Public Art in Berlin

The Celebration of Berlin’s 750th Anniversary in 1987 chapter features some of the projects from Sculpture Boulevard (Skulpturenboulevard), the first large-scale public sculpture project in West Berlin, developed to celebrate this anniversary. The Culture Department sponsored the Sculpture Boulevard program and commissioned eight eminent artists. Each artist had the freedom to choose a location for his or her work inside the area between Rathenauplatz and Wittenbergplatz, which were at that time part of West Berlin. One of the commissioned artists, prominent German artist Wolf Vostell, developed his Berlin work Two Concrete Cadillacs in the Form of the Nude Maja and placed it on a traffic roundabout in Rathenauplatz at the western end of Kurfurstendamm Boulevard. Other examples are presented in this unit. Olaf Metzel’s 13.4.1981 composition appears as a chaotic bunch of diverse elements, created to symbolize the chaos left after a riot that happened on April 13, 1981, at Kurfurstendamm. On that night, a spontaneous riot broke out after the media incorrectly announced that a Red Army Faction member, Sigurd Debus, had died in prison as a result of a hunger strike. This misinformation was shared with the public shortly before the parliamentary elections, with the intention of influencing public opinion. Through this work, the artist made a statement of how strong the media’s power can be and what could happen as the result of manipulation. Metzel’s work is symbolically composed of police barriers, but it also has supermarket shopping cart replicas incorporated into it. Another work in this section is Arc 124.5° by famous French conceptual artist Bernar Venet. It was a gift from the French government for the occasion of Berlin’s 750th anniversary in 1987. The vertical body of the sculpture, which strikes out into the air, is located in front of the Urania, near Wittenbergplatz. This chapter includes an interview with Bernar Venet.

An exhibition entitled “Ernst Neumann and His School” held in 1910 in the library of the Royal School of Applied Art in Berlin provided an opportunity for reflection about Neumann’s contributions to German art’s development since the turn-of-the-century.1 Paul Westheim praised him as a leader of artistic printmaking, known for his experimentation and innovative teaching, and also as the creator of distinctive posters, such as his large advertisement (figure 1) for an appearance of the dancer Sarharet in 1903 at the Wintergarten in Berlin.2 Neumann was among the first German artists to apply his talents to commercial graphics, continuing the spirit of the great French poster art of the 1890s. Westheim suggested, however, that this inventive spirit actually restricted his success, for Neumann refused to follow the two trends that were coming to dominate German advertising —the “object poster” of Lucian Bernhard and the “prestige poster” of Ludwig Hohlwein.3

Citing examples as diverse as the Sistine Chapel, Colonial Williamsburg, Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty and Vito Acconti's Seedbed as well as works by Richard Serra, Rebecca Horn, Claes Oldenburg, Jenny Holzer and Bruce Nauman, the author defines installation art as a medium with broad possibilities for expression, universal appreciation and democratization. He creates a new taxonomy of his subject, identifying four specific forms - enchantments, impersonations, interventions and rapprochements - and shows how installation art is steering the concept of museums and galleries in new and exciting directions. Most importantly he helps readers feel more comfortable with site-specific art, a genre that dates back to man's earliest artistic expression.

Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958-68 It is generally conceded that installation art dominates the 1990s. Multimedia artists Matthew Barney, Robert Gober, Jenny Holzer, and Bruce Nauman have had major shows in museums such as the Whitney and the Guggenheim. Barney, who, despite his installations, prefers to be called a sculptor, won the first Hugo Boss Prize administered by the Guggenheim in 1997, and Ann Hamilton will represent the United States in the Venice Biennale in the year 2000. What is astonishing is that the Museum of Modern Art of New York from July 9 through September 22 is holding an exhibition of work completed during the years 1958-1968 that has the freshness, even the glitz and buzz of very current installation art. The work-that also includes paintings, sculptures, photographs, and collages-is by the sixty-nine-year-old Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. When the twenty-nine-year-old Kusama first arrived in the United States from Japan in 1958 she became part of the scene and made friends with such artists as Claes Oldenburg (whose soft sculptures Kusama anticipated) and Andy Warhol, whose paintings with their repetitive motifs, such as his Marilyn Monroes or Jackie Kennedys, were influenced by such Kusama collages as Airmail Stickers (1962). She also became friendly with Donald Judd, who bought a very special oil now being shown at MoMa with Kusama's characteristic repetitive dots (one of her so-called net paintings), filled with movement and flow, with sudden impastos that seem to suggest in their randomness an impending chaos. Notoriously self-promoting and ambitious, the artist was always enormously productive. Kusama's fourteen-year controversial stay in the States led not only to total exhaustion but to depression. Depression, however, was not new to the artist-nor did she hide what she considered mental illness from her friends and admirers. To the artist her illness, which had begun when she was a child with hallucinations of flowers, nets, and dots threatening to engulf her, was the origin of her art. The illness was her muse, her inspiration, and the reason for her strange decision when she returned to Tokyo in 1973 to reside in a psychiatric hospital. It must be said that many critics have expressed doubt that she is mentally ill. During her stay in the hospital, she has not only continued to produce enormous numbers of works but she also has written and published in Japan eleven novels, plus volumes of poetry. In her letters and normal discourse there is no obvious indication of mental illness. Her intensity of expression, her strangely piercing eyes suggest a person of unusual concentration and attention, and not an ill person. She is a short woman, whose shuffling walk seems difficult, perhaps painful, but it seems to stem from a physical rather than a mental disorientation. It is true that although Kusama's early life was protected by a very comfortable family, difficulties-especially tensions between the mother and daughter-did arise when Kusama declared her intention to become an artist. It was only when she lived in New York (during the Vietnam War) that she felt free, though finances were burdensome. She was against the war, condemned Wall Street, and in a parodic act against the market (though she also needed money) during the 1966 Venice Biennale-to which she was not invitedshe began selling her installed mirror balls to passersby for 1,200 lire apiece to the outrage of the Biennale organizers, who quickly disallowed the sales. These icons, in an installation of 1,500 plastic mirror balls that Kusama titled Narcissus Garden, have been reconstructed for the current exhibition. It is merely one of the installations that make what was originally set up in 1966 so egregiously contemporary. It is unlikely that a viewer seeing Kusama's displays of furniture (what she then called sculpture, and what a contemporary viewer would very likely consider installation sites) with their encrustations of phallic protrusions, would think they were created in the mid1960s by a woman artist (despite their feminist motifs). …

Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s Berlin period (1922–1923) is largely discussed in work on the director as biographical material. However, the wide circle of acquaintances Dovzhenko made within Berlin’s art world made it an extremely fruitful period for his artistic development. This article explores the influence of two German artists – Dovzhenko’s friend Käthe Kollwitz, and art teacher Willy Jaeckel – on his 1928 film Arsenal. Through exploration of quotations from two print cycles – Kollwitz’s The Weavers’ Revolt (1897) and Jaeckel’s Memento 1914/1915 (1915) – this article demonstrates the depth of Arsenal’s debt to German art, and goes some way towards addressing the lack of scholarship on the Berlin art world’s influence on Dovzhenko’s directorial vision. Using Heinrich Plett’s principles of quotation analysis as a guide, it explores both the way that Dovzhenko appropriates the artists’ work, and also the impact the intrusion of the quotations’ prior contexts on our understanding of the film. It reinforces existing readings of Arsenal’s exploration of the relationship between conflict and suffering, and underlines its strong pacifist message. It also argues that Arsenal investigates the very borderline between art and cinema, and suggests that the film should be explored not just in a cinematic context, but also in the tradition of the great print cycles on the theme of conflict of Francisco Goya, Kollwitz, Jaeckel and Otto Dix.

Contemporary conceptual art is one of the ‘texts’ which is now shaping the memory of the Holocaust, and, by extension impacting our culture’s social awareness of genocide, both past and present. The attempted genocide of European Jewry has been a continuing theme in Christian Boltanski’s installation art. Boltanski, one of France’s most eminent visual artists, addresses the myriad challenges inherent in representing the Holocaust through art and finds a middle path between abstraction and graphic representational depiction. Through a reworking of documentary photographs, Boltanski offers an original artistic response to the catastrophe of the Holocaust — working both within and outside traditional paradigms of Holocaust art and Holocaust historiography. As witnesses to the Holocaust, these documentary photographs are situated between the demands of historical meticulousness and the more lithe needs of Holocaust remembrance.1 However, the distinction made between historical representation and the artistic re-representation of historical events becomes more opaque in Boltanski’s work.2 Boltanski’s unique appropriations and reconfigurations of images of perpetrators, victims and bystanders of the Holocaust raise questions and offer insights into current aesthetic, moral and historical debates regarding the nature and identity of the victims, the indifference of the bystanders, and the motivations of the Second World War’s genocidal killers. Boltanski’s art fluctuates between the particular and the general as he engages viewers in pondering the fact of mass death in the 20th century.

<p>Porirua City is twenty minutes north of Wellington, New Zealand’s capital. The city is fifty years young and is home to the youngest demographic in the country. The city is culturally diverse but lacks a clear architectural representation of this cultural diversity. The city has developed around a beautiful harbour but the waterfront is underutilised in the city’s urban design. THINK BIG, act small proposes a design strategy that re-invents Porirua City’s urban future by bringing people back to its neglected water-edge. The proposition explores how design as process and outcome can empower a community for the future of a city through spatial agency and social engagement. The thesis explores the designer’s role in this process as landscape architect, architect, and social activist. A series of large, medium and small scale interventions are proposed. The Strategy is presented in three parts: 1. The Toolkit: a kit of architectural ideas designed to re-think the city’s urban environment around its relationship to water. These ideas can be deployed over time. 2. Two Temporary Projects: two small interventions from The Toolkit are tested in Porirua. An art installation and a community pop-up space are used to initiate conversations around the future of the city with people of the city. 3. The Big Move: a series of design moves, both big and small, are proposed as a composite vision for the future of Porirua. The proposition includes outcomes from the community pop-up space. The Big Move proposes a constructed wetland park, a series of blue-green streets, public pools, and housing. The aim is to establish new ecosystems that ease flooding, improve water quality, provide catalyst areas for economic growth, and create new social spaces for the city. The design aims to draw the harbour into the city. Polynesian and Maori attitudes towards land and water are integrated in the design: land is boundless and water is a bridge. A park, Te Awaura Park, is proposed as a ‘soft’ edge to the city’s existing boundary. The narrative of the park expresses the neighbourhood characterstics unique to each suburb in Porirua. The park aims to create a true local space, a space celebrating the city’s people.</p>

<p>Porirua City is twenty minutes north of Wellington, New Zealand’s capital. The city is fifty years young and is home to the youngest demographic in the country. The city is culturally diverse but lacks a clear architectural representation of this cultural diversity. The city has developed around a beautiful harbour but the waterfront is underutilised in the city’s urban design. THINK BIG, act small proposes a design strategy that re-invents Porirua City’s urban future by bringing people back to its neglected water-edge. The proposition explores how design as process and outcome can empower a community for the future of a city through spatial agency and social engagement. The thesis explores the designer’s role in this process as landscape architect, architect, and social activist. A series of large, medium and small scale interventions are proposed. The Strategy is presented in three parts: 1. The Toolkit: a kit of architectural ideas designed to re-think the city’s urban environment around its relationship to water. These ideas can be deployed over time. 2. Two Temporary Projects: two small interventions from The Toolkit are tested in Porirua. An art installation and a community pop-up space are used to initiate conversations around the future of the city with people of the city. 3. The Big Move: a series of design moves, both big and small, are proposed as a composite vision for the future of Porirua. The proposition includes outcomes from the community pop-up space. The Big Move proposes a constructed wetland park, a series of blue-green streets, public pools, and housing. The aim is to establish new ecosystems that ease flooding, improve water quality, provide catalyst areas for economic growth, and create new social spaces for the city. The design aims to draw the harbour into the city. Polynesian and Maori attitudes towards land and water are integrated in the design: land is boundless and water is a bridge. A park, Te Awaura Park, is proposed as a ‘soft’ edge to the city’s existing boundary. The narrative of the park expresses the neighbourhood characterstics unique to each suburb in Porirua. The park aims to create a true local space, a space celebrating the city’s people.</p>

In den letzten Jahrzehnten des 18. Jahrhunderts erlebte der dänische Gesamtstaat eine Blütezeit des äußeren Friedens, die auf den Gebieten der Kunst, Literatur, Philosophie und Theologie von einem deutsch-dänischen Kulturtransfer geprägt war, den man als Wahlverwandtschaft bezeichnen darf. 1 Kopenhagen war nicht nur das politische und kulturelle Zentrum Dänemarks, sondern zugleich auch eine der Hauptstädte des deutschen Kulturraums. Die Verbundenheit der dänischen und der deutschen Sprache und Kultur band sich, trotz vorübergehender Trübungen des Verhältnisses, im Ganzen noch problemlos in einem gesamtstaatlichen Patriotismus. Nationale Spannungen gab es kaum, das deutsch-dänische Verhältnis war weitgehend ungetrübt, bis die territorialen Verluste Dänemarks als Folge der Napoleonischen Kriege den Nährboden für ein wachsendes Nationalgefühl bereiteten, das in den folgenden fünfzig Jahren zu Spannungen führte, die in einem gewaltsamen Bruch endeten. Die Kunstakademie in Kopenhagen war die einzige in Nordeuropa und verfügte über eine Anziehungskraft, die über den Gesamtstaat hinausreichte. Zu nennen sind in diesem Zusammenhang Künstler wie

