Skulptur Projekte 2017

Thanks to its editions every ten years, “Skulptur Projekte”, an exhibition devoted to sculpture in public spaces, is a litmus test for studying the relationship between art and urban dynamics.

John Knight, A Work in Situ. © Skulptur Projekte 2017. Photo Henning Rogge
For the past 40 years, once every decade, the art world heads to Münster: one of Germany’s cities with the highest standard of living, with an average of two bikes per inhabitant and 70% of its city area allotted to spectacular green spaces. The event is “Skulptur Projekte”: a contemporary art exhibition dedicated to sculpture in public locations.
Nicole Eisenman, Sketch for a fountain. © Skulptur Projekte 2017
Nicole Eisenman, Sketch for a fountain. © Skulptur Projekte 2017
The fact that this show takes place every ten years gives it great authority and makes it seem like a ritual. It also allows for a painstaking, strictly site-specific preparation of new works, with great importance given to the conception and realisation phase. Moreover, all production unfolds in the city and its outskirts. This extended timeframe tests the works themselves, since they must have the chance to settle in before being acquired, directly by the city itself or by private individuals who in turn donate them to the public. Thirty-six sculptures, by artists like Lothar Baumgarten, Rebecca Horn Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Donald Judd, Rosemarie Trockel, are still present in Münster from previous editions.
Thomas Schütte, Kirschensäule, 1987. © Skulptur Projekte 2017
Thomas Schütte, Kirschensäule, 1987. © Skulptur Projekte 2017
“Skulptur Projekte” is, therefore, a litmus test for a long-term study of the relationship between art and urban dynamics; in this sense, a publication on the history of the event, scheduled for 2019, will cover these past 40 years of sculpture in the West and, more in general, take stock of sculpture and its transformations and shifts in paradigm.
Every ten years the city gets ready and enthusiasts from across the world join here. But the first aficionados of the exhibition are the inhabitants themselves – a result that cannot be taken for granted, since “Skulptur Projekte” was born out of the city’s deep misunderstanding for modern sculpture. In fact, the refusal of a work by Moore in the 1960s and of a kinetic sculpture by George Rickey in the mid-1970s convinced Klaus Bussmann, director of the Westfälischen Landesmuseum in Münster, and the curator Kasper König of the need to open a dialogue on the meaning of sculpture and the potentials art could have when located outdoors. They invited Carl Andre, Michael Asher, Joseph Beuys, Donald Judd, Richard Long, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Ulrich Rückriem and Richard Serra to design outdoor works.

 

The first edition of “Skulptur Projekte”, in 1977, was accompanied by controversy, and the same was also true for the second edition, in 1987. But starting in 1997 the inhabitants, overall, supported the event and today we can say they truly identify with it. The more monumental works distinguish the land whereas others remain in the collective memory. In this sense, the project has unquestionably reached its goal, creating curiosity, awareness, understanding and pride.

Financed by the city of Münster, by the Region and by various institutions and private entities, “Skulptur Projekte” is now in its fifth edition. Curated by Kasper König together with Britta Peters, a freelance curator from Hamburg, and Marianne Wagner, a contemporary art curator at LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur, it offers thirty-five new projects: sculptures, strictly speaking, but also installations and performances that blend in with the context. Today, it’s unthinkable to limit our notion of sculpture within conventional canons; moreover, while walking around the town you get the impression that the best works aren’t the more iconic ones but rather those related to specific architectural and socio-environmental situations. In short, the success of the works – be they permanent or temporary – depends on their ability to deeply become a part of the context while respecting its deep-rooted characteristics.

An example of the expansion of sculpture is the work HellYeahWeFuckDie by Hito Steyerl: a series of videos plus some structures intended to host them; everything is focused around a reflection on robotics and, more in general, the digital era as well as on the impact of technology with respect to the lives of humans as it has unfolded today. The work is located within the impressive entrance hall of the LBS West bank headquarters.

