American Conceptual Artist
1824-1997
Douglas Huebler was a conceptual artist who based his work in photography beginning in the late 1960s. From a personal history of abstract expressionist painting and minimalist sculpture, he developed unique installations of photographs with texts as objects, conceived from narratives, which he engineered from life. Implicit in his work are the abandonment of modern photography and its history of classification. Huebler replaced the artistic photograph with documents of process and strategies. - Joyce Roetter
Douglas Huebler grew up on a farm during the Great Depression in rural Michigan. Despite his early desire to become an artist, his father worried over the money needed to attend university and thought he would never make money as an artist. He decided to enlist in the Marines, and fought in the West Pacific as an aerial artist, sketching maps from planes. He used his g.i. bill to attend the University of Michigan, and pursued his dream of becoming an artist. Huebler was initially aligned with the minimalist movement and was included in the seminal 1966 exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York titled, "Primary Structures." Shortly thereafter, he made the famous statement, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” He then started producing works in numerous media often involving documentary photography, maps and text to explore social environments and the effect of passing time on objects. The basic idea behind conceptual art is that the ideas, the concepts behind the work is more important than the work and the execution of the work itself. This led many Yoko Ono, for example, to not even actually make the art, but rather leave a set of instructions for the viewer. An example of this process in action can be seen in Huebler's 1969 photographic piece, a series that, consists of ten black & white photographs of Central Park accompanied by a text explaining that a picture was taken each time he had heard a bird call. The concept behind the series was the art, the execution of the process simply mechanical.
However, by the mid '80's he had made an artistic about-face and turned from conceptual art to figurative painting. By staying away from the hub of the conceptualists in New York, he never reached anywhere near the level of artistic recognition that Lawrence Weiner, or Joseph Kosuth, for example had. Many of his works were influenced by a variety of genres, one in particular being Breughl. Though his recognition in the United States is lesser known, he still has pieces being exhibited at world renowned musesums.
For twenty years, he was dean of the California Institute of Arts.
Bio courtesy of Wikipedia.com.
For more, read Huebler's New York Times obituary.