We are happy to spread the word about a recently published book by one of our own members, Carolyn S. Loeb, Associate Professor Emerita in Art and Architectural History in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University.
In her new book, The City as Subject, Dr. Loeb examines specific bodies of public art in Berlin—murals painted in West Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s, street art and public sculpture from the period after reunification, and the official Memorial to the Berlin Wall at Bernauer Strasse—to explore how public artworks reflect the historical memories of the city even as they enter a broader discourse about how the urban space is inhabited.
Loeb identifies key elements—network, ground plane, and void—present in Berlin public art and memorials. She traces an implicit network, for example, in the memorials to destroyed synagogues found at intervals across the city. She notes the many plaques and commemorative stones embedded at the ground plane; and she observes the varying treatment of interstitial spaces across the city, from the firewalls left standing after the war to the now preserved void left by the Wall at Bernauer Strasse.
Yet this generously illustrated book (with 46 color plates and 34 black and white photos) is more than an explication of public art and memorials in Berlin. Loeb is on a search not only for the layers of history but also for “liberatory possibilities” that can be found among the sites and art objects she examines. She cites Henri Lefebvre, who describes the city as “an oeuvre, a work in which all its citizens participate.” Thus the city as subject of these artworks is also the subject of Loeb’s own inquiry, as she asks: What practices, vocabularies and strategies are employed here? How have materials, structural fragments, and vacant areas been used to reveal history, challenge gentrification, retrieve abandoned spaces, and ultimately, allow urban life to flourish?
— Carolyn Prescott
