View allAll Photos Tagged polymorphic
Family: Lauraceae
Common name: sassafras
*distinct brown/orange bark *polymorphic leaves, 1-3 lobes *sometimes mucronate tip, usually rounded *impressed veins *root beer smell sometimes
Family: Lauraceae
Common name: sassafras
*distinct brown/orange bark *polymorphic leaves, 1-3 lobes *sometimes mucronate tip, usually rounded *impressed veins *root beer smell sometimes
Family: Lauraceae
Common name: sassafras
*distinct brown/orange bark *polymorphic leaves, 1-3 lobes *sometimes mucronate tip, usually rounded *impressed veins *root beer smell sometimes
Family: Moraceae
Common name: paper mulberry
*simple, all leaf arrangements *polymorphic leaves 1-5 lobes *general cordate shape, serrate/dentate margins *pubescence everywhere *milky sap
Family: Moraceae
Common name: paper mulberry
*simple, all leaf arrangements *polymorphic leaves 1-5 lobes *general cordate shape, serrate/dentate margins *pubescence everywhere *milky sap
Leaves: simple, alternate, polymorphic in shape, can have 1-3 lobes, can be unlobed, entire margins, impressed pinnate venation / Apex: obtuse, rounded or mucronate / Base: acute
Moraceae, red mulberry, simple alternate, polymorphic, unlobed/lobed, very soft, base truncate, serrate, bottom dens pubescents, pseudo terminal buds, small spikes on twigs
Leaves: simple, alternate, polymorphic in shape (unlobed, mitten, 3-lobed), serrate to dentate margins, upper side venation is impressed and pubescent, underside has dense pubescent
Family: Moraceae; common name: red mulberry; notes: no leaves left on the tree! The leaves are polymorphic and pubescent. This is one of the typical leaf shapes.
Broussonetia papyrifera Moraceae: paper mulberry
Nonnative-invasive, originates in Asia, produced in thickets, bark appears to have “zebra” stripping, leaves are simple and opposite/alternate/whorled, polymorphic, pubescence everywhere
Alfred 23 Harth’s early formation can be read as a remarkable intertwining of play, discipline, and conceptual awakening that would later come to characterize his multidisciplinary oeuvre. The boyhood dream of becoming an architect already contained a telling dialectic: on the one hand, the imaginative freedom of building ephemeral huts in the garden, one after another; on the other hand, the precision of constructing variations within given parameters. These garden architectures were not merely child’s play but may be understood retrospectively as proto-installations, temporary structures that mediated between imagination and actuality, an early rehearsal of the experimental crossings between construction, performance, and image that marked Harth’s mature practice.
A decisive rupture, almost an initiation ritual into modern art, occurred in 1958 when his elder brother Dietrich took him to a Dada exhibition in Frankfurt am Main. The timing was crucial: postwar Germany was only just beginning to reopen itself to the radical avant-gardes suppressed under fascism. For the young Harth, Dada presented not only a set of provocative images but also the lived possibility that art could destabilize categories, break down hierarchies, and operate conceptually as much as materially. The work The Navel—a simple black dot on white paper, accompanied by a title that displaced perception into language—sharpened this awareness. What mattered was not the mark itself but the dynamic between sign and referent, artwork and its commentary. The epiphany here was not aesthetic pleasure in the traditional sense but recognition of art as a space of thought, irony, and intellectual tension. This was nothing less than the beginning of a lifelong trajectory in which Harth would consistently return to the interface of sound, image, and idea.
In the following years, Harth immersed himself with voracity in every available art medium. School courses gave him the discipline of drawing, painting, and craft; his own appetite for performance led him to stage small situations, often masked or disguised, anticipating the performative interventions of the happening movement. The acquisition of his first camera at twelve extended his field into visual experimentation, while his pencil drawings of jazz musicians revealed both his growing fascination with musical improvisation and his awareness of biography as a narrative lens for art. What is striking here is the simultaneity of practices—music, drawing, performance, photography—that refused to be subordinated to a single discipline. Even before formal professional training, Harth was cultivating a polymorphic artistic identity in the spirit of the avant-garde.
The turn at fifteen to oil painting coincided with a parallel transformation in music: the gift of a tenor saxophone by his parents, an instrument that would guide him into deep engagement with jazz and improvisation. This was not simply the adoption of a hobby but the entry point into an emerging identity as a musician-artist, one who would soon refuse to see music and art as separated categories. Music, drawing, film, and conceptual play converged into a holistic practice that aligned with the growing international awareness of intermedia arts in the 1960s.
Attending the Goethe Gymnasium in his final school years refined this eclecticism. As an art-focused program with an ambition to train future cultural producers, it provided him with a sweeping introduction to international avant-garde currents, from Informel painting and Fluxus to Concept Art and experimental film. What Harth absorbed was not only technique but also a certain intellectual ecology: Frankfurt at that time was a city where cultural exchange, experimental music, and critical thought interacted dynamically. Together with Hubertus Gassner, who would later become a prominent museum director, Harth initiated happenings and other art events. Harth and founded the centrum freier cunst. Such a venture signaled more than youthful ambition: it represented the determination to create autonomous platforms for hybrid work when established institutions remained largely indifferent. Here Harth’s music group Just Music performed alongside conceptual and photo-based works, embodying an ethos of cross-disciplinary experimentation that paralleled international movements but arose organically from the Frankfurt milieu.
By the time of his Abitur in 1968, Harth embodied a paradoxical combination: on the one hand, a youthful openness to every medium, on the other, a growing self-awareness of art as critical practice. His decision to study design at the Werkkunstschule Offenbach, later shifting to art pedagogy at Goethe University, should not be misunderstood as a retreat into conventional paths. Rather, it reflects his strategy of grounding avant-garde impulses in a broader discourse of form and teaching. His musical activities expanded concurrently, so that life at this junction became an intense negotiation of study, performance, and conceptual inquiry. Alfred Harth's focus on synästhetic creation was indeed a significant aspect of his artistic approach at that time. He was interested in exploring synaesthesia beyond traditional media like TV, film, or theater, aiming to realize multisensory or synästhetic works that integrated sound, visual elements, and space in novel ways. This approach reflected his broader interest in breaking conventional boundaries of artistic disciplines and engaging the audience in immersive, multi-layered experiences that could not be confined to a single medium or format.
Looking back, one sees that Harth’s early trajectory established key themes of his later career: the refusal of boundaries between disciplines; the privileging of concept and idea over medium-specificity; the creation of autonomous spaces for collaboration beyond institutional frameworks; and, above all, the conviction that art is not an object but a process—often ephemeral, contingent, and dialogic. The boy who once built huts in his parent’s garden was already rehearsing the logic of variation and improvisation that would structure his later works across music, performance, and visual art. To trace these beginnings is to see how Harth’s career was less a matter of progression from one discipline to another than an ongoing movement across media, always oriented toward the space where form touches thought.
Moraceae, "red mulberry", polymorphic, crenate/serrate, milky sap, impressed venation, pubescence under, top feels like cat's tongue