The City as Subject

Public Art and Urban Discourse in Berlin

Carolyn S. Loeb

• Verlag: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Jahr: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350258624
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Arte
• Thema: Arte generale

In The City as Subject, Carolyn S. Loeb examines distinctive bodies of public art in Berlin: legal and illegal murals painted in West Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s, post-reunification public sculptures, and images and sites from the street art scene. Her careful analyses show how these developed new architectural and spatial vocabularies that drew on the city's infrastructure and daily urban experience. These works challenged mainstream urban development practices and engaged with citizen activism and with a wider civic discourse about what a city can be. Loeb extends this urban focus to her examination of the extensive outdoor installation of the Berlin Wall Memorial and its mandate to represent the history of the city's division. She studies its surrounding neighborhoods to show that, while the Memorial adopts many of the urban-oriented vocabularies established by the earlier works of public art she examines, it truncates the story of urban division, which stretches beyond the Wall's existence. Loeb suggests that, by embracing more multi-vocal perspectives, the Memorial could encourage the kind of participatory and heterogeneous construction of the city championed by the earlier works of public art.

1

Introduction: Public Art and the Affirmation of the City

Berlin is a walker’s (and bicyclist’s) city. Its flatness is conducive to getting out and about in its famous, invigorating Berliner Luft (Berlin air). Thus the scholar or visitor can take breaks from perusing the numerous volumes that have been written about the city’s past to search out, in situ, layers of this past that remain in its structures and street patterns. From traces of its medieval roots to the glittering ensembles of the New Berlin, Berlin’s history is discernible in its cityscape. And within this constellation of historical traces, the observant walker also encounters an array of public artworks that reinforce and draw attention to this feature. Whether or not these public artworks take specific historical events as their theme, the materials and forms that they deploy point to how the city’s walls, pavements, streets, and other infrastructural elements preserve and articulate its layered past.

The specific bodies of public art that this book examines—murals painted in West Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s, street art and public sculpture from the post-reunification period, the official Memorial to the Berlin Wall at Bernauer Strasse—sometimes take episodes from the city’s history as their themes. But they are distinctive and significant because elements of the city’s infrastructure lie at the heart of their creation. By honing architectural and spatial vocabularies derived from daily urban experience, these public artworks not only alert us to ways in which Berlin’s past is embedded in the present. They also challenge mainstream urban development practices and engage with a wider civic discourse that is concerned with the question of how to understand what a city is.

These are not concerns that we usually associate with public works of art. In the past, public art often addressed national political or cultural identities; today, such works are often used to brand corporate spaces carved from the public domain. But the murals and sculptures whose stories we focus on here rely on very different origins, agents, means, audiences, and commitments from either of these. We begin by looking at West Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s, where artists seized upon blank, exposed firewalls to paint numerous legal and illegal murals. By recuperating abandoned infrastructure and neglected spaces, these murals contributed to a wider contemporary discourse among critical urban professionals, citizen-activists, and others, concerning the direction that urban redevelopment should take. This urban discourse cultivated widespread awareness of these issues in Berlin, which persisted beyond the fall of the Wall in 1989. During the following decade, other forms of public art emerged that drew on the continuing sensitivity of this audience to urban concerns. Both street art and new forms of public sculpture that arose following reunification also grounded themselves in the infrastructure of the city; their uses of architectural and spatial materials and forms argued for the significance of urban elements as repositories of history and of the character of the city. As market-driven speculation and property redevelopment intensified in the 1990s, these forms of public art continued to articulate and contribute to the ongoing oppositional discourse that urged wider citizen participation in shaping the city; the works by public artists whose stories we tell here engaged moments of liberatory possibilities to challenge mainstream redevelopment practices and to claim citizens’ right to the city. We will see ways in which these artists, in collaboration with activist allies, helped shift aspects of urban redevelopment policy. And yet it is necessary to acknowledge, too, that mainstream practices dominated the period; this is evident not only in the growing presence of corporate-sponsored public art. We see it as well in a major public design intervention made with municipal support, the Memorial to the Berlin Wall and its Victims and to the Division of the City at Bernauer Strasse, completed two-and-a-half decades after the fall of the Wall. This extensive open-air installation reflects the impact of more one-dimensional, less inclusive approaches to public art, even as it adopts in many important ways the urban-oriented vocabularies established by the earlier works of public art that we examine. The Berlin Wall Memorial does not seize the opportunity offered by its themes to examine the impact of the Wall on its wider neighborhood setting and the urban implications of that impact. Although many of the architectural and spatial materials and forms introduced by the earlier public artworks are evident here, their force is subverted. We see instead how the absence or avoidance of connections with the wider grassroots discourse—here, this would especially entail broader attention as well to the views of former East Berliners—can limit full and searching interrogations of the history and nature of the city.

