Münster

If you can travel this summer, go to Münster. Go to Münster because you will see beautiful works there, installations in public space. Go to Münster because you will be really able to live the works that are there, the works from 1977, 1987, 1997, and 2007. You will walk through a town, and if you don’t have the little map with you which shows you which sculpture is where, you might just get confused and think that something is art – and doesn’t this border blurring between art and „art“ make everything more real? You can rent a bike and bike down to lake Aa, where you can meet the singing voice of Susan Philipzs under the bridge, where you can lie on the grass under the Antenna which Ilya Kabakov put up in 1997, and you can sit on the wood stairs of the Pier by Jorge Pardo (still 1997), staring at the water. You will see History of Art pass by, jumping from the past into the present, as Donald Judds sculpture, “untitled” (1977) coils itself on the grass, and where we suspect people will sit, and write their names (Hänsel loves Gretel… ) – traces of words and loves that may still be seen, scrubbed clean, but not invisible.

Under the Torminbrücke over the Lake Aa, listen to the sound installation by Susan Philipsz

Lie on the grass and read Ilya Kabakov's message against the sky

Donlad Judd's "untitled" from 1977 bears some traces of human cohabitation

If you buy one catalogue this year, buy the Sculpture Projects Münster catalogue. The only one in the collection (Venice Biennale, Documenta, and Sculpture Projects) that has artists writing about their work in it. The only one with an amazing glossary compiled by art historians, theorists and artists, defining, in a very different way, art terminology – a catalogue you will love to read.

From the Glossary (in brief):

Artworld - (…) On the one hand, Heidegger accords art the capacity to qualitatively inform an entire culture, while on the other making the art world responsible for why it cannot unfold this altering power and that works ultimately sink into the trivial, for in the art world they suffer “world-withdrawal and world-decay.” (…)
Wolfgang Ullrich – professor of art studies and media theory at the State Academy of Design in Karlsruhe
( Martin Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art”)

Collaboration – (…) The motivation behind today’s collaborations varies radically, almost in proportion to the number of different modes of working. A common explanation is the wish to practice generosity and sharing as an alternative to contemporary individualism and the traditional role of the romantic artist as a solitary genius. Self-determination in an ever more instrumentalized art world, both commercially and publicly, and a desire to be a more powerful force in society have also been mentioned as important motivations.(…)
Maria Lind – curator and critc

Desire – “Let yourself covet men’s culture, art, wisdom, honour,” postulated Friedrich Schleiermacher in 1798 as the tenth precept of his Idea for a Catechism of Reason for Noble Ladies. His enjoinment marks a manifold change of perspective on desire in the bourgeois era. (…)
Katharina Sykora – professor at the Braunschweig University of Art’s Institute of Art Studies

Migration – (…) Trans-border migration is not only constitutive for the nation and its borders; migration also creates new social spaces, relationships and family concepts, which normally are hardly ever noticed. Migration constantly contravenes national guidelines and border policies (…)
Marion von Osten – artist, author, and curator, professor at the Zürich School of Art and Design


If we say “do not judge the book by the cover” perhaps we can say “do not judge the exhibition by the catalogue” yet in this case, the amount of thought, care and knowledge that has been put into the Münster catalogue reflects the amount of thought, care, and knowledge put into the Sculpture Projects.