Gerd Stern, a Beat Generation poet, pioneering multimedia artist and proponent of sensory overload, whose performances, installations and kinesthetic events involved popular culture notables like Marshall McLuhan, Timothy Leary and the New York City disc jockey Murray the K, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 96.
His daughter, Radha Stern, confirmed his death, in a rehabilitation center. He lived in Manhattan.
Moving back and forth between the Bay Area and New York City from the late 1940s through the late ’60s, Mr. Stern was something of a counterculture Zelig.
He met Allen Ginsberg in Manhattan when both were briefly checked into Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric Institute. He built musical instruments for the avant-garde composer Harry Partch. He worked for the paperback publisher Ace Books and arranged the publication of William Burroughs’s pseudonymous first novel, “Junkie.” He managed the poet Maya Angelou at the start of her earlier career as a cabaret performer. (They were romantically involved as well.) He also wrote travel articles for Playboy magazine and helped create the Berkeley listener-supported station KPFA-FM.
With Michael Callahan and Steve Der Key, Mr. Stern founded the artists’ collective USCO, which took its name from “US company.” Members included the photographer and weaver Judi Stern (his third wife), the film and video maker Jud Yalkut and Stewart Brand, who would publish and edit the “Whole Earth Catalog,” the popular counterculture resource manual and product guide.
Communally living in an abandoned church in Garnerville, N.Y., in Rockland County, the group’s members helped define the 1960s with performances that were often described as psychedelic. Slide and film projection, kinetic sculpture, strobe lights and music were all part of the show.
As the collective’s spokesman, Mr. Stern was credited with its slogan, “You’ve got to go out of your mind to use your head,” although he attributed it to the LSD apostle Timothy Leary, with whom the group did not entirely get along.
Leary hired USCO to work on a “brain activating” light show that he staged in an Off Broadway theater on Manhattan’s East Side in July 1965. According to Mr. Stern, the group, playing a taped harangue by the French surrealist Antonin Artaud, confounded Leary by drowning out his exhortation that the audience “turn on, tune in, drop out.”
“He wanted to do things like the life of Buddha and the life of Christ, and we said, ‘No thanks — we don’t do linear,’” Mr. Stern said in an interview with Alastair Gordon for his book “Spaced Out: Radical Environments of the Psychedelic Sixties” (2008).
The collective made a stir in late 1965 with its performance of “Hubbub” at the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque in New York. Soon after, the group was commissioned by the Broadway producer Michael Myerberg to design a discothèque in a former airplane hangar at Roosevelt Field, on Long Island.
The artists’ design involved 18 programmed slide projectors, two 16-millimeter film projectors and a video projector prototype. (By Mr. Stern’s account, the proposal was chosen over one by Andy Warhol, who at the time was staging a multimedia event, “The Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” at the night spot Dom in the East Village.)
The disco, which became known as Murray the K’s World, figured in a May 1966 cover story in Life magazine under the title “New Madness at the Discotheque.”
That same year, the collective staged an influential show at the since-closed Riverside Museum on the Upper West Side, in which it coined the term “be-in” to describe its four-room environment. Highway signs blinked messages, and speakers blared taped audio collages.
“A 14-foot rotating ‘cave’ pulses with strobe lights,” the art critic Grace Glueck reported in The New York Times. “A machine made of old computer parts plays itself a game of tic-tac-toe.” She described the show as “jangling” and noted that as folksy as it sounded, “the ‘be-in’ isn’t easy to take.”
“Its light-up paintings, frenetic machines and high-decibel noises add up to a kind of programmed pandemonium,” Ms. Glueck wrote.
Mr. Stern’s life was as colorful, confusing and sometimes chaotic as his art. He was born Gerd Jacob Stern in Oct. 12, 1928, to a Jewish family in the Saar, a German-speaking region administered by France and Britain under a mandate from the League of Nations. After the Saar was incorporated into Nazi Germany in 1935, Mr. Stern’s father, Otto, a cheese importer, moved his family to New York City, where he re-established his business.
Mr. Stern attended the Bronx High School of Science and the City College of New York with the intention of studying zoology, but he left after a few weeks. His subsequent stay at Black Mountain College, the experimental interdisciplinary school in North Carolina, where he planned to study poetry, was even briefer. Its rector, the painter Josef Albers, was, Mr. Stern recalled, “out of the same mold as my father: the Germanic disciplinarian.”
“I couldn’t take it,” he said, “so I split.”
