The speech was given by Nora Sternfeld on 28 November 2022 at the Metropolis Cinema in Hamburg to mark the 41st anniversary of Hamburg’s Art in Public Space programme

‘What is can never be justified by what was, no matter what conclusions we draw about the past.” [1] This statement by philosopher Jacques Rancière could be applied to the 41-year period that has passed since the Kunst im öffentlichen Raum (Art in Public Space, hereafter KioR) programme was launched in Hamburg. 41 years of inviting people to gather and debate in public spaces, 41 years of tackling the impossible task of understanding art as something which does not justify what is.

In 1981, under the leadership of Uwe M. Schneede, the then director of the Hamburg Kunstverein (a contemporary art gallery), the Kunst am Bau (Art in Architecture) programme was replaced by the more reflective, interventionist KioR. For many years, and long before 1981 of course, art in urban spaces had served precisely to justify what was. In other words, the power-based relationships of the day. Monarchies and oligarchies, military leaders and bourgeois notions of art. Artists had adorned the city streets and squares accordingly, primarily by creating and erecting statues of powerful white men. These figures who enjoyed such importance, at least in their own lifetimes, were depicted sitting astride horses or standing proud on pedestals, hands on heart or swords drawn. These statues and busts, in marble or bronze, were intended to impress or simply to be there to justify what was, because, as we know from the writings of Robert Musil, most people didn’t give them a second glance.[2]

Perhaps, though, that’s exactly what gave such artworks their ideological, legitimising power. Literally set in stone, they conveyed the message that this is how things are, how they always have been, how they must always be. They were certainly not intended to encourage reflection or pose questions in such a way as to suggest that what is was up for discussion.

By contrast, that seems to have been the driving force behind Hamburg’s KioR programme from its very beginnings. Since 1981, the city authorities and the various KioR projects have accepted the mission impossible of displaying works of art whose precise aim is not to justify what is. The programme’s founding vision was to face the past and move forward in a different way, in the spirit of democratic artistic and cultural processes.

After this speech we’re going to watch Helena Wittmann’s film 41 Jahre Kunst im öffentlichen Raum which looks at various KioR projects installed in Hamburg in the last four decades and hears from some of those involved in creating or commissioning/supporting them. It starts with works that were conceived in the 80s and early 90s, inspired by a particular historical era. One such is Thomas Schütte’s Table with 12 Chairs, installed in the city’s Niendorf district in 1987. After eleven local streets had been named in 1984 after some of the men and women who had served in the resistance against the Nazi regime, Schütte designed a stone-topped round table surrounded by oversized brick-built chairs. Eleven of the chairs bear the name of one of the resistance fighters, the twelfth is left blank. An invitation to take a seat at the table oneself? A marking of absence? We can read the table as an attempt not to justify anything, including the Germany of the 1980s, but to invite the viewer to remember, to join the conversation, to focus on resistance. I could of course also contradict myself and say the table could retrospectively be read as justifying or legitimising in nature: as an elevation of the history of resistance over the history of atrocities; as an over-identification with resistance. But for that, a lot remains open, a lot remains empty. We could discuss it. The questions of endurance and explanation arise here, though, as with many of Hamburg’s sites of remembrance, which often seem empty, abandoned, almost forgotten. We’ve already mentioned the function of invisible monuments raised for purposes of glorification. But what function is served by invisible monuments raised as warnings? How can they not cease to have the intended effect? What challenge is posed to us by their claim not to justify what is? Or, to look at this from a different and more specific angle, how might public art in Hamburg be presented and made accessible to its viewers?

This question has particular relevance to the present state of the Monument against Fascism designed by Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz for the Harburg district of the city. At the time of its installation in 1986, it was a 12-metre-high lead-clad column. A plaque placed nearby bore a text in seven different languages, inviting passers-by to show their support for its anti-Fascist message by writing their thoughts on the column. Over the years, as the space available for new inscriptions was filled, the monument was gradually lowered into the ground.

In 1992, James Edward Young coined the term “counter-monument”, taking the Gerzes’ monument as his main example.[3] It was key to such counter-memorials that they should not pre-empt debate, or replace it with a monumental presence. Instead of lifting the burden of remembering from the German people’s shoulders, their intention was to keep the wound open and the debate going. This resulted in artistic-formal strategies that negotiate between presence and absence. The text on the Gerzes’ plaque, which is all that remains visible now that the column has been fully sunk into the earth, reads as follows:

We invite the citizens of Harburg, and visitors to the town, to add their names here to ours. In doing so we commit ourselves to remain vigilant. As more and more names cover this 12 metre-high lead column, it will gradually be lowered into the ground. One day it will have disappeared completely and the site of the Harburg monument against fascism will be empty. In the long run, it is only we ourselves who can stand up against injustice.[4]

Fair enough, but what if no one stands up against anything, what if the remains of this counter-monument end up completely unnoticed, hidden amid litter bins and puddles somewhere near Harburg Station. This is more or less what has happened to Margrit Kahl’s Synagogue Monument,[5] which was inaugurated on 9 November 1988, the 50th anniversary of the destruction of the Eimsbüttel synagogue on Kristallnacht. Designed as a mosaic on the ground where the building once stood, and echoing its floorplan and vaulted ceiling, it is a marker of absence. It was from the outset, and still is today, meaningful and controversial in equal measure. And yet it goes unnoticed by passers-by on a daily basis.