Such instructive limitations, however, as we find at the Berlin Wall Memorial, reflect its distinctive historical context. Each of the bodies of public art that we explore here is affected by its time. The city itself and its institutions changed over the course of the years between the 1970s and the early years of the new millennium. Successive changes posed new questions, as well as created new possibilities and new constraints, for the artists whose works we are examining. Throughout this period, however, discussion and debate about the nature of Berlin’s urban development never abated; specific issues and how they were framed changed, but public focus on and interest in how Berlin is shaped as a city and who shapes it remained constant. This created a nourishing environment and a knowing audience for the public artworks that concern us here.

One further preliminary word about change is necessary. The city that we encounter today is no longer the city in which many of the works of public art that we consider here were created. This is especially true for the murals from 1970s and 1980s West Berlin. Their surroundings included many remaining gaps in the streetscape created by wartime bombings, makeshift kiosks and storefronts filling in damaged lots, scarred and shabby building façades, and few sidewalk trees or other amenities. These and other features marked a city that was still recovering from the massive destruction of the war, and that was both economically constrained and in a precarious geopolitical position. Although it is a cliché to say that Berlin is “always becoming,” this was a period in which that was indeed true; full restoration of the cityscape lay decades ahead in the future.

An Overview of Themes

The public artworks that are the focus of this book—murals painted in West Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s, street art and public sculpture from the post-reunification period, and the recently completed official Memorial to the Berlin Wall at Bernauer Strasse—anchor its story. They are the primary documents, whose materials, settings, methods and means of creation, and other features form the basis for analysis. Such scrutiny is informed by theoretical perspectives that enable us to situate these works of public art within their broader social and historical contexts and to assess their impact and significance. The lens that we bring to bear on our examination of these public artworks widens, in other words, to reveal their connections to the larger environment of struggles over the direction of urban development in Berlin.

We begin to see clearly and forcefully the central themes and arguments of this study in the examination of the murals that were painted on exposed firewalls in West Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s, the subject of the next chapter. Both illegal and officially sponsored murals used the walls bordering lots that had been rendered vacant by Second World War bombings, as well as other surfaces, to reclaim and reintegrate neighborhood spaces. In the face of the dominant urban renewal discourse of the times that promoted demolition of older structures, the murals ratified oppositional citizen-activism, both legal and illegal, that proposed alternative conceptions of urban redevelopment. Muralists revalued the salvageable infrastructure of the city in a way that paralleled the actions and initiatives of political protestors, and thematically their murals depicted a range of imagery that included vignettes of the city’s history as well as fantastical urban visions. These murals contributed to the counter-claims of local residents to preserve the built forms, spaces, and scale of their neighborhoods instead of destroying them.

The significance of the interconnections here between activist local residents and murals that represent in a complementary medium citizens’ challenges to mainstream means of urban redevelopment is illuminated by Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the right to the city.¹ This urban theorist’s complex work drew on a multiplicity of experiences and intellectual encounters, including involvement with the events of May 1968 in Paris, awareness of Surrealist practices, and contact with the ideas and actions of Guy Debord and the Situationist International. In opposition to the increasing domination of technocratic urban practices and to capitalism’s relentless pursuit of spatial hierarchy and social homogeneity, Lefebvre argued for the city as a site of heterogeneity, layered time, and new possibilities; for the primacy of use-value over exchange-value; and for the need for citizens to engage in social struggle to achieve their place in and their vision of urban life. Although West Berlin muralists were responding to some of the same inspirations, especially the political, urban, and visual sensibility of 1968 Paris, it was not until the 1990s that urban artists and their supporters in Berlin made explicit reference to the idea of the right to the city. Nevertheless, this concept articulates the range of innovative thinking and contestational practices pioneered during the earlier period of mural-making.

Nor were the West Berlin muralists isolated examples of urban artists in this period who represented by means of paintings on walls the struggles of overlooked or disenfranchised people for control over their neighborhoods’ evolution. West Berlin muralists were aware of contemporaneous mural movements elsewhere in Europe, in the United States, and in Latin America, that were engaged in similar efforts. Recognition of these links opens the door to reconsideration of the art-historical periodization of muralism, and suggests that the precedents that West Berlin muralists acknowledged in Mexico and New Deal America from the first half of the twentieth century represent a different phenomenon from what developed beginning in the 1960s. Whereas the murals of Los Tres Grandes in Mexico and the Works Progress Administration in the United States addressed the project of nation-building, those painted within the international muralist community in the later twentieth century gave voice to citizens’ claims to the right to the city.

