«Lip­stick on the face of a Go­ril­la»: Art & Ar­chi­tec­tu­re

Testo in italiano al seguente link

The architect Norman Foster supposedly said in the early 1980s that art on a building was like «lipstick on the face of a gorilla». It is unclear if Forster actually made such a statement. But even if this is a legend, it sheds light on the complex relationship between art and architecture. What the statement probably meant is that even the finest art could not save bad architecture. It could also have meant that art cannot really cope with the rawness of architecture. Or it could have been a critique of art as a superficial practice, a masquerade and decoration which is less profound, grounded, or vital than architecture. No matter how one interprets the ironic statement, the anecdote of the grotesque encounter between the lipstick and the face of the gorilla is provocative. It asks for a reaction. If offers an entry point to the topic of the interrelation between art and architecture, an issue where specialists and the large public meet.

The golden age of public art

The statement was part of a vivid debate about the interrelation between art and architecture in the 1980s and early 1990s. In fact, this period could be considered something like the golden age of public art in the Western countries. More than any other period, the 1980s and early 1990s saw a plethora of public art projects, exhibitions, and publications. Several large-scale monuments that became canonical were inaugurated in that time. Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C. (1982), a stone structure with the names of the US soldiers killed in the war, half sunken in the ground, sparked a bitter controversy. Esther Shalev-Gerz’ and Jochen Gerz’ Memorial against Fascism in Harburg (1986) consisted of a column cladded in lead. The public was invited to write comments on the Nazi period onto the surface which, during the timespan of seven years, gradually was lowered and sunk in the ground. In 1993 it had disappeared, and only an underground opening shows a part of the inscriptions. Alfred Hrdlicka’s Mahnmal gegen Krieg und Faschismus in Vienna (1988) was critically discussed. For some it was a mirror image of a past that would rather be forgotten. For others it was not critical enough because it included the depiction of a fallen German soldier thus making the aggressor itself a victim.
Many groundbreaking sculptures referring to architecture were produced during the same period. Think of Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc on Federal Plaza, Manhattan (1981), Joseph Beuys’ 7000 Eichen at Documenta 7 in Kassel (1982-1987), Donald Judd’s 15 Untitled Works in Concrete at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, TX (1984), Daniel Buren’s Les Deux Plateaux in the Palais Royal in Paris (1985), Siah Armajani’s Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge in Minneapolis (1988), Claes Oldenburg and Cosje van Bruggen’s Spoonbridge and Cherry in Minneapolis (1988) or Rachel Whiteread’s House in London (1993). While these public sculptures had no explicit political function, they nevertheless polarized the opinions. As soon as art leaves the walls of the museum or gallery and enters the public realm, it’s function changes. It inevitably moves towards the monument and includes issues of power, politics, norms, tastes, inclusion and exclusion.

The situation in Switzerland

In Switzerland, the trend toward the close interaction between sculpture and architecture was also evident during the 1980s and 1990s. The three most prominent cases of public art are Max Bill’s Pavillon Skulptur in Zurich (1983), Meret Oppenheim’s Meret Oppenheim-Brunnen in Bern (1983) (fig. 1), and Sol LeWitt’s Cube (1984). During the building boom of the late 20th century most new public buildings for administration, schools and higher education were adorned with public art. In parallel to the growing trend of public institutions, private institutions, namely banks such as UBS, Zürcher Kantonalbank, Banca del Gottardo and Raiffeisen as well as insurance companies such as Helvetia and Swiss Re invested not only in corporate art collections but in architecture-related art. While the tradition of Kunst am Bau starting in the early XX century, had put art in the service to architecture, reserving roughly one percent of the construction budget for artistic interventions, it became, during the 1980s and 1990s, something like a partner. In some rare cases, artists were even included in the planning from scratch and not invited after the completion of a building. The changed relationship was manifest in notions such as «Kunst im Bau» or, more generally, «architekturbezogene Kunst.»

Three major exhibitions in Basel focused on the relation between sculpture and architecture. Skulptur im 20. Jahrhundert in Wenken Park, Riehen (1980), Skulptur im 20. Jahrhundert in the Merian Villa in Brüglingen (1984), and TransForm: Bild, Objekt Skulptur im 20. Jahrhundert in Kunsthalle Basel (1992). Tabula Rasa was the title of the 9th Sculpture Exhibition in Biel (1991), held on the occasion of the 700th anniversary of the Swiss Confederation. Unlike earlier venues of the sculpture exhibitions launched in 1954, the works of art were not autonomous sculptures, merely placed in Biel during the exhibition, but site-specific interventions. Some artworks were even performative, such as Christian Philipp Müller’s Bibliobus (fig. 2), a bus containing a library that moved to various locations. Art had become a means to perceive architecture and urbanity. Peter Greenaway curated the exhibition Stairs (1994) in Geneva, where 100 white staircases were placed throughout the city during 100 days, offering viewpoints to various urban situations. In Fribourg, the group exhibition Cabines de Bain (1996) took place in the spaces of an old swimming pool outside the old town. These various events paved the way for the Swiss National Exhibition, Expo.02 which, after several delays, opened in 2002. While traditionally the design of the masterplan for such a large-scale exhibition was in the hands of architects, now it was given to a young artist, Pipilotti Rist.