 

The work by Aram Bartholl is similar in theme but quite different in its development. It advances the fundamental question of our times: our way of life has made us utterly dependent upon technology, whose function, in turn, depends on energy sources. How can the effects of this dependency be negotiated? His three installations for Münster are based on a series of thermoelectric devices that transform fire, a source of life and primal communication tool, directly into electrical energy, also encouraging socialisation; as in the case of a bonfire around which people can unite to recharge their mobile phones or even to chat. His works are a memento, but they also stimulate reflection and indicate new possible beginnings.

Pierre Huyghe, After Alife Ahead. © Skulptur Projekte 2017. Photo Ola Rindal
Pierre Huyghe, After Alife Ahead. © Skulptur Projekte 2017. Photo Ola Rindal
Pierre Huyghe, too, is poised between the past and the future with a complex installation in a former ice-skating rink. The uncovered flooring becomes a landscape with valleys and islands; puddles become ecosystems for vegetal and animal microorganisms. Beehives represent life underway and animals you wouldn’t expect to see, like peacocks, roam about freely; the natural and the artificial have become one, and it’s hard to say if this is a primordial past or a post-apocalyptic future.
Mika Rottenberg’s work is surprising, for the exactness of the context and for the power of the sensory experience it offers: inside an abandoned Oriental minimarket, whose presence, on its own, greatly clashes with the surrounding neighbourhood, the artist screens a surreal film, in which the scenes take place in an underground tunnel that supposedly connects Mexico to the United States. In this situation, everything is paradoxical, starting with the super-kitsch neon store sign on the outside and the interior scattered with all kinds of products and even the para-reality portrayed in the film, whose protagonists are work, production processes and the body of exploited and frustrated individuals.
Mika Rottenberg, Cosmic Generator (working title). © Skulptur Projekte 2017
Mika Rottenberg, Cosmic Generator (working title). © Skulptur Projekte 2017
Ayse Erkmen acts on a different level, intervening upon the structure itself of the city: in fact, the artist created a catwalk running below the water’s edge, joining both banks of a channel in the port: one is developed and enlivened by bars and restaurants while the other has fewer visitors. The catwalk is underwater, and by looking at the passers-by you get the impression they’re walking on water.
Lara Favaretto, Momentary Monument – The Stone. © Skulptur Projekte 2017
Lara Favaretto, Momentary Monument – The Stone. © Skulptur Projekte 2017

Lara Favaretto directly faces the issue of the permanence of the work with her Momentary Monuments: works made up of sculptures in the shape of parallelepipeds with fissures into which coins can be inserted. The monoliths-piggy banks are intended to be destroyed, and their contents of coins, to be reused for different charities.

Nicole Eisenman’s beautiful fountain is classic in style but overwhelming in meaning. On its rim we find five human figures larger than reality; their happy and relaxing bodies represent a shift between genres and a possible new relationship with nature.

An expression of this expansion of sculpture is also Speak to the Earth and it will tell you by Jeremy Deller, who ten years ago, acting as a socio-anthropologist, invited some inhabitants with gardens to keep a diary; today, he displays the collection of over thirty-three large green notebooks, available for consultation, in a storage area in one of these veggie patches. While leafing through these, you get the feeling of great closeness to the lives that are not our own but which, flowing before us, generously come alive.

Certainly, it may seem that this kind of reflection is more acceptable in a reassuring place like Münster. Maybe that’s why the collaboration between Skulptur Projekte and another city nearby with its own past seems so interesting: Marl, an industrial agglomerate, flourishing in the 1950s and 1960s – the decades of Germany’s economic boom, which affected above all areas like the Ruhr – but which today is dramatically depopulated and cut off from any cultural or tourist itinerary.
The town is the location of some extraordinary examples of post-war modernist architecture, like the Town Hall/Contemporary Art Museum, by Johannes von den Broek and Jakob Bakema, and the magnificent brutalist school of Marschall, saved just in time from demolition though still in total abandon. An exchange of works between the towns and the theme exhibition The Hot Wire, which presents examples of modern and contemporary sculpture and models of many key works made over the years in Münster, is an opportunity to get to know the town and its museum that, once a flourishing place and today the custodian of important art, inspired Kasper König in elaborating the “Skulptur Projekte”.
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