“I’m not good at saying thank you, so I’ll say sorry,” quipped Michael Elmgreen of artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset at the opening of “A Space Called Public / Hoffentlich Öffentlich,” a nearly year long celebration of public art across the city of Munich. Of Germany’s major hubs, Munich sits pretty low on the list of relative affinity towards cutting edge contemporary art. It’s a stronghold of conservatism and tradition, where hearing a phrase like “My kid could make that,” would not surprise in the halls of the Haus der Kunst, Pinakothek der Moderne, or newly reopened Lenbachhaus. But Elmgreen and his cohort Ignar Dragset are out to change — or at least poke at — that phenomenon. “We want to challenge the typical perception of Munich both from the outside and in,” says Dragset.
The pair selected 17 public artworks by artists and artist duos from 13 different countries, spreading them in and around the city center, in what is the city’s largest investment in public art to date: €1.2 million ($1.6 million). As one might expect, controversy over the funding has bubbled since January when Stephen Hall and Li Li Ren’s “4th Plinth Munich,” a recreation of the plinth that stands in London’s Trafalgar Square and its corresponding competition, was first installed, and at each subsequent opening. By the project’s official launch on June 6th, things appeared to have settled down, with Munich’s arts and culture director, Hans-Georg Küppers remarking that, “Works of art don’t have to please everyone,” and being quick to explain that the funds come from a pre-existing mandate for 1.5% of the city’s annual construction and renovation budget to go to arts and architectural projects. “It is money well spent,” he added.
Of the new works installed, Kirsten Pieroth’s “Berlin Puddle,” 2013 has drawn the most ire. She has taken water from the streets of Berlin in order to create a puddle in Munich, which quite blissfully reflects the sky and tree limps above it on a sunny day. Half jokingly, Elmgreen commented, “We tried to find an uneven piece of pavement, and it was so impossible that we had to create the space for the puddle ourselves.” That didn’t go over so well with certain citizens who questioned why public money was being spent on defacing the city. However, amidst the numerous responses of “I don’t get it,” from passers-by, Pieroth has received an equal amount of praise, recounting, “One very dressed up woman, around 70, stopped for nearly a half hour to look at it and told me it’s so beautiful she will come back each day to do the same.”
Other forms of protest have been content-oriented. Turner Prize nominee David Shrigley’s memorial for Michael Jackson’s pet monkey Bubbles receives a nightly onslaught of abuse from the patrons of the Michael Jackson memorial 100 yards or so down the promenade, requiring Shrigley’s own crew to return each morning and reattach the various printed images, poems, and candles that adorn the statue.
Elmgreen & Dragset remain quite unfazed by such reactions, even encouraging them to some extent. “Any confrontation about works is a sign of a well functioning democracy,” says Elmgreen. “We wanted to do something both for the small percentage of people who might genuinely enjoy the works here and also to challenge what the others might expect from art in the public space.”
In designing “A Space Called Public,” the duo shunned traditional fly-in-fly-out biennale structures, opting to slowly engage Müncheners rather than the international art crowd. And despite the more sensational tales of consternation, it’s working. Owners of a flower stall next to Han Chong’s “Made in Dresden,” a golden Buddha which lays on its side in the Viktualienmarkt, have adopted the statue, cleaning it off and from time to time even laying water lilies and lotuses in the puddles that formed in the crux of its arm during the devastating rains that have flooded much of the country over the past weeks. Martin Kippenberger’s “METRO-Net Transportable Subway Entrance” brings flocks of tourists and residents alike to lie around it on the Marienhof. “Dream — A Monument” by Ragnar Kjartansson on Gärtnerplatz attracted attention as it was unveiled for it’s play on traditional monument construction and humorous inscription, which translates to, “He only ever wanted to eat pralines and masturbate.” While, next to it on Thursday, Henrik Olesen’s “Sexual Categories 1-5” brought throngs to pick up one of five free T-shirts, which reference Fassbinder’s history in Munich and discrimination against the LGBTQ community in Germany.
Winner of the 4th Plinth project, Alexander Laner’s piece still awaits its true verdict. Laner has created a mini apartment inside the hollow plinth with a roof terrace and garden surrounding it, in a comment on the relatively expensive rents in Munich’s city center. The plinth welcomed its first inhabitant on Friday and will be free for 24 hour rentals starting on June 15, the time constraint owing to the lack of running water and chemical toilet on premises. “I was riding my bike past Wittelsbacherplatz in January when they were building up the plinth. When I saw that it was hollow inside, I immediately knew what I wanted to make,” says Laner who outfitted the apartment, “in the same way real estate developers do, as cheaply as possible while still keeping a cool, modern look.”
Regardless of the extent to which the works continue to grow on Munich residents, they will all disappear at the end of September. Thereafter, it’s not sure what will happen to each individual piece: though the city solely produced all but Tatiana Trouvé’s “Waterfall,” the artists maintain full rights. What is clear to Elmgreen, however, is the one-off nature of the exercise, saying, “It’s good not to turn everything into a tradition. There are so many of them already.”
See images from “A Space Called Public / Hoffentlich Öffentlich” in the slideshow.
