Douglas Huebler 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 his bachelor's and master's degrees at the
University of Michigan, and later went on to study at the Académie Julian in Paris. He worked for several years as a commercial art illustrator in New York as he established himself as an artist. (His family still has a few of the illustrations from this period.) 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." In the late 1960s Huebler's work was published in
0 to 9 magazine, an avant-garde journal which experimented with language and meaning-making. Huebler subsequently 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 of the art school at
California Institute of Arts from 1976 to 1988 where he influenced a generation of artists including
Mike Kelley and
Christopher Williams. In 1989, he retired to
Cape Cod. He died in
Truro, Massachusetts in 1997. ==Exhibitions==