But it was not only art which moved toward the terrain of architecture. Some architects as well approached the realm of art. Herzog & de Meuron, practicing since the late 1970s, were inspired deeply by the work of Joseph Beuys and, starting in 1991, collaborated with artists such as Thomas Ruff. Actually, the collaboration began on the occasion of the exhibition held in the Swiss Pavilion for the Architecture Biennale in Venice. The fact that architecture had, since 1980, its own biennial exhibition, alternating with art, offered another highly visible platform where architecture and art could interact. And it made clear that the representation of architecture had moved center stage. With the foundation of the Architecture Museum AM in Basel in 1984, a private initiative, Switzerland got a unique institution to present contemporary architecture. It opened at the same time as the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt a.M. (1984) and the FRAC Centre-Val de Loire in Orléans (1983) and was followed by Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein (1989) and the Architekturzentrum Wien (1991).

Haus

At the very core of this dynamics stands a work by the Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss, entitled Haus (1987) created for the exhibition Skulptur Projekte in Münster 1987 (fig. 3). This exhibition played a pivotal role in the changing relationship between art and architecture. Exhibiting architecture is just as big a challenge as placing works of art in public spaces. Architectural exhibitions usually show models, plans and documentary photographs that refer to realized or planned buildings. Exhibitions of art in public space, on the other hand, require institutional and spatial framing, namely pedestals, titles and labels, so that the artworks can be shown to their best advantage. By changing the title Skulptur. Ausstellung in Münster 1977 to Skulptur Projekte in Münster 1987, replacing «exhibition» with «projects», the curators Klaus Bussmann and Kasper König focused on this twofold challenge and thus on the relationship between art and architecture. The impact of Haus by Fischli & Weiss in the field of art and architecture alike stems in part from the fact that the artists solved both paradoxes, i.e. that of the architectural exhibition and the outdoor art exhibition, in a coup, as it were.
Haus was an artifact about 5 meters long and about 3.5 meters high, placed without a base on a wasteland between a cinema and a snack bar, neat the train station of Münster. The façade was made of wood and Plexiglas and was painted in various shades of grey. There were various naturalistic details such as ventilation shafts, door traps, rain gutters, etc. but no lettering, no street signs or house numbers. Haus was not architecture in the strict sense, as it could not be entered. It was also not an architectural model, as it was created on a scale of 1:5 and was therefore clearly taller than a human. However, it could not be defined as an autonomous sculpture either, as it was destroyed after the end of the exhibition.

30 years later, Haus was reenacted, now for the retrospective of Fischli & Weiss (Weiss had passed in 2012) in front of the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2016. It was an aluminium cast, painted by Fischli (fig. 4). Since 2018, the work has been permanently installed on a plinth in front of the open Oerlikon racecourse in Zurich and thus in a context that resembles that of the original environment in Münster. Stylistically, the cubic forms, the flat roof and the horizontal window bands of Haus can be assigned to the International Style, or what is commonly known as «modern architecture». What was long considered avant-garde – for example Peter Fischli’s parents’ house, the Haus Schlehstund (1933) in Meilen, near Zurich, designed by Bauhaus student Hans Fischli, Peter Fischli’s father – had become something of a commonplace by the 1980s.¹ «Looking at the building makes you slightly melancholy, because it represents a waning age, a time when people had very different hopes than they do today», Weiss said in retrospect.²
Haus represents an office and manufacturing building. The front is marked by large windows, the rear by a loading ramp for deliveries. The four floors are accessed via a freight elevator. Haus does not stand for a spectacular author’s architecture that competes with art, nor does it represent an anonymous architecture that stands for the homogenization of the environment. Rather, it stands for a set of ambiguities, hovering between art and architecture, blue-collar work and white-collar work, deindustrialization and information industry, the abstract and the concrete. These ambiguities are characteristic for the opening of the borders between art and architecture during the 1980s.

