Between the early 1950s and his death in 1998, Carlfriedrich Claus (b.1930) produced a corpus of work that occupies terrain somewhere between philosophy, art, linguistics and acoustic literature. Both visually with his language sheets and acoustically with his language operations, he plumbed and explored the depths of human consciousness, making a wholly individual contribution to the art of the 20th century in doing so. These sound processes and language operations have a consistency and radicalism unacknowledged hitherto.
Starting with an open mind, he delved into the history of ideas and religion with a view to examining their practical relevance today. In the 1950s, Claus acquired a thorough background in the dialectical materialism of Ernst Bloch, but alongside that he systematically worked his way through a wide range of philosophical and religious schools of thought from antiquity onwards – and indeed even earlier – and established a basis for his creative output from a synthesis of all his studies.
Both this universal frame of thought and his artistic output, which did not – and indeed refused to – fit in with the approved subject matter and aesthetic criteria of Socialist Realism in a narrower sense, drove the artist into existential isolation during the East German years. He was uncompromising in measuring the reality of socialism against the ideals of a fundamental humanism, democratic freedoms and general social responsibility. It was only long after numerous exhibitions and publications in Western Europe and America had brought him public recognition abroad to that a first comprehensive exhibition of his work was put on at the Kunstsammlungen in Chemnitz in the midst of the upheaval of political change in 1990. Subsequently, this exhibition went on tour to Münster, Frankfurt, Bielefeld, Munich and Hamburg in West Germany. In 1995, his good contacts with the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz culminated in the showing of Claus's Sound Process Room, and ultimately prompted the artist to designate the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz as a permanent home for his fragile and complex cross-media work after his death.
© Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, Stiftung Carlfriedrich Claus-Archiv
© Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, Stiftung Carlfriedrich Claus-Archiv
Einem luftigen akustischen Kosmos entgegen
CD, Rumpsti Pumsti (Edition) Nummer 12, June 2011
Edition of 300 copies. First 30 copies with signed & numbered original lomography by Hartmut Geerken. Jewelcase with 12 page booklet including a text by Hartmut Geerken (German only).
Collaboration performance by this two infamous german visual artists, writers & sound-poets, recorded at Lyrik-Kabinett München, June 1991. This is Carlfriedrich Claus' only sound-collaboration ever. Both artists prepared a 60-minute backing-tape and wrote a detailled score for live-performed poetry and voice-operations. In addition to these fixed compositions they left room for spontaneous improvisation and the use
of small cymbals ('tschinkas').
Hartmut Geerken (born 1939) is an author, composer, musician, film-maker, performer, actor, mycologist, archivist, stager of exhibitions, publisher of numerous authors from the circle of literary expressionism
and dada, lumberjack, and bumble-bee-keeper. As a percussionist, he has collaborated with a variety of free jazz musicians such as Sun Ra, John Tchicai, Sainkho Namtchylak. As a poet, he is a practitioner of concrete poetry and organizes events such as the annual Bielefeld New Poetry Colloquium. As an actor, he appeared in six films by Herbert Achternbusch and appeared in two of Achternbusch's plays at the Munich Kammerspiele.
Carlfriedrich Claus Retrospective LP/CD-Set