The City as Subject: Public Art and Urban Discourse in Berlin

Description

In The City as Subject, Carolyn S. Loeb examines three bodies of public art in Berlin in the postwar and contemporary periods: legal and illegal murals painted on exposed residential firewalls in West Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s, public sculpture created primarily during the decade and a half following reunification, and the official Berlin Wall Memorial. Through careful analysis of these works, Loeb develops a conception of the city as not only shaped by its citizens but capable of connecting Berlin’s inhabitants with the past. The three structures in question each represent a distinctive body of public art that has emerged in the city—and beyond their ostensible subjects, they are all embedded within Berlin’s specifically urban landscape. These bodies together demonstrate public art’s reliance on the city’s own forms and materials as a means of visual expression. By considering the history, contexts, subjects, materials, and formal decisions manifested in each work, as well as their relationship to a prevailing climate of citizen activism, this book shows how these bodies of public art present a vision of Berlin that counters today’s homogenizing practices, and in doing so each one keeps alive citizen-activists’ conversations about the nature of the city that they desire. Cover Contents List of Illustrations Preface and Acknowledgments 1 Introduction: Public Art and the Affirmation of the City An Overview of Themes Berlin Background The Aim and Description of This Book 2 West Berlin Walls, Street Art, and the Right to the City The Murals and Their West Berlin Context The Right to the City: A New Paradigm for Public Art Street Art and the Right to the City 3 City Spaces: Contemporary Public Sculpture in Berlin New Monuments Networks Voids Ground Planes Conflicts Sculpture Reclaiming the Urban Realm 4 The Memorial Landscape of the Berlin Wall Where Was the Wall? Toward Memorialization The Memorial Landscape The Afterlife of the Memorial Landscape The Persistence of Forgetting The Memorial and the City 5 Conclusion: Public Art within an Urban Discourse Bibliography Index