Skulptur Projekte Munster has changed my perception of sculpture.  Until recently my perception of sculpture has been a bronze, stone, wood, marble, or other construction material in some form that typically does not invite audience members to physically engage with it.  Sculptures were supposed to be a monument like Michelangelo’s David or Constantin Brancusi’s Bird in Space.  Skulptur Projekte Munster presented public sculpture in the form of human performances, video installations, and architectural structures.  For me, these works challenged my ideas of what sculpture can be and questioned what it is supposed to represent.

The Im Pumpenhaus theater is hosting the director duo Gintersdofer and Klassen for Skulptur Projekte Munster.  The pair perform public rerun fragments of the existing work Body Politics in alternation with a new work titled Kabuki Noir Munster.  They perform six days a week at 5pm.  When I was there, the theater was full and the artists were enjoying performing.  They were incredibly laid back.  To the point where they invited the kids who had been hysterical, on stage to take a bow.  although it was laid back and at one point the DJ left and the performers were doing the sound and act at the same time; there was coherency to the performance.  Stuck on my mind the most was the repetition of the performance.  I remember the woman who was speaking putting on and taking off her heels periodically, I remember bits of the choreography that was done several times back to back, and I remember they took more than one bow at the end of the performance.  Ironically the aim of the performance I attended was to force the audience to remember certain actions through repetition (the woman said while putting on her heels).  It was an enjoyable experience but I could not help wondering what it was doing in Skulptur Projekte Munster.

Alexandra Pirici choreographed a performance entitled Leaking Territories hosted by the Historical Town Hall in Munster.  The work consists of six performers and can be seen Tuesdays through Sundays from 4-8pm.  The performance begins when the performers sing something I could not understand.  After some time, they lead the audience into another room where an important treaty was signed.  The performs continue to position themselves around the room and orient the audience in time and space.  The would list facts that began with “We are now…” followed by a measure of time or distance away from an event or place.  In between information the performers would arrange their bodies into sculpturesk positions and hold them for a length of time.  The positions would relate to the information being provided.  The choreography was very impressive.  What was more impressive was the merger of human performance and sculpture.  So impressive I began to question what sculpture is if human performance can be sculpture.

Gerard Byrne installed a work entitled In Our Time in the Munster public library.  The work is a small room with a piano, red curtains, stools, speakers, and a video of unspecified length.  When I entered and sat in the stool to watch the video, I immediately noticed the two speakers directly in front of me.  Behind the speakers was video and a radio crew setting up in the video.  The speakers surrounding the audience were much higher quality than the two in front of the video.  The surrounding was the noise of the crew setting up.  This scared me at first, I thought somebody was going to come out from behind the curtains and attack me as part of the performance.  When I was there no one jumped out from behind the curtains but the sound of the crew setting up was interrupted by a weather report of the central north U.S. and then the south-east part of the U.S.  What I found weird was how the Minneapolis was having storms when the report said it was.  Coincidence? Maybe but that is not the goal of this post.  The goal of this post is to explain that this was a unique architectural space with a video installation in a public sculpture exhibition.  This was fascinating to me because I was already struggling to define sculpture and now I had a radio lab that could generally be installed in virtually any room.

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            The above is a work by Aye Erkmen.  Her work is fittingly entitled On Water.  It consists of ocean cargo containers stacked in the river, steel beams, and steel grates on top.  The work allows its audience to wade across the river in a way that normally one would not be able to.  If my perception of sculpture had not been previously challenged by other works in Skulptur Projekte Munster, I would have called this an architectural work.  After having been to Skulptur Projekte Munster I would call this a sculpture.

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References

Skulptur Projekte Munster