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Skulptur Projekte Münster 07

In 1977, the exhibition “Skulptur,” curated by Klaus Bussmann and Kasper König, opened in Münster amid public debate about the role of art in urban space. Thus began Skulptur Projekte Münster, a once-per-decade city-wide event that König calls “a long-term study” of art and its relationship to the public sphere. Thirty years later, the critical potential of public art has been all but consumed by the privatization of public space and the instrumentalization of art in the service of urban regeneration and cultural tourism. Yet there are signs of resistance. This year’s Projekte, curated by König, Brigitte Franzen and Carina Plath, argues for the return of artistic autonomy and employs concepts of continuity and history as key critical strategies.

An extensive, newly created Projekte archive installed at the LWL–State Museum of Art and Cultural History forms a geographic core of the exhibition. Thirty-four new projects by 36 international artists and 39 permanent public works radiate out from here. The archive evinces König’s long-term curatorial strategy and traces the history of Skulptur Projekte Münster from its origins in the conceptual art and Land art of the 1970s to a preoccupation with site-specificity in the 1980s to participatory, context-sensitive works that probed the pervasive media and entertainment culture of the 1990s. Skulptur Projekte’s sustained discourse about art in the public sphere resonates in Michael Asher’s long-term project Caravan as well as in Bruce Nauman’s long-awaited, finally completed Square Depression and Jeremy Deller’s new ten-year diary project with local allotment-garden owners.

Several artists respond to the history of sculpture or Skulptur Projekte itself. The French artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s mini-Münster theme park displays quarter-scale replicas of sculptures from previous shows. The Israeli artist Guy Ben-Ner’s playful I’d give it to you if I could, but I borrowed it comprises three interactive bicycles that control a digital video depicting the reconstitution of works by Tinguely, Beuys, Picasso, Duchamp and Rodney Graham into a functional bicycle built for three. Rosemarie Trockel, Nairy Baghramian, Martin Boyce and Manfred Pernice revisit materialist, formalist traditions that predate Skulptur Projekte in an attempt to counter the functionalization of art and secure its autonomous presence.

Andreas Siekmann’s Trickle down. Public Space in the Era of its Privatization exposes the co-opting of art by urban-regeneration and civic-marketing initiatives in a series of schematic drawings and a sculpture made from crushed civic mascots. Public art’s capacity to reveal complex, sometimes disturbing local stories is restored in sculptural interventions by Martha Rosler that imbue Münster’s corporate identity with historical spectres. The Lithuanian artist Deimantas Narkevicius demonstrates the totalitarian nature of iconoclasm in The Head, a montage work that reverses archival film footage of the dismantling of a statue of Karl Marx’s head to show, instead, its celebrated resurrection. Unofficial histories also loom large in Silke Wagner’s figurative monument and anti-fascist Web archive The history of Münster from below, which uncovers the personal political struggles of the Münster citizen Paul Wulf.

Artists critiquing the urban infrastructure have done so skeptically here, cautious not to produce works that are easily absorbed by the very structures they oppose. Tue Greenfort’s Diffuse Entries—a liquid-manure truck converted into a phosphate-neutralizing waterreclamation fountain—subtly mocks feeble attempts to reverse the environmental damage caused by animal farming. Hans-Peter Feldmann has renovated the underground toilets at the Domplatz and offered them to the public for free. Pawel Althamer’s meandering grassy Path counters urban design’s increasingly prescriptive nature. Mark Wallinger’s almost invisible three-mile circular string perimeter Zone and Annette Wehrmann’s carefully managed work site Aaspa—Rest & Relaxation at the Lake make visible the demarcations of public and private space.

These works prove that Skulptur Projekte Münster continues to provide a space of contestation. As democracy wanes under economic pressures and the instrumentalization of contemporary art seems all but complete, the exhibition is perhaps an achievement even more laudable now than it was at its inception.

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