Hartmut Geerken

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'). This is like nothing else. Very serious, raw and quite unsettling. 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. Carlfriedrich Claus was influenced by the Kabbalah, mysticism, and Marxist and Far Eastern philosophy. He made no secret of his utopian, communist stance. A voracious reader and truly 'universalistic' in his worldview, Claus developed his own style of pictorial writing. Working within the strictures of a linear form, he produced his Ôlanguage sheets' which are graphics and text at the same time. As a GDR citizen, Claus lived for many years in artistic isolation. He was suspect in his political views and was given the opportunity to leave the country which he refused.
His home was a magnet for European intellectuals from the 1950s onwards. As a pre-eminent figure and one of the last great avant-gardists, Claus was in many respects the counterpole to Joseph Beuys on Germany's artistic landscape. 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.