Sculpture. Projects in Münster 1997 [antikvár]

PrefaceSkulptur. Projekte in Münster / 997 represents the third attempt, after 1977 and 1987, to explore the possibilities of "art in public space". Already following the last sculpture exhibition, Münster city council had declared itself in favor of continuing the experiment ten years later (a very Westphalian rhythm); still, the exhibition directors harbored considerable doubt as to whether such a continuation would be sensible or even possible. Münster isn't Kassel, with its established tradition of documenta, and it certainly isn't Venice, where the ambience of the city makes up for even the worst Biennale. Münster has to live up to its self-imposed task, though admittedly under ideal conditions: an urbanized, central European small-big city with a historical infrastructure, great willingness to cooperate on the part of all involved (city, state, university, regional association, private persons), and a sufficient financial base, which for 1997 could even be doubled through substantial sponsorships from business, banking, finance, industry, and trade. Rather, the concerns were of a more fundamental nature: today, in the age of media and dissolving communicative structures, is there still even a need to address the issue of communal public space? Will artists still be interested and willing to take on this challenge? After all, aren't cities like Münster, in the final phases of reconstruction, so thoroughly designed and perfectly equipped that no space is left for artistic intervention? And in any case, hasn't contemporary art lost interest for the most part in the sculpture and avant-garde of the twentieth century? Precisely these concerns, however, also served as an impetus to continue the approach from 1987, quite apart from the latent expectations on the part of the city and the international art scene. Theprovisions were the same, allowing the invited artists the greatest possible freedom in developing their projects with respect to both subject and (up to a certain point) financing. The sole, and not merely pragmatic, limitation in contrast to 1987 was the request to stay as much as possible in the area of the old city inside the so-called Promenade ring. The renovated Landesmuseum of 1907 on the cathedral square in the heart of the city was also made available as a "temporary public space", in an effort to stimulate a dialog between the museum "interior" and the urban "exterior". Of course the concentration on the central area had practical reasons as well: though a city of only moderate size, the urban area of Münster extends over a diameter of more than 20 km, threatening to turn the exhibition into a kind of Easter-egg hunt for out-of-town visitors if works were distributed over the entire area. A more important reason, however, was the desire to call attention to the central area's qualities as an urban center and place of historical identification. Already in 1987, the critical dialog between the artists and the experience of historical traces was one of the most exciting discoveries of the potentialities latent in so-called "artistic interventions" - from Lud-ger Gerde's Gestrandetes Schiff (Stranded Ship), to Lothar Baumgarten's discreet reminder of the fate of the Anabaptists in the cages on the Lamberti-Kirche, to Rebecca Horn's conjuring of history in the old Zwinger. Since 1977 the specific character of the Münster experiment had consisted not only in the "site specific", the work in situ with qualities developing out of the interplay of place and artistic intervention, but even more so - above all in the works of Joseph Beuys and Ulrich Rückriem, as well as in the large-scale project by Claes