Art: from private to public and back

How can one explain this historically unique proximity between architecture and art? Why were the limits between art and architecture, during the 1980s and 1990s, suddenly so porous? Why did the borders separating the genres from each other become, during a certain time, permeable?
On the one hand, it was a consequence of the development of art, an issue of form, so to speak. Art had been expanding toward larger dimensions since the 1960s. Minimal Art with its emphasis on the modular, on repetition, on simple geometric volumes and an «industrial look» had blurred the boundaries towards both design and architecture. Earth Art moved far onto the terrain of architecture, left the enclosure of the conventional exhibition space and moved to a larger scale. The more successful and popular contemporary art became, the more space it required. When Christo & Jeanne-Claude wrapped the Reichstag building in Berlin for Wrapped Reichstag (1995) with silver fabric, crowds flocked to the new capital for peaceful gatherings. James Turrell, since his transformation of Roden Crater near Flagstaff, Arizona, a protagonist of Earth Art, became the most popular author of public art. His installations, such as the Skyspaces are attractions in private collections and public buildings.

On the other hand – and this is the main hypothesis to be followed here – the momentary opening can be seen as a result of a general shift of the role of art within society. During much of the 20^th century, modern art was considered at the margins of society, either outside, or ahead, in guise of the military notion of the «avant-garde». It was interesting for a small, specialized audience. This started to shift during the 1960s, when the formerly secluded «artist’s world» became the «art world» and, for instance with the triumph of Pop Art, moved toward the center of the society. The notion of «contemporary art» replaced the idea of the «avant-garde». This trend culminated in the 1980s and early 1990s. Contemporary art became not only accepted by a growing public, it became a major attraction, equal to sport and pop culture. From an emblem of resistance and provocation it turned into a symbol of identity and affirmation. Blockbuster exhibitions, newly built museums, such as Guggenheim Bilbao (1997) designed by Frank Gehry, became drivers of city marketing and the tourism industry.
During a brief period, contemporary art offered identification and coherence, agreement or disagreement. It was, more than architecture, the place where ideological, ethical, moral issues could be disputed in public.

This constellation changed after the Millennium. The skyrocketing prices for works by a limited group of canonized artists, are symptomatic for this shift. Contemporary art has moved from a public function back to the private realm. Unlike during the time of the avant-gardes it is not located in a societal niche, but in an exclusive bubble of the financial and cultural elite, so to speak. When, for instance, in 2010, the citizens of Zurich voted against Nagelhaus, a public art project designed by Caruso St John and Thomas Demand in 2010, following the campaign by the right-wing party that attacked the project with the slogan «5.9 millions for a toilet?», they made a bad deal, financially. Already at the time of the vote, artworks by Demand’s sold for several hundred thousand Swiss francs. It would have been a bargain to have the largest artwork by Demand in public ownership. But the denial made clear that a majority of the voters did not share the values of the minority interested in architecture related art (fig. 5).
With the shift in public relevance, art has lost its impact in the realm of political representation. The most obvious result it the decline of monuments. When the 700^th anniversary of the Swiss Confederation was celebrated, a competition for the Bundesplatz, the space in front of the Parliament in Bern, used as a parking lot, was launched. The winning project by the designers Stephan Mundwiler, Christian Stauffenegger and Ruedi Stutz was a stone surface with 26 fountains, representing the 26 cantons. With a delay than more than a decade it was realized in 2004 and immediately became a popular attraction. The redundant title chosen for the competition – Place as Place – is symptomatic for the fact that there is neither any need nor capacity for art for political representation (fig. 6).

When the 30^th anniversary of German reunification was celebrated in October 2020, no one called for a monument. To this day, there is still no monument to this momentous historical event, although the Bundestag decided to erect one in 2007. The resulting grotesque Freedom and Unity Monument in Berlin, a giant seesaw that can be set in motion by visitors, is under construction. It is characteristic of the political will to present the issue, which continues to be a source of conflict, as a playful event. At the same time, it is characteristic the fact that the question of the monument is not in the hands of art anymore.
The fact that a stone clad square with a group of fountains attracts visitors, passersby and politicians in Bern and that a moving platform soon will represent the unification of Germany makes clear that architecture, to some extent has taken up the public function that art has left. And if there is any object that stands as a landmark for the reunited Germany it is the glass and steel cupola over the old building of the Reichstag, inaugurated in 1999. The winner of the competition held in 1995 was Norman Foster. Some of the finest public art works are installed in the buildings since its inauguration, among them Hans Haacke’s seminal Der Bevölkerung (2000) and Gerhard Richter’s Schwarz Rot Gold (1999).
After all, some lipstick does suit the gorilla. Translation FBe
 

1. P. Fischli, My House, Bauhaus, in Tate Etc., vol. 6, Spring 2006, https://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/my-house-bauhaus.

 

2. Hans Ulrich Obrist, The House in Münster, the fabric of reality, in Fischli Weiss. Questions & Flowers. A Retrospective [exhib. cat. Kunsthaus Zürich], JRP Ringier, Zurich 2006, pp. 237-246.