Mr. Stern’s life was as colourful, complicated and typically chaotic as his artwork. He was born Gerd Jacob Stern in Oct. 12, 1928, to a Jewish household within the Saar, a German-speaking area administered by France and Britain underneath a mandate from the League of Nations. After the Saar was integrated into Nazi Germany in 1935, Mr. Stern’s father, Otto, a cheese importer, moved his household to New York Metropolis, the place he re-established his enterprise.
Mr. Stern attended the Bronx Excessive College of Science and the Metropolis Faculty of New York with the intention of learning zoology, however he left after a couple of weeks. His subsequent keep at Black Mountain Faculty, the experimental interdisciplinary faculty in North Carolina, the place he deliberate to review poetry, was even briefer. Its rector, the painter Josef Albers, was, Mr. Stern recalled, “out of the identical mildew as my father: the Germanic disciplinarian.”
“I couldn’t take it,” he mentioned, “so I cut up.”
He was, nevertheless, strongly influenced by different Black Mountain instructors, together with Buckminster Fuller and John Cage.
It was by means of Cage that Mr. Stern was launched to Marshall McLuhan’s theories, studying the manuscript of what could be printed in 1964 as “Understanding Media,” McLuhan’s oracular treatise on the influence tv and different modes of communication had on human consciousness.
At this level, Mr. Stern recalled, his poems turned nonlinear, “working off the paper into collage and lights and sounds.” He turned phrases into slide reveals, pasted phrases round three-dimensional objects and, with the set up “Contact Is the Solely Love,” constructed a tool to blitz viewers with assorted phrase pictures.
