Carius #68+
Karl-Eckhard
9783954762682
256 pages
Distanz Verlag Gmbh Llc
Overview
Fifty years after ’68, the sculptor and design professor Karl-Eckhard
Carius (b. Berlin, 1942; lives and works in Vechta) offers insight into
his wide-ranging musings, actions, and anticipatory projects. Gathering
previously unpublished writings, autobiographical reflections, photographs,
installations, drawings, and literary notes, the book is a
creative document of a time of rebellion and the dawn of a new era. It
also sheds light on an unexplored chapter in the history of Berlin’s
Hochschule für bildende Künste (today’s Berlin University of the Arts)
with its protagonists and motivations. “The Ravishment to Paradise of
Bernhard Heiliger, a Professor at the Academy—An Assault on the
Reality Principle” (1969) reflects the critique of the traditional and
conventional education young artists received in Berlin at the time.
The stories of this and other actions illustrate the defeat of a utopian
vision, but they also suggest the artist’s capacity for radical experimentation.
With an essay by Bazon Brock describes Carius, who now teaches
design, as “one of the few surviving witnesses of those halcyon days
of radical happiness.”
