more than thirty pages was routinely devoted to thematic documentations. Fluxus was featured in issue 2, with manifestos and detailed chronologies listing performances. There was Land art in issues 3 and 7, including full-bleed illustrations of Earthworks by Michael Heizer, Walter De Maria, and others, along with published and previously unpublished writings by artists like Robert Smithson and Dennis Oppenheim. Body art figured in issues 6 and 8, with photographs, stills, and occasional typewritten descriptions of performances by Vito Acconci, Dan Graham, Bruce Nauman, Oppenheim, and the Viennese Actionists. And there were five mammoth collections of photographs and drawings covering recent actions by Beuys.

Heubach systematically pursued artists who worked outside traditional media and who, in his biting words, "radically snubbed prevalent artistic taste, still indebted to the pretentious and muddled spirituality of the '50s." That actually meant something in Europe, where the gulf between established and experimental art was so much greater than in the US. Efforts on behalf of varied media extended to music, film, and literature. Heubach was in the thick of the literary and musical avant-garde, for Cologne was home to West German Radio (WDR), with its legendary support of electronic music, radio plays, and new poetry. Kagel early on contributed Detour to Higher SubFidelity, featuring photographs of alternative record styluses--straws, scissors, fingernails, forks, funnels, combs, what have you--accompanied by deadpan commentary; Philip Glass and Steve Reich followed later. Cologne's lively film scene, too, left its mark on the magazine. Members of the resident independent film group X-SCREEN published work in progress, as did Valie Export and Peter Weibel. Heubach's support of new media and interdisciplinary work was aimed at exploding existing boundaries and fostering dialogues, as evidenced by the loose intermingling of these remarkably varied pursuits within each issue. Space was further available for artists who escaped even the broadest categorizations, whose work paralleled, as it were, the editor's open, all-embracing attitude. Thus maverick Dieter Roth appears in 1969, with characteristically circular, at once melancholic and humorous musings on the adjective "old"; and in 1970, with pseudoscientific diagrams and notes cunningly entitled Vom Pferd, meaning literally "about horses" but also referencing the German idiom for "pulling one's leg."