Over a two-week period in 2017, an artist-in-residence, fashion and art faculty, and graduate and undergraduate students collaborated on a temporary art installation of soft and hard sculpture located inside of an academic building on campus, as part of the university's public art collection.&nbsp; Working together as a creative team, and involving the community, they built the sculpture, applying stainability practices through the extended use phase of the materials.&nbsp; In 2019, the fashion faculty led a second team to breakdown the sculpture and increase again the life cycle of the components by using them for two different community-based art and fashion education non-profit workshops that provide art and fashion learning for children in foster care.&nbsp; The project addresses some pertinent topics in relationship to teaching innovation, extending the use phase of materials, collaborative education. and community involvement and outreach. The artists personal body of work and statement behind the sculpture strongly involves using resources and collaborative involvement from the local community for his site-specific art pieces.<br>

Simon Marchan Fiz is one of Spain’s most eminent art historians in the field of contemporary art. In this article he offers a survey of Minimalism, focusing on American sculpture and relating it to the tradition of European and Spanish sculpture, for instance connecting Tony Smith or Donald Judd with Eduardo Chillida or other European sculptors. The development of sculpture towards overcoming the influences of Informel followed a similar course to that of painting. A “methodology” of Informel was established, oscillating between the subjective foothills of this and the new constructive subordination. The semantic meanings of these artworks operate on the level of perceptual codes and figures of recognition of elemental mathematical codes in terms of their modular structure and the simplicity of their geometry. Most Minimalist artists have written about art, including Andre, Flavin, Smithson, Morris, and others. Minimal art often draws upon the material repertoire of heavy industry, i.e. its manufactured components, for physical support.

In late nineteenth-century Germany, museum friends’ associations and the cultural élite of the industrial centres of Germany supported public art collections, most of which were incorporated into municipal or federal agencies and governed by administrative experts such as Wilhelm von Bode (1845–1929) in Berlin and Gustav Pauli (1866–1938) in Bremen. The majority of German art collectors around 1900 relied not only on the expertise but also on the guidance of these museum directors as ‘public authorities’. This paper will explore how different individual and political preconditions, collecting strategies and forms of art mediation in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German art collecting in Bremen, Berlin and Weimar affected the interaction between museum directors, commercial agents and individuals of the old and new social élites, motivated by a form of philanthropic social and cultural accountability as well as by the pursuit of an established social position.

Dale Chihuly, a prolific glass artist, is primarily lauded for moving blown glass out of the confines of small, precious objects and into the realm of large-scale contemporary sculpture. He is known for such memorable installation exhibitions as "Chihuly Over Venice" (1995–96), "Chihuly in the Light of Jerusalem 2000" and "Chihuly in the Park: A Garden of Glass" at Chicago's Garfield Park Conservatory (2001–02). This prodigious artist employs collaborative teams and a division of labor as part of the developmental process. He creates complex, multipart sculptures of dramatic beauty that place him in the forefront of the movement toward establishing the blown glass form as an accepted vehicle for installation and environmental arts. KeywordsCollaborative TeamCreative PeopleCreative PersonExciting PartCreative CareerThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

The Miscellany Drawer is an introductory project for learning modeling in 3D software for CGI animation that incorporates collaboration and 3D printing. It gives students the opportunity to recreate a real-life object while learning about the software interface and modeling tools before getting into actual animation. Traditionally the modeling of the object was the extent of the exercise but the 3D printing and collaborative aspects have been added to help students see the possibilities of new technologies, draw connections to 3D printing used in stop motion animation, draw connections with fine artists like Louise Nevelson and Claes Oldenburg, and draw connections to the collaborative nature of animation production pipelines. Students will sketch, model, and 3D print a hard surface object approved by the class to promote variety and complexity in the final composition. The class will combine all the individual prints into a shoebox using stick-tac and superglue to adhere the pieces into a well-designed artwork. To ensure it is not just a few students arranging the box but everyone contributing, each student can only touch or move their own 3D print. With multiple sections of the class, doing the project over the course of a few years the boxes can be arranged to create an large installation art piece.

Vacant land invites occupation, both by ruderal vegetation and spontaneous human intervention. This active engagement—taking the form of art installations, cultivated plots, or domestic appropriations—is often unplanned and temporary. Capable of existing outside of market forces, the projects are realized efficiently, but without long-term durability. Their short-term value is undeniable but so is their vulnerability. This is especially true of landscape projects on abandoned lands. The limitations of temporary projects are elaborated across diverse occupation types, including guerilla activities, pop-up projects, design collaborative work, and short-term land leases. The argument is structured around four main points. First, public space needs to be unregulated and diverse, not just on a temporary basis in leftover spaces. Second, landscape projects require time to develop to perform culturally and ecologically. Third, temporary projects can be placeholders that limit the need for long-term re-visioning. Finally, cities with large inventories of abandoned land require greater restructuring than the temporary can promote. The temporary functions well as programmatic overlay or an event landscape to activate an existing, clearly articulated, often vibrant, space rather than as a catalyst for systemic urban change in places of disinvestment.