During the years when Stephan von Huene was working on the sound sculptures as well, the medium of drawing represented both a mode of playful and experimental practice as well as a form of artistic expression for him. This is shown among others by two groups of works which allow us to trace a chronological progression: the ZEIT Collages document an exchange of letters and images that connected the artist with his future wife, Die ZEIT editor Petra Kipphoff, between Los Angeles and Hamburg. Using excerpts from Die ZEIT which touch upon world politics as well as anecdotal topics, von Huene added his own drawings in order to focus on specific aspects or devise a new narrative.
1972 – 1997
Manifested in the Getty Talk too is a chronology of events. Like an art historian, von Huene traces the genealogy of the sound sculptures and comments on them in the mind maps. These pages served as a model for a lecture delivered by the artist at the Getty Center in LA (1991), but also function independently of their oral delivery as schematic diagrams for the diverse contexts (technical, artistic, art-theoretical, philosophical, among others) within which the sculptures may be regarded, and for whose interpretation they serve as points of departure. In an interplay between analysis and synthesis, the sketch-style mind maps exemplify the artist’s self-reflection in an open form that inspires further thought.
