Gerd Stern (1928–2025)
158March 4, 2025
Pathbreaking Beat poet and multimedia artist Gerd Stern, a cofounder of seminal arts collective USCO, died on February 17 in Manhattan. His daughter, Radha Stern, confirmed his death to theNew York Times. An exuberant and colorful figure, Stern lent his vivid imagination and larger-than-life personality to such disparate enterprises as managing the cabaret career of a young Maya Angelou, collaborating with Harry Partch on building Partch’s massive Marimba Eroica, designing USCO’s revolutionary psychedelic light shows, and turning a bathtub into a bong, out of which he and Count Basie smoked weed. “I keep thinking of things when opportunity knocks — that’s how I function,” he told journalistRozanne Goldin 2021. “And I often do the knocking myself.”
Gerd Stern was born on October 12, 1928, in the Saar, the son of a Jewish cheese importer. After the territory was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1935, the Stern family fled to the US, settling in the Washington Heights section of New York. Stern’s relationship with his father was turbulent, and at sixteen he left home. Following a brief stint at the City College of New York, which he hated, he moved down to Greenwich Village and began hanging out at the Four Seasons bookshop, where he mingled with thePartisan Reviewcrowd, including Delmore Schwartz and Lionel Trilling. Offered a scholarship to Black Mountain College, he traveled to North Carolina but swiftly returned, having been put off by rector Josef Albers’s German accent and authoritarian mien, which reminded him of his father’s.
Following a lusty encounter with an older woman who convinced him he should become a poet, Stern embarked on this career with verve, publishing his inaugural volume,First Poems andOthers, in 1952, eventually going on to incorporate art and audiovisual elements into his poetry and vice versa. In 1949, severely malnourished and living in a burned-out car in New York, he was advised by a doctor to check himself into the New York Psychiatric Institute. “You tell them that you are a young poet and that you just tried to commit suicide and that you need help,” Stern later recalled the doctor advising him. “They’re looking for interesting people.” Stern himself found some interesting people at the facility, befriending Beat icons Allen Ginsberg and Carl Solomon, who were also interned there. On his release, Stern went on to spend the 1950s ping-ponging between New York and California, for a time living on a disused laundry barge in Sausalito. While on the West Coast, he worked as a public relations director for KPFA, the world’s first listener-sponsored radio station, bringing in guests including philosopher Alan Watts and painter Grace Clements; managed both Partch and Angelou, enjoying a torrid affair with the latter; drove Chet Baker cross-country; and penned travel articles forPlayboy.
Back on the East Coast, Stern had his first solo exhibition of electronic sculptures and collages in 1962 at Allan Stone Gallery. In 1963, he was awarded a solo show at the San Francisco Museum of Art, where he mounted the multimedia performanceWho R U & What’s Happening?,which he also presented at the University of British Columbia, where it was accompanied by a lecture by Marshall McLuhan, with whom Stern would long remain affiliated. That same year, with painter Stephen Durkee and engineer Michael Callahan, he founded the Company of Us, or USCO. Featuring a rotating membership of about fifteen people and operating out of an abandoned church in Garnerville, New York, the collective specialized in what they termed “intermedia,” creating immersive light and sound environments informed by psychology, information theory, and communication engineering and by Eastern and Western mysticism. Sharing McLuhan’s view of technology as an extension of the body, and guided by such mottos as “We are all one. In a world of simultaneous operations, you do not have to be first, to be on top” and “Guidance, counseling, navigation, and control is our business,” USCO deployed ordinary materials, human actors, and contemporary technology in hyper-stimulating artworks that flooded viewers’ senses and altered their perceptions. These became more refined after an encounter with Harold Edgerton, inventor of the strobe light, which the group favored. “We were all taking acid and getting into Meher Baba and into Kabbalistic spirituality, and it didn’t occur to us that we were blowing a lot of the audience into some space where we didn’t really want to find them after the show,”Stern told Tina Rivers Ryan, now the editor ofArtforum, in 2015. “We wanted them to leave ecstatic.” Among the endeavors to which USCO brought their jubilant, mind-expanding work were Jonas Mekas’s inaugural New Cinema Festival; Timothy Leary’s Psychedelic Theater; the installationThe Tabernacleat their Garnerville church home; and, at a hangar in Long Island’s Roosevelt Field, Murray the K’s World, the first multimedia discotheque.
As the 1970s dawned, Stern with Callahan founded Intermedia Systems Corporation, which produced multimedia art. Also beginning that decade, he taught communications and Media at Harvard University and the University of California, Santa Cruz. In the 1980s, he set up Museum Technology Source Inc. to supply museums with technology and returned to the family cheese business. In later years, he served as a consultant to the Rockefeller Foundation’s art program, consulted and produced for the National Endowment for the Arts, and was an artist in residence at DAAD, Berlin; the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha; and the Emily Harvey Foundation, Venice. His volumes of poetry includeAfterimage(1965), a serigraphed selection featuring drawings by David Weinrib;Conch Tales(1984); the chap bookFragments(2002); andWhenThen(2018). The University of California, Berkeley, in 2001 publishedFrom Beat Scene Poet to Psychedelic Multimedia Artist in San Francisco and Beyond, 1948–1978, an oral history of Stern.Stanford University purchased his archive in 2013. His last book,PST: The Extraordinary 18-Year Run of the Poetry Science Talks Salon, coauthored with Neal M. Goldsmith, is forthcoming.
“I think I may die within the next ten or fifteen years—probably realistic,” he told Gold in 2021. “I am not concerned about the actual when: I know I will keep writing and doing art until that happens because I’m not into stopping.” He concluded, “Anything.”