He was, however, strongly influenced by other Black Mountain instructors, including Buckminster Fuller and John Cage.
It was through Cage that Mr. Stern was introduced to Marshall McLuhan’s theories, reading the manuscript of what would be published in 1964 as “Understanding Media,” McLuhan’s oracular treatise on the impact television and other modes of communication had on human consciousness.
At this point, Mr. Stern recalled, his poems turned nonlinear, “running off the paper into collage and lights and sounds.” He turned words into slide shows, pasted words around three-dimensional objects and, with the installation “Contact Is the Only Love,” constructed a device to blitz viewers with assorted word images.
In 1963, he began taking LSD, a further influence on his art, and exhibiting electronic sculptures and staging multimedia performances that segued into his work with USCO.
The collective performed widely over the next few years, mainly on college campuses, and Mr. Stern — a hirsute, bespectacled, owlish presence and the most voluble of the group — became regarded as an Aquarian Age savant. In a 1968 profile, The New York Times Magazine characterized him as “a bearded bard and proselytizer-practitioner of a new art.”
That new art became passé in the 1970s. Mr. Stern founded a new collective, the Intermedia Systems Corporation, and he entered academia, teaching at Harvard University and the University of California, Santa Cruz.
In the first decade of the 21st century, his work with USCO enjoyed something of a revival. There was a retrospective at Anthology Film Archives in Manhattan in 2005, and that same year, media pieces were included in exhibits at the Tate Museum, Liverpool; the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; and museums in Frankfurt, Munich, Vienna and Paris.
Mr. Stern was back in the news in 2014 when a long-lost 16,000-word letter written by Neal Cassady to Jack Kerouac resurfaced after 60 years, reviving a bitter chapter of Beat Generation literary history.
Kerouac had called Cassady’s amphetamine-fueled letter “the greatest piece of writing I ever saw” and credited it with inspiring the stream-of-consciousness prose style he developed for “On the Road,” his now-classic 1957 novel. In the early 1950s, Allen Ginsberg sent the letter to Mr. Stern in hopes of having it published by Ace Books, but, some years later, Kerouac accused Mr. Stern of having tossed the letter over the side of a houseboat into Sausalito Bay, across from San Francisco, thus depriving Cassady of the recognition that was his due.
Mr. Stern recalled receiving the letter as “part of a stash of about two and a half feet of books and manuscripts that Allen had collected from all of his buddies.” He said he had returned them all except for the Burroughs text published as “Junkie” in 1953. Soon after, he said, Ginsberg started the rumor that the letter had been thrown overboard, and Kerouac repeated it in an interview with The Paris Review.
Once Mr. Stern returned the letter, Ginsberg evidently sent it to another publisher, in whose archives it was discovered, unopened.
“At the best, he forgot that I gave it to him,” Mr. Stern told The Associated Press. “At the worst, he said it just to stick it to me. But it doesn’t matter now. Allen’s dead. Jack’s dead. Neal’s dead. But I’m still alive.”
Mr. Stern’s first marriage, to Jane Hill, ended in divorce, as did his second, to Ann London; his third, to Judith Wilson; and his fourth, to Sara Shaw. He is survived by a daughter, Radha Stern, from his first marriage; a son, Zalman Stern, from his third marriage; another son, Abram Stern, from his fourth marriage; several grandchildren; and a great-grandchild. Three other sons and a grandson died earlier.
In his later years, Mr. Stern contributed to the libretto to Anne LeBaron’s “LSD: The Opera.” He also worked with Judith Sokoloff, a magazine editor, to compile an international anthology, “Hag Sameach: Poems for the Jewish Holidays.”
After his father’s death, Mr. Stern entered the family cheese-import business, moving the company across the Hudson River from Lower Manhattan to Cresskill, N.J. For a time, he was president of the American Cheese Society.
Reporting on the society’s seventh annual conference for The Times in 1990, Dena Kleiman found Mr. Stern in fine form. When the moderator of a panel discussion asked how one knows if a cheese is any good, Mr. Stern said, “The flavor is gentle yet penetrating,” then began describing his love for a perfect reblochon, a creamy cow’s milk cheese made in the Savoy region of France.
“The substance, when it comes to your tongue, spreads over all your taste buds and affects all the flavors,” he said. “When you palpate the cheese, and the rind quivers, and the color has a perfection that is unmatched. …” He stopped midsentence, his intensity having aroused a chuckle from the audience. Catching himself, he said, “Maybe you can’t describe a cheese with words.”
It was his aesthetic in a nutshell.
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