Douglas Huebler: One of the Fathers of Conceptual Art

Editor’s Note:  I knew Doug Huebler and his family, including his eldest child and only son Dorne Huebler, from 1971 until Doug’s passing in his home in Truro, Massachusetts in 1997.  Among many other things, we were tennis buddies.  The Outer Cape Cod art colony — Provincetown, Truro, Wellfleet — included many notable artists and writers.  During my 42 years on the Cape, after Robert Motherwell, Doug Huebler was the most significant visual artist.  But he was also perhaps the most modest  and unassuming.  Despite having museum exhibitions all over the world and being represented by the some of the 20th century’s most important art galleries — Leo Castelli, Holly Solomon, Paula Cooper — Doug would rather talk about being a farm boy in Michigan, or being in the marines during World War II, than promote his career and art.

DOUGLAS HUEBLER (1924-1997) grew up in rural Michigan during the Depression and served in the Marines in World War II. After the war, funded by the GI Bill, Huebler earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Michigan, and later went on to study at the Académie Julian in Paris.

Initially a painter, Huebler moved on to produce geometric Formica sculptures in the early ’60s, which aligned him with the Minimalist movement. In 1969, he participated, with Joseph Kosuth, Robert Barry and Lawrence Weiner, in a landmark exhibition of conceptual art curated by Seth Siegelaub. As part of the show, Huebler issued one of his most famous statements: “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” Huebler’s statement was a launch pad for the Conceptual Art Movement. He then started producing works in numerous media often involving documentary photography, maps, and text to explore social environments and the effect of passing time on objects. A representative example of Huebler’s early work is Duration Piece #5, 1969, a series of ten black & white photographs with accompanying text. To document the piece, Huebler stood in Central Park and, each time he heard a bird call, he pointed his camera in the direction of the call and shot a photograph. In 1971, he began “Variable Piece #70 (In Process) Global,” for which he proposed his intention “to photographically document the existence of everyone alive.” In the 1980s and ’90s, Huebler began incorporating painting into his conceptual art pieces, creating a persona he called “the Great Corrector,” who took works by masters like Picasso, Matisse, Bruegel and Hieronymus Bosch and attempted to “make them better.” For his “Buried Treasure” series, incorporating text about the unscrupulous dealer, Huebler paints fake Monets, Van Goghs, Gauguins and a De Chirico.

Huebler’s academic career spanned more than forty years; he taught art at Bradford College in Massachusetts, and at Harvard. Huebler served as dean and then program director of the art school at California Institute of Arts from 1976 to 1988 where he influenced a generation of artists.

DORNE HUEBLER (b.1955) studied film and animation in Jules Engel’s program at California Institute of the Arts. (BFA 1980, MFA 1983.) During that time, he completed three animated short films: “The Gameroom” (1978), “Ichym” (1979), & “Corpus Callosum” (1984) which won an assortment of awards at film festivals in the USA and Europe including a CINE Eagle, a student Academy Award (Southwest Region), and awards at Ann Arbor, New York Filmmaker’s Expo, Athens, Sinking Creek, Montpelier (France), and Moen (Belgium). Professionally, Huebler has worked both in visual effects and title design for feature films, television, commercials, and movie trailers. He won an Emmy Award in 1991 for his work on “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” (Title Design) and has won three Key Art Awards as art director/title designer on feature movie trailers for “Backdraft” and “Dragon: the Bruce Lee Story.” In 1993, Huebler joined the digital department at Buena Vista Visual Effects at Walt Disney Pictures working on various productions for Disney and other studios. In 1995/96 he was visual effects supervisor for the facility’s work on over 240 shots in “James and the Giant Peach.” Since 1998, Huebler has been working at Industrial Light and Magic. In 2003 his work as compositing supervisor on “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” was nominated for best compositing in a motion picture by the Visual Effects Society at their first annual awards ceremony.

The videos below were recorded via Zoom and run between 60 seconds and 10  minutes. Click on any video. You must be connected to the Internet to view the videos.

INTRODUCTION TO DORNE HUEBLER:    1:58 min.  

MODESTY:   5:15 min.  

SELF-CONFIDENCE:   2:21 min.  

CREATES A UNIQUE PERSONAL BRAND:   2:31 min.

OVERCOMES CHALLENGES TO SUCCEED:   3:52 min.

VALUES FIRST-RATE EDUCATION:   10:01 min.