West Berlin murals from the 1970s and 1980s, then, contributed to local residents’ efforts, as well as to those of the wider, international urban muralist movement, to counter dominant urban planning paradigms. And these efforts could be effective. Within West Berlin, opposition to the practice of urban renewal by demolition in favor of the preservation of existing older structures, ensembles, and streetscapes led to the creation of a new planning policy, the 12 Principles of City Renewal (12 Grundsätze der Stadterneuerung), approved by the municipal administration in 1983. Referred to by the umbrella term, “cautious urban renewal,” the new policy emphasized preservation, included citizen participation, and stressed the goal of maintaining existing neighborhood social mixes. Later in the decade, West Berlin hosted an International Building Exhibition that showcased such preservationist practices as well as innovative new construction. Although not realizing the right to the city—and, indeed, perhaps better understood as evidence of cooptation of this political thrust—these events nevertheless attest to the influence of the movement of critical citizen-activists, of which the West Berlin muralists were a part, on urban redevelopment decisions.

The change in urban planning policy to which West Berlin muralists contributed, as part of the larger struggle over redevelopment, had repercussions that affected public art in the 1990s and beyond. The revaluation of Berlin’s traditional buildings and streetscapes that this change institutionalized provided a new lens through which people looked at often-derelict, neglected old residential and industrial sites. With the unexpected fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of the city, the rich architectural legacy of the past, especially in East Berlin—unfamiliar territory to West Berliners, West Germans, and many others from all over the world—was rediscovered. At first, pioneered by artists, students, and those eager for spaces in which to initiate alternative cultural and political projects, this was a moment of emancipatory possibilities. Street art that supported and was an expression of these endeavors flourished. By the turn of the millennium, however, property speculators and a real estate-driven economy recognized the desirability and profitability of gentrified neighborhoods made up of restored traditional structures and spaces; they began to wrest from former East Berlin residents and the “urban pioneers” the cityscape that the latter had begun to transform. Struggles over displacement, building occupations, and redevelopment schemes ensued, some of which continue to the present day.

The perspective offered by critical urban theory provides clarity about these interactions between works created by public artists, their urban significance, the city’s infrastructural redevelopment, and the agents of economic and social change. Informed by the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, the work of Henri Lefebvre, as well as by Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism, critical urban theory examines the urban effects of postwar state economic supports and their increasing erosion through the growing hegemony of neoliberal policies. These policies favor, instead, private-sector control and the imposition of austerities on those groups previously bolstered by state programs, such as workers, the poor, students, and immigrants. Against this backdrop, critical urban theory “emphasizes the politically and ideologically mediated, socially contested and therefore malleable character of urban space—that is, its continual (re)construction as a site, medium and outcome of historically specific relations of social power.”² Critical urban theory recognizes both the operations of control that social, political, and economic institutions exercise, and the openings for liberatory initiatives and democratic alternatives in the urban arena that are “latent within the present, due to the contradictions of existing social relations.”³ These insights are particularly valuable for understanding changes in the representation of urban possibilities by public artists over the course of the first twenty years following reunification. We see such change, for example, in the case of street art’s shift from an emancipatory beacon guiding innovative cultural, urban, and social projects, to a property- and city-marketing mechanism. As critical urban theorist Neil Brenner has written, “the nature of the structural constraints on emancipatory forms of social change, and the associated imagination of alternatives to capitalism, have been qualitatively transformed through the acceleration of geoeconomic integration, the intensified financialization of capital, the crisis of the postwar model of welfare state intervention, the still ongoing neoliberalization of state forms and the deepening of planetary ecological crises.”⁴ All of these forces are at work in Berlin.

Berlin’s municipal administration responded to this complex of trends by competing for recognition as a “global city,” which required the encouragement of intensified corporate development. New, signature corporate headquarters buildings and their sculptural embellishments yielded internationally familiar, placeless, urbanistically homogenizing forms. At the same time, however, the city administration sponsored the creation of numerous works of public art that proposed an entirely different, heterogeneous, and participatory conception of the city. This distinctive body of public sculpture, created from the late 1980s through the early years of the new millennium, uses the everyday infrastructure of the city to heighten awareness of the ways in which history is embedded in urban structure, to bring that history into daily life, and to engage viewers in reflection on these themes. The climate of critical urban awareness that prevailed in the 1970s and 1980s continued to provide a foundation and an audience for these new sculptural endeavors. The city itself is usually not the explicit subject of these sculptures. Rather, such sculptures signal the role of the city as a repository of historical witness through their reliance on the spaces, stairs, walls, signs, pavements, and other ordinary features of the urban environment as armatures for their construction. These sculptures rely on such urban infrastructure of their sites to instigate awareness of the city as custodian of historical meaning and memory. Taking the city as their inherent subject, then, these sculptures challenge corporate-shaped models of the city and argue instead for the place- and history-centered self-consciousness of Berlin’s public ar...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Public Art and the Affirmation of the City
• 2 West Berlin Walls, Street Art, and the Right to the City
• 3 City Spaces: Contemporary Public Sculpture in Berlin
• 4 The Memorial Landscape of the Berlin Wall
• 5 Conclusion: Public Art within an Urban Discourse
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint