THE ONCE AND FUTURE SCULPTURE OF RON HUEBNER: Internal Flame

• Published in: Canadian art (Toronto, 1984) 1984), 2014-04, Vol.31 (1), p.104
• Main Author: Peck, Robin
• Format: Magazinearticle
• Language: English
• Subjects: Art exhibits; Huebner, Rob; Sculpture; Visual artists
• ISSN: 0825-3854

Bram Stoker's Count Dracula and Mary Shelley's monster in Frankenstein are both social commentaries: embodiments of the horrifying aspects of their contemporary societies. One can update Frankenstein's monster to the glowing green monster in The Hulk, and Dracula to the hemophages in Ultraviolet, both the subjects of recent films. These monsters are all mearcstapa (the Old English word for "border-steppers"): hybrids, like mythical centaurs, gorgons and sphinxes, all mutation and adaptation, and projections of the fear of the anomalous. Monsters (from Latin monstrum, "an unnatural thing," from the root of moneo, "to warn") are portents of the evolving future. The construction of [RON HUEBNER]'s sculpture, his monster, was a sign of his discontent with present time and a longing for a future in which this present monstrousness may find some reconciliation. Huebner was always uncomfortable in what he referred to as the "picture-postcard art scene" of Vancouver. Born in Alberta, he grew up in British Columbia and was educated at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Huebner's student years were not the halcyon years of NSCAD conceptual art; however they were the years of the ascendency of sculpture at NSCAD under faculty members John Greer, Dennis Gill and Thierry Delva. While on student exchange in New York City, Huebner was studio assistant to American sculptor Dennis Oppenheim. The influence of Greer and Oppenheim on his sculpture is obvious. For instance, one can compare Huebner's lead sleeping bags with a similar use of the material in Greer's sheet-lead "paper airplanes" of the early 1970s. Less obvious is the way in which Huebner's education in sculpture did not travel well. Aside from a few figures, the Atlantic provinces are underrepresented in the narrative of 20th-century Canadian art history, which focuses mostly on central Canada and more recently on its West Coast. Even so recent a study as William Wood's history of the cataloguing of "the move from sculpture to installation and beyond" since 1960 does not mention any art made east of Quebec. To many East-Coast artists, "Canadian art" is a misnomer for what is really art from Toronto, and now also art from Vancouver. However, when Huebner relocated to Vancouver in the mid1980s, Vancouver was still dominated by its own provincial art cultures, each with its own local micro-history (of Vancouver Pop Art, of Vancouver Minimalism, of Vancouver Conceptualism and particula