---------------------[F.S.H. Home] 
                     [Projects] 
                     [Biografie]
                     [Texts]
                     [private room]






















p   r   o   v   i   s   i   o   n   a   l 1992

--------------------------------------------------------Installation shown at:
                                                         Kunsthalle II, Innsbruck 1992
                                                         John Good Gallery, New York 1992
                                                         Galerie Otto Schweins, Köln 1992
                                                         Kunstmuseum Bonn, 1993

Bedroom Politics
an essay by Philip Pocock

Marcel Proust begins Remembrance of Things Past from bed. The
very first sentence in his trilogy states:
       "For a very long time I used to go to bed early."
Passages from the narrator's own autobiography of sleep serve to better
describe the sense of privacy and temporality evoked by Felix Stephan
Huber's own bed photographs. Proust's personal epiphanies un-derscore
Huber's obsession like written snapshots with captions such as:
       "...to savour, in an instanteous flash of perseption, the sleep
       witch lay heavy upon the furniture, the room,"
click, then:
       "When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of
       the hours, the sequence of the years,"
and awakening:
       "everything would be moving round me through the darkness:
       things, places, years."



                                                                                     Things, places, years: These are entries in Huber's diary, his oevre
                                                                                     since 1982. Raum 4 is a view in Huber's bedroom at home. Unlike
                                                                                     the others silver prints in the show, it is constructed like much of his pre-
                                                                                     vious montageworks - built from roughly rectangular sheets or frames of
                                                                                     paper or celloid and temporarily hung on a wall. Like the entire instal-
                                                                                     lation, it is there provisionally.

                                                                                            Thirteen bedroom photographs: two of home; a pair from one hotel
                                                                                     and nine other provisional sleeping arrangements this year. The grainy
                                                                                     images in this show, like film, publicize private stories. Serving this
                                                                                     theme, his subjects, a travelogue of bed[room] images gaze into by means of
                                                                                     taping off areas indexes the gallery as a sort of Asylantenheim.

                                                                                            Bands of tape all over the room illiterately extend the photographs
                                                                                     into a no-name public space. The body politic is indexed as abstract, out-
                                                                                     side the fictive space of Huber's private rooms. Political scenes, public
                                                                                     archetipes are mapped out on the floor and walls with tape - twenty-one
                                                                                     bed outlines in three rows on the floor and up the walls. Prison? A night
                                                                                     in jail in New York? A camp for displaced persons? War in Yugoslavia?

                                                                                            Huber's installation represents the public in the form of concrete
                                                                                     chaos; unstable, restless, outside influence. the photographs, personal
                                                                                     recollections of where he stayed the night remain private, concrete time
                                                                                     alone, when memory clocks start their ticking inside us.

Neptune's son by mortal mother, a giant named Procrustes lured
and bound unsuspecting travellers to his notorious iron bedstad.
Where they too long or wide for it, he lopped off a limb: If too short, he
sadistically streched them to fit. The myth of his bed invents a macabre
souvenir of how erotic and political desires tragically interchange.

       Procrustian beds show up daily in newspapers - cotts in refugee
camps, homeless shelters, crime scenes, natural disasters - as people are
assigned makeshift, temporary quarters in Jordan, Somalia, the former
GDR or elswhere. They all start to look generic like the faces of victims
and murderers by Christian Boltanski, hauntingly homogenizing every-
one into one pure thing - identity.

       The ordinariness in Felix Stephan Huber's bed[rooms] blurs their
inividuality too. And boredom, the erotic, routine begin to feel vaguely
alike. The thing remains, where this all takes place, the very first and last
thing we see each day, the bed[room].