Irma Hünerfauth

On a backstreet north of Oxford Circus, Arcadia Missa is neighbored by empty office blocks, vape shops, and phone-repair booths. Inside the gallery, the detritus of consumer electronics is reimagined by a series of sculptures by Irma Hünerfauth. Some early paintings by the German artist, who died aged 90 in 1998, are also on view, but these wiry intersecting striations on canvas can be read as premonitions of her later interest in electromechanical systems. Having practiced Art Informel under Conrad Westphal in 1962, Hünerfauth took a welding course, and her work’s trajectory changed. Soon after ‘68, she renounced paint “squeezed from a tube” and found her medium in matter extracted from minerals, fabricated, vitalized, drained, then discarded.1 Consciously infiltrating the “masculine domain” of Jean Tinguely and other kinetic artists, she began collecting scrap, welding together machine-like-assemblages.

From her Vibrationsobjekte series (1971–1985)—created under the moniker IRMAnipulation—four Perspex boxes on stilts and springs contain motherboards, switches, cables, and plastic. Welded and woven together, her delicate jewelry-box scenographies have the quality of ethnographic objects in vitrines. But while museum conventions forbid ritual objects from performing as they were intended, Hünerfauth’s artifacts can be “manipulated” at the press of a button. Jolting into action, copper wires shiver and glass pipes sway like an effigy “dancing” in a wind-up box. Referring to the works as “programs” and “games,” Hünerfauth asked the player to observe their “vibration, just as a gust of wind quietly moves nature.” The work shifts beyond formalism into the behavioral; a nod to Hünerfauth’s contemporary Hans Haacke, who had earlier made Perspex boxes—also referred to as “programs”—wherein environmental processes played out.

Hünerfauth’s Vibrationsobjekte are naive feedback systems, a term that recalls cybernetics—Norbert Weiner’s 1948 theory of feedback, control, and communication in self-regulating systems. Encompassing the biological and electromechanical (via the meteorological), both Hünerfauth’s “gusts of wind” and Haacke’s condensation constitute “information”; probabilistically measured, statistically defined and implemented as frameworks for understanding other complex “Systems”: electronic circuits, neural pathways, even stock markets. Cybernetics was circulating the art world by 1968 (the year Hünerfauth abandoned painting) via Jasia Reichardt’s “Cybernetic Serendipity” at London’s ICA, which celebrated a hive of computer-aided activity in the legacy of modernist kinetic sculpture. Reichardt admitted her approach was “prematurely optimistic,” and while the works in the show celebrated the potential of the “new,” Hünerfauth’s absent Vibrationsobjekte expose how the new gets old. Hünerfauth’s excavated e-waste was already obsolete; artefacts extracted from earth’s deep-time that served but moments of technological time. Such premature mourning anticipated that of her German contemporaries—Isa Genzken, Gerhard Richter—so caught between the devastation of World War Two and Cold War anxieties.

At the far end of the gallery is Hünerfauth’s War, animals suffer too (1981), a Perspex tank containing soil, a plastic lamb, and wire “flowers” emerging from its “decomposing” body. The box senses motion and “speaks” a recording of shrieks, bleats, and crackles on slowly degrading magnetic tape. Confronting the Sixties’ technophilic utopia that dreamt up “cybernetic meadows” where robots and livestock graze in harmony, the work locates technology as the bedfellow of warfare. (Wiener applied cybernetics to locate and attack enemy aircraft; the first electronic computer, ENIAC, calculated ballistic trajectories; even Perspex was developed for warplane windshields.) Beyond its imbrication in war, the “information age” is extraordinarily material- and labor-intensive, its ecological (and psychological) harms further obscured by a Matryoshka doll of black-boxes. Hünerfauth’s concern about opacity and obsolescence’s implications on agency, and the resulting alienation, was prescient.

That Hünerfauth invites the “manual operation of the beholder” not only reprograms the experience of viewing art, but extends the “System” to include human agency.2 Conversely, Haacke’s Perspex “programs” were intended as autonomous and free of external input (they were nevertheless responsive to the heat and breath of viewers, requiring—as all art does—climate control and technical upkeep). Which raises the question: on which inputs and outputs is a “System” defined? In reality, systems expand exponentially to enfold further inputs, triggering further outputs ad infinitum; to define a boundary is an artificially imposed limitation. The leading voice of System Esthetics, Jack Burnham, suggested that “systems theory may be another attempt by science to resist the emotional pain and ambiguity that remain an unavoidable aspect of life.”3 Hünerfauth knew this all along. Her fallible compositions, charming like thumb puppets, slump and settle back into position, a hair out of place.

The exhibition hums with the machine’s uncanny already-pastness. In the context of her ‘IRMAnipulations’, Hünerfauth wrote, “Free yourself from the “rightness” of society […] from the “rightness” of science. They are overrated correctnesses because they are in constant transformation.”4 Information hasn’t resolved uncertainty. Hünerfauth’s pseudomachines still quiver defiantly with it.