Kommissar Hjuler und Frau is the husband-and-wife configuration of Detlev Hjuler (born 1967, working as ‘Kommissar Hjuler’ or ‘Papa Baer’) and Andrea Katharina Ingeborg Göthling (born 29 October 1981, working as ‘Mama Baer’ or ‘Mama Bär’), based in Flensburg on the German-Danish border. The partnership has sustained continuously from 1999 onward across the music, painting, assemblage, collage, installation, performance, experimental film, conceptual art and writing working modes. Detlev Hjuler additionally sustains a day-position as a police officer in Flensburg, a documented fact the partnership has not concealed. Both members are self-taught: Hjuler began making music in 1999 and visual art in 2006; Göthling began the same positions on parallel early careers.
The method: Kommissar Hjuler und Frau's position runs through deceptively simple working means · mainly voices, a cassette-tape recorder and a microphone · through which the partnership produces what the Bureau reads as ‘suburban dramas’: domestic working scenarios filed through deliberately disrupted sound-poetry vein. The method draws antecedents from Joseph Beuys (Hjuler's influence and acknowledged antecedent), the Fluxus tradition, the Dada tradition and the art-brut tradition. The partnership joined the NO!art movement in 2009 as members.
The document is Asylum Lunaticum (Intransitive Recordings, 2009), the document selected by The Wire among the top fifteen experimental albums of 2009. The document compiles the early releases across the 1999–2009 career from the small-edition lathe-cut LP, cassette and CD-R tradition the partnership has mainly operated through. The method of physical-object working assemblage (junk sculptures, hand-painted covers, attached object-surfaces) extends into the document's idiom: the Hjuler / Baer partnership has consistently produced positions in which the sonic document is inseparable from the physical-object working artefact.
The Fluxus +/- sub-imprint series (since 2014, on the Psych.KG partner imprint from Euskirchen, Germany) constitutes the partnership's sustained manner through the 2010s and 2020s. The series mainly appears as small-edition LPs (often 100 copies or fewer) with the contemporary Continental and transatlantic experimental roster: Milan Knížák, Peter Weibel, Charlemagne Palestine, Maja Ratkje, David Toop, Steve Dalachinsky, Matthew Shipp, Karlheinz Essl, Hartmut Geerken, Anna Homler, Jonathan Meese and the Fluxus roster. The mail-collaboration palette runs to about 120 positions across the sustained life.
The partners across the catalogue include Intransitive Recordings (the Howard Stelzer partner the Bureau has chronicled), Ultra Eczema, Nihilist Records, Obskyr Records, the own Der Schöne Hjuler-Memorial-Fond imprint, and the Continental and transatlantic experimental network. Documented collaborative partners include Brume / Christian Renou (Human 2010, Salicylat 2010), The New Blockaders, Bomis Prendin, LSD March, Medium Medium, John Wiese and the Continental experimental roster.
The Bureau's editorial reading: Kommissar Hjuler und Frau is filed at Tier II as the Continental neo-dada / Fluxus / art-brut partnership the Bureau has chronicled. The sustained 25+ year husband-and-wife configuration, the position's documented Wire-cited position (Asylum Lunaticum 2009), the Fluxus +/- sub-imprint sustained partnership across the 120 collaborations and the partnership across the Continental and transatlantic experimental network constitute the significance the Bureau files.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Bronze Age · last revised c. Classical Antiquity