embodied, embedded – Beat Huber listening to the sound of the flowing creek 1961
Stones fallen out of rocks on the surface of the earth – rounded weightlessly in the currents of water, ice, sun and wind – a pebble exists like a human being on the living surface of the earth. Rolling stones … rubble and boulders in the mass, but as a single pebble as unique as every single person.
We humans are a part of our phenomenology ourselves, but we are still humans: someone special. And yet we are also part of the oxidizing, living patina on the surface of the earth.
From a philosophical point of view, our relationship with nature, which is focused on profit, together with the realization of the biological conditionality of our existence, define materialism. In the face of the cultural dominance of Hollywood, Bollywood and megacity architecture, visual art is dedicated to subjective points of view and sensibilities and is more often used for decoration than for spiritual enlightenment.
In the novel Island, 1962 Aldous Huxley expresses two opposing definitions of materialism: Our superficial idea of possession defines the abstract materialism.
Concrete materialism, on the other hand, requires full mindfulness in everything one does and one experiences.
… In concrete materialism, one must be fully aware of the individual materials that pass through one’s hands, as well as of the dexterity with which one goes about one’s work and as well as of the people with whom one works. … And further: concrete materialism is quite simply the raw material of a fulfilled human life.
During the 1990s, in my work as a stonemason, I returned to the rounded stones of the rivers from my childhood memories and embarked on the experiment of detaching such stones individually from their element in order to give them a domestic place. By avoiding a form in the sculpture that is alien to the stone, I am aiming straight at the materialistic perspective that pays special attention to materiality in sculpture.
The narrativ of my artistic experiment is some act of domestication of wilderness. The form, that is already inherent in the stones is refined. In addition, a stone treated in this way is isolated from its biological neighbourhood because the living surface of the earth, which also exists on it, is mechanically separated from it. In biological terms, it is therefore isolated, pure matter on the living earth. The object out of stone obtained in this way is a alien body; it belongs neither to nature nor to tradition and for me as a human being it becomes a symbolically charged artefact.
I’m in for a surprise.: the more strictly I observe what happens while I am working, the stranger such a stone appears in the context of contemporary art.
Nobody disputes that the STEIN series are artifacts, but whether they are works of art is something we can ask the little children.
About the Title “STONE” It was not until May 2000, when the 10.4-ton sculpture with the working title “Sculpture for a Bedroom” was presented to the public in an exhibition in Schänis, that the name “STONE” emerged. Joung and old gave the work the name “De Stei” of their own accord. This consensus impressed me and so I gave the series the name STONE, although with my series of works I actually depict the little PEBBLE that small children put in their little pockets with their little hands. “PEBBLE” was the first choice for the title.
In my catalog, the sculptures are given a consecutive number, the year of their creation and a material designation, beginning with STEIN 1, 2000, Gotthard granite.
The “stones” are unsigned because a signature destroys the weightlessness of the individual sculpture.