Words About Sculpture Projects Muenster 07

In retrospect, Skulptur Projekte Münster was my favorite stop on my Grand Tour. There was a viewable amount of art and one could see how different artists approached the assignment of making public work. The art museum showed documentation of past proposals, so one could see Bruce Nauman's proposal from 1977 that wasn't realized until this year. Some of the work will remain long after the art tourists have gone away, and in ten years a new group will join the collection.

Jeremy Deller worked with the an allotment garden group who will be writing journals that will be kept until SP 2017. He also gave out seeds for the Dove Tree, which will take ten years to bloom--a reminder to return to Muenster.

Above is one of the city's confection shops that is selling work by Pae White: marzipan sculptures of Los Angeles' taco trucks and their wares.


Above is a view of Guy Ben-Ner's "I'd give it to you if I could, but I borrowed it." The work is a video powered by the exercise bikes: pedal backwards, and the video moves in reverse, pedal faster and the action speeds up. The video begins with the artist at an museum exhibition with his children. Bored and rambunctious, they reassemble Picasso's Head of a Bull, Duchamp's bicycle wheel attached to a chair, and Jean Tinguely's Cyclograveur into a functioning bicycle (with the help of an air pump from Joseph Beuys' Zerstorte Batterie. There's a wonderful layering effect as you watch the Ben-Ners tour Muenster's past sculptures on their conglomerated art-bike, all while one pedals an exercise bike in-between a bike ride tour of Muenster's Sculpture Project.


Above is Mike Kelley's Petting Zoo, with a salt lick shaped like Lot's Wife. The best part was watching one woman scrape goat shit off her Prada shoes. Mike would smile.


This is Bruce Nauman's Piece, snapped in the pouring rain. There was a soaked-to-the-bone ride back to the bike rental place at the end of the day.


If I would pick a favorite piece it would be Andreas Siekmann's "Trickle Down. Public Space in the Era of its Privatization. " The spheroid pictured above is an amalgam of all those fiberglass cows (and other city icons) given to artists to be decorated and placed about the city. Next to it is the industrial trash compactor used to make the sculpture (below). On the compactor are silhouettes of the different city icons with the year of the program.


Around the circumference of the courtyard are wheat-pasted posters depicting the process where private business interests fund the project,


redevelopment districts are created and secured,


an agenda of surveillance and crime reduction is put in place,


general lolly gagging activities are outlawed,


and those laws are in turn used to suppress public demonstrations and political action.




'Nuff said.

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