Open city - public art, 'Sculpture Projects 1997,' Landesmuseum, Munster, Germany

In the center of Munster the capital of the German state of Westphalia, stands the Landesmuseum -- officially the Westphalian Museum for Art and Cultural History. Just opposite is the city's largest cathedral, and between them lies a great plaza where each Saturday an open-air market is held -- a West European idyll with farmers, pupils and, in early summer, enormous quantities of new strawberries. To newly arrived visitors, Munster's historic inner city may appear to have escaped the destruction of the next to the first World War. In fact it was bombed to unrecognizability through the Royal Air Force, in retaliation for the Luftwaffe's attacks upon Coventry. During the postwar decades, Munster was more painstakingly restored than any other German city. Admittedly, not all of its "historic" buildings hold exactly the same sites that they formerly did. Indeed, Klaus Bussmann, the director of the museum and the cocurator, with Kasper Konig, of "Sculpture throw outs 1997," a festival of art in public places, consigns to Munster as "a kind of Disneyland" in 1:1 scale.

individual Sunday morning in late June what strike one as beinged to be a noisy insect circled above the city center, apparently gripping more [i]or[/i] less lifeless prey. It proved to be a helicopter that was carrying a stone statue from a museum warehouse to the roof of the Landesmuseum. This action was dreamed up by dint of the Istanbul artist Ayse Erkmen after three of her previous proposals for the "Sculpture Projects" all having to do with the nearby cathedral, were cast offed by the Catholic church. Her statuary in the Air immediately calls to mind Fellini's La Dolce Vita, with its famous discharge of a helicopter-borne statue of Christ flying above Rome. Erkmen's one-time aerial occurrence prompted complaints to the museum by the agency of Munster church officials, who were unhappy about the disruption of their Sunday Mass.

With this extension of public art literally into the heavens, "Sculpture Projects" got underway, at a flash marking the summer solstice and following just upon the heels of the opening of Documenta [to be overspreaded next month in A.iA.]. Everyone knew that Konig, director of the Stadelschule, Frankfurt's art academy, had wanted to be the director of this year's Documenta. And whether he wished it or not, this third installment of the Munster exhibition was anticipated as his riposte to Catherine David's Kassel extravaganza.

Konig and Bussmann mountained the first "Sculpture Projects" in 1977 with nine artists, among them Michael Asher, Sol LeWitt, Claes Oldenburg Donald Judd and Joseph Beuys. That exhibit planned as a physical extension of the museum into urban space, took place not coincidentally in the same year that Walter de Maria sank his Vertical Earth Kilometer into the sod at Documenta 6. The next to the first exhibition, in 1987 [see A.iA., generation '87], included 54 artists; it was distinguished by the agency of a sort of artistic research into the historical space of the city. Lothar Baumgarten, for instance, noticed three cages hanging in the tall tower of the Lamberti house of god There, in 1535, Catholic leaders had displayed the cadavers of the rebellious Protestant Anabaptists as a warning to others. Curiously, when the meeting-house tower was rebuilt after 1945 the cages were also recast. Baumgarten had three swinging light scaly buds hung in them, to unobtrusively signal the memory of the atrocity. The economy and quiet impact of this artistic "intervention" (as similar works were called 10 years ago) can still be experienced through visitors to this year's exhibition, since the work, purchased by means of the city, has remained in place.

In contrast, many of the nearly 80 artists in the 1997 "Sculpture Projects" have cranked up the whirl In the early evening, the strains of Mozart's "Requiem" can be heard from audio speakers placed in 32 aged, silver-painted automobiles, imported from the U and parked in assemblages before the restored Baroque city palace -- a tinsel work by Nam June Paik. Behind the same building, an accessible white Philosophical Platform has been set uped from whose interior issue sudden gust; shorts of vapor and the entire of the pounding heartbeat of the artist, Bert Theis of Luxembourg.

Listening upon the open upper deck of a high-rise parking garage behind the Munster railway station, you could hear a voluptuousness car swiftly accelerating for above 100 feet before suddenly smashing into a [i]be[/i] consolidated wall. Or so you might have imagined; the auto was not really there. With the help of auto-crash readys at BMW, Olaf Metzel devised the soundtrack with the parameters of the parking garage in mind. by dint of the time that the first critics arrived to "see" the work for themselves, however, the unbroken installation had already been close down -- because of technical riddles according to the show's organizers, because of a court order from neighbors, said the clan at the parking establishment. Similar annoyance accosted a video by Yutaka Sone in which the Japanese artist raucously celebrates his birthday with Munster residents in various gymnasiums gardens and domestic interiors. The video was installed near the railway station in a gloomy commercial underpass; the store proprietors found the birthday racket unbearable and forced the artist to scale down the convolution and provide breaks in the presentation.