A Public Playground for Invention

MUNSTER, Germany —  For the third time in 20 years, the “Sculpture Project” has come to town. And, it’s a pleasure.

Organized by the Westphalian Regional Museum and curators Kasper Konig and Klaus Bussmann, the exhibition consists of temporary new work for mostly urban spaces by more than 60 international artists. Blessedly, there is no theme--except to see what a variety of mostly talented artists will do when invited to work in the complicated environment of the public arena.

Yes, project proposals for sculptures in city parks and streets were subject to curatorial review and approval from various city offices. But no bureaucratically directed social goal intrudes; no “healing the wounds of urban fragmentation” or other such politically puerile platitudes drove the plan.

Instead, the wide-ranging results show that, undergirding all, a considerable amount of faith in artists to conceive provocative projects independently, with or without regard to exigencies of the site, has guided the “Sculpture Project.” For the show’s three-month duration (it continues through Sept. 28), the city is a laboratory or workshop for diverse artistic ideas. It’s the way to go.

Some artists have indeed constructed public amenities, such as L.A.’s Jorge Pardo, who built an exquisite pier and pavilion of California redwood that juts into Aa Lake. Others, like Richard Serra, have made blunt sculptural interventions that could care less about sociability; Serra’s solid, 40-ton block of rusting steel, embedded in the ground at a slight tilt, nods down an allee of trees toward the beautiful baroque facade of a famous country house.

For visitors to the citywide show, the procedure is simple: Stop by the museum in the city center and see the exhibition of project models or related works by the participating artists; pick up the handy pocket guide with a map to the project sites; then, set out for a walk. (The 540-page catalog, which is excellent but heavy, is best not lugged around town.) At a comfortable pace, you can see most everything on foot in a day and a half, although some works (such as the Serra) are far afield and require a taxi or bicycle to get to.

The show’s knockout work is Hans Haacke’s “Location Merry-Go-Round,” a bracingly sarcastic response to a 1909 war memorial in a leafy public park. The memorial, which commemorates three 19th century wars waged by Bismarck, the “Iron Chancellor” who unified Germany, is a huge stone cylinder ringed by a parade of classical figures. Sculptor Bernhard Frydag chiseled a nationalist dedication into the monument’s base, celebrating “the reestablishment of the Reich.”

Adjacent to the monument Haacke built a same-size cylinder from roughhewn wooden planks, gaily topped by coiled barbed wire. Through cracks in the wooden walls of this makeshift prison you can glimpse an antique German merry-go-round, which spins amid dancing lights while madly blaring a militaristic calliope tune.

Haacke’s noisy sculpture jabs a finger in the eye of complacency, insisting that a heart of darkness always beats inside a culture’s soul, regardless of efforts to deny, romanticize or even contain it. His pushy piece couldn’t be more different from Rebecca Horn’s nearby installation, “The Contrary Concert,” which sentimentalizes a similar motif.

Inside a ruined tower used for centuries as a prison and torture chamber, Horn installed flickering electric candles, perpetually tapping hammers, an ostrich egg precariously balanced between metal points, a pool that collects dripping water and other such elements. The building’s once powerful but mute historical testimony of human horror is given kitschy voice by these additions, which transform it into a kind of awful fun house. Made for 1987’s “Sculpture Project,” this popular work has unfortunately been dedicated as a permanent public piece.

Another ruined battlement, this one from the 12th century, is the site for Diana Thater’s beautiful, fragmented video installation, “Broken Circle.” Climbing the narrow wooden stairs to the stone tower’s five cramped levels brings you to various video projections, which show distorted bits of a videotape of a herd of running horses. The accumulated pieces of the picture combine and recombine in your memory but never really add up--even when the ostensible “natural wildness” of the imagery is revealed to have been wholly staged for a Hollywood-style camera crew.

At a man-made grotto and lagoon not far away, Austrian artist Franz West has installed a hilariously pungent two-part sculptural folly. One part is a horizontal tumescent blob, taller than a standing person and painted bright pink; the other is a colorfully painted pissoir.

Gentlemen are invited to use the pissoir to relieve themselves, while gazing dreamily across the lagoon at the blob--part witty sendup of a reclining nude sculpture in the pastoral manner of Henry Moore, part gigantic phallus gliding across the landscape. For West, manly intervention in the urban sphere has been an absurdist tale of erotic fantasy, conquest and failure, driven onward by the most basic impulses.

In another lagoon, Andrea Zittel has launched 10 “personal islands.” These one-seater icebergs of floating fiberglass--inaccessible because they are anchored in the distance, only to be occupied by the imagination--suggest that desire for solitude is paradoxically amplified in the dense urban world, where no man is an i^le flotant.

Adjacent to a pedestrian bridge, Tony Oursler has rewired an ordinary street lamp so that it talks, its lightbulb flickering brightly to match the speech pattern. Like a knowing outtake of “Candid Camera” (remember the famous talking mailbox?), the sculpture startles unsuspecting passersby with a pleading, vaguely insistent rant about illumination, beauty and losing yourself in the glow.

A very different brand of dreaminess is infused in Ilya Kabakov’s “Looking Up. Reading Words . . . ,” which beckons in a public park. Lying in the grass, you look up at an old-fashioned radio tower, where a poem is written within the antenna’s wire feelers--a poem about lying in the grass and watching the clouds go by. A quiet communication heavenward ensues.

Several sculptures were not complete when the show opened, including works by several of the most promising participants: Jeff Koons (whose 1987 piece was the standout of the second “Sculpture Project”), Richard Deacon, Per Kirkeby.

Also, vandalism has been an unfortunate problem. The pristine pavilion interior at the end of Pardo’s pier, where an elegant cigarette machine is wittily hung on one wall, has been marred with graffiti. Other works have likewise been damaged.

Still, the Munster sculpture show is turning out to be one of the more worthwhile international art events regularly marking the summer calendar. Its evident commitment to allowing artists to guide the process is a simple lesson other venues could profit from.