James E. Young’s text begins by describing another artwork: a large, minimalist sculpture by American artist Sol LeWitt which was installed in the plaza outside Münster Castle (now part of the city’s university) for the duration of the 1987 Skulptur Projekte exhibition. LeWitt’s work, a rectangular cuboid constructed with aerated concrete blocks, was entitled Black Form (Dedicated to the Missing Jews).

Have you seen Black Form? Let’s take a look at its history.[6]

Unlike the “German counter-monuments”[7] that Young goes on to consider, LeWitt’s substantial cuboid is anything but a negative, vanishing form. The artist himself described it as  “ungainly”[8], “hard to swallow”[9] and “antithetical to its site”[10]. Taller than head height and  impossible to grasp visually from any one side, this huge abstract work certainly formed an antithesis to the Neo-Baroque façade of Münster Castle. Having housed the State building department and been home to the local Gauleiter Alfred Meyer during the Nazi era, the castle was almost totally destroyed in bombing raids during the war. After it was rebuilt, it became the main administrative centre of the University in Münster – by 1987 it looked as if nothing had ever happened there. LeWitt’s chosen title, however, specifically draws attention to the fact that something had happened there, by referring not only to the Jewish population of Münster that had been exterminated but also, and most importantly, to the unborn Jewish children, the future generations who might have studied at the University. It was for their sake that he added this title.[11]

As LeWitt himself has said, Black Form is his only overtly political work of art. Its location gave it a discreet political aspect – an equestrian statue of Kaiser Wilhelm I had once stood on the same spot. Designed by Johann Friedrich Reusch and Bruno Schmidt (the architect who also designed the Kyffhäuser Monument, so dear to the Nazis), it was dismantled in 1942 so that its metal could be repurposed for the war effort. It is the title, however, that gives LeWitt’s piece its explicitly political dimension.[12] It turns a minimalist sculpture into a conceptual interventionist work of art, its language becoming a conceptual part of the black form. Implicitly, this artistic-political gesture of clear, unequivocal naming, this highlighting of antithesis, addresses more besides, namely the idea that abstraction itself can be a form of re-education and play a part in countering Fascism. In this respect, the political aspect of this Jewish-American artist’s abstract work installed in front of a new old façade in Germany emerges as a provocation of form. Perhaps that makes Sol LeWitt’s Black Form more of a counter-monument than any of the German examples that Young writes about in the rest of his text. Significantly, Mahnmal, the term used by German artists for their monuments refers not to a confrontational counter-perspective, but rather to a monument’s moral dimension: it’s the idea of warning against repeating the past which underlies the formal strategies of absent presence.[13] By contrast, LeWitt’s Black Form was absolutely and unambivalently present. Or at least it was until the decision was made in March 1988 to demolish the temporary installation. A counter-monument in the truest sense of the word, it had been contentious from the start. It was defaced with graffiti and political slogans and, despite the best efforts of Münster’s progressive faction, no permanent new home in the city could be found for it. That’s when it gained a new lease of life thanks to Hamburg’s KioR initiative, through which it was installed in an enlarged form in the Platz der Republik, outside the Town Hall in the Altona district in 1989. [14] But how many people today know anything about this back story?

Let’s move on to Barbara Schmidt-Heins’s Die eigene GESCHICHTE (One’s own history), a 1992 work which you’ll see Britta Peters discuss in the film. You may well have noticed – I know I have – that she’s one of the few female artists to be mentioned here.[15] One of the ways in which we might understand this work is as a generator of questions. Whose history are we talking about? HISTORY in capital letters points to the many complicated relationships between the Self and history. Who writes history? What is left out? How does history read the Self and the Other? What is the history of German trains? What is history anyway? And what does it have to do with me? Installed at three different points along the Altona-Hamburg railway line, the three identical versions of Schmidt-Heins’s conceptual work are primarily visible from the passing trains. One is on a telecomms building at the Television Tower; the second is located between the Sternschanze and Dammtor S-Bahn stations; and the third is on one of the walls of the Hamburg Kunsthalle, near the central railway station; it can also be seen if you’re on foot from the Ernst Merck bridge and on the wall facing the train tracks at Harburg bus station. It is therefore continuously present in the city, but at the same time only ever seen when you’re on the move.

