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: something 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.
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.
My artistic experiment involves an act of domestication of wilderness. The stone is given a refinement of form. In addition, it is isolated from its biological neighborhood because the living surface of the earth is mechanically separated from it. Thus, biologically speaking, it is pure matter on the living earth; as a work of art, it is stony material that becomes a piece of alien matter and, for me as a human being, a symbolically charged artifact.
What is civilized about man in society is not a given, but instead his striving to master ourselves in the face of the realization that we are part of society.
I let myself be surprised: 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. The public, from children to old people, 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” would have been 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 STONE 1, 2000, Gotthard granite.
The “stones” are unsigned because a signature destroys the weightlessness of the individual sculpture.