Highlights from Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017
By Andrew Stooke
Münster, in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, is a worthy contender for the title of bicycle capital of Europe. Visitors heading to the city’s decennial event, Skulptur Projekte, saw bicycles parked or abandoned immediately outside Münster Central Station, a telling sign that the event and city is best experienced on two wheels, and on a leisurely schedule that draws together the project’s more far-flung sites that can only be accessed by traveling long, meandering stretches through its six districts.
The city itself is a lovingly recreated facsimile of an idealized landscape before its original civic center was flattened in wartime air raids. It is not a place where time has stood still, per say, but where it seems permissible for one to shuttle back and forth through the ancient and the modern. It aspires to be a fixed point where the accelerated movements of social, philosophical and political change can reverberate and settle. This small-city environment, coupled with Skuptur Projekte’s occurrence once every ten years since 1977, has formed a wonderful incubator for observing the effects of public sculpture and the durational practices in public art. Previous Projekte classics, such as Bruce Nauman’s photogenic, crator-like Square Depression from the 2007 edition, remain in situ, while several new works in the 2017 edition were installed temporarily but inhabited unusual places, as was the case with Pierre Huyghe’s After ALife Ahead (2017), an archeological dig site teeming with living matter that sprawled across a disused ice rink.