The ambivalence between presence and absence continued to shape the KioR conversation throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. Here, too, in the context of a post-representative process of dematerialisation, the feeling was that a critical examination of this area should not result in museumisation or petrification – nor in a fossilised justification of what is. With this in mind, Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen, renowned former director of the Hamburg Kunstverein, also addressed the history of public art in Hamburg. He commissioned projects that employed processual forms to draw attention to the apparently ordinary, using experimental approaches to intervene in everyday life. His multi-work Außendienst (Fieldwork) initiative examined the idea of public space from a different angle, considering it not just as what was “out there”, but as an opportunity for human cooperation. The processual had to be translated into the ephemeral. In the film, Britta Peters speaks of the history of KioR and its best moments as “images and experiences that people will never forget”.

Schmidt-Wulffen established a productive channel of cooperation between the Kunstverein and the local department of culture, in the person of Achim Könneke. As a result, the Außendienst project was followed by another one entitled weitergehen (continuing/moving forward). The processual aspect itself continued, in that the project was curated via a close collaboration between the artists and the city authorities, the aim being that art should play its part in urban development. At the same time, the “Right to the City” and “No One is Illegal” movements had introduced artistic politics and political art to the streets of Hamburg. Against this backdrop, KioR found itself working at the interface between art and activism. The “collective wish production” that informed the design of the urban space known as Park Fiction offers a typical example of this, bringing together emancipatory participation, urban activism and reflective artistic practice. Park Fiction provided an urban aesthetic for these collaborative processes – a place to linger, gather and engage with others. Artist Christoph Schäfer was one of the co-creators and driving forces behind the project and continues to work with activist and filmmaker Margit Czenki and others to keep it alive today. This project has been more successful than any other in terms of renewing its artistic interventions and creating a lasting impact. In this case, KioR has created contexts for thinking about space differently, collectively and in a radically democratic way. As it says on the Park Fiction website, referencing the title of Margit Czenki’s film “... wishes will come out of the tower blocks and take to the streets...’.

Sophie Goltz, city curator from 2013 to 2016, continued this process, organising demonstrations with the Silent University – a translocal platform created by artist Ahmet Öğüt to create teaching and learning spaces for refugees – and other initiatives dealing with homelessness, and with the “Right to the City” and “No one is Illegal” movements. An exhibition and other events meanwhile traced the history of the KioR programme. Sophie Goltz took these as a basis for developing proposals about the future of urban art in Hamburg. So what kind of wishes should take to the streets now?

The projects’ strengths can certainly be seen in the fact that over the last 41 years they’ve succeeded – despite the neoliberalisation of cities, the spending cuts in education and art, and the festivalisation of culture, and indeed perhaps by facing up to all these issues – in creating a lasting approach which understands that public spaces need renewal, and that the latter should reflect the age in question. That public spaces need to allow thought and action without seeking to justify what is. This success is remarkable, unusual and special, and can probably only be explained if we remember that, from the very beginning, local councillors and art experts have formed committees and worked side by side, and have done so with seriousness of purpose, intensity and consistency. Contrary to what one might expect, this collaboration has created an ongoing relationship. Newly educated about contemporary art, councils have taken a stand for experimentation and, even when questions were asked, have helped promote ideas that go against traditional forms of urban management and marketing. Many individuals in turn, including the late and much-missed city curator Dirck Möllmann, have supported artists in going against the flow with temporary, imaginative and activism-based projects.

At the same time, and with precise regard to the politics of memory, much has been forgotten, and so that continuity sometimes seems to have been and gone rather than been institutionalised. So what kind of wishes should take to the streets in this specific context?

A historical-political-artistic interrogation of the issue of colonial violence, its legacy in the present and the way it remains symbolically embedded in Hamburg’s urban landscape has been notable by its absence. For far too long, numerous monuments and houses, bridges and sites of remembrance here in Hamburg have justified what is. Meanwhile, as mentioned earlier, many of the historical-political artworks aimed at reminding people of the atrocities of the Nazi era are today, sadly, almost invisible, almost forgotten.

Furthermore, our concept of “publicness” has changed. The development of public spaces in times of increasing privatisation is precarious and sometimes ironic. However, it is perhaps more important than ever. It raises questions about the digital, material and cultural commons, about the formation of collective infrastructures, and also about the possibility of productive disagreements. What kind of public art infrastructures could be established in Hamburg? Or, to put it another way, what kind of infrastructures would not justify what is? How and what might they link together translocally? And how might the conflicts about history in public spaces which still need to be aired in Germany be dealt with publicly?

In conclusion, what is the best way to take things forward and build on the impressive progress made in the first 41 years while embracing the spirit of KioR but perhaps adopting new approaches too? One vision for the future – based on Sophie Goltz’s ideas – is to develop plans for a city institute which would carry out research into urban development but would also work on issues relating to the history of public art in Hamburg. Between institution and para-institution, between the ephemeral and the enduring, a dialectic of experiment and structure could emerge enabling the city to refresh and explore in depth the various impulses and interventions that give public art its public character.

The film we’re going to see now invites us to use this anniversary to take a critical look at the future. While it can’t divine what may happen next, we can all keep these questions in mind as we watch: given its history, what might be the future of Hamburg’s art in public spaces programme? And what infrastructure would we like to see in place that will not justify what is? [16]

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