080026 EX Kunst in Wien: Contemporary Public Sculpture (2021W)

As the role of monumentality, the question of passive viewership, the display of heroism, and the function of figuration in public sculpture were addressed with renewed urgency in the wake of the Second World War, what Rosalind Krauss has called “the logic of sculpture” began to fail. Sculpture was no longer compatible with the logic of the public monument – and vice versa. Each began to trouble the expectations of the other in productive and surprising ways. This excursion looks at the relationship between sculpture, monument, and “counter-monument” on the basis of examples of contemporary public sculpture in Vienna.

Required weekly readings and on-site analyses will focus on issues related to site-specificity and temporality, materiality and dematerialization, and the role of (anti)figural representation in public sculpture. How do works of public sculpture set out to activate spectators, crystalize the past, provoke reaction, or even efface themselves? Do they succeed? We will trace the intersections of art historical concerns with memory culture, which offers a rich perspective on the transformation of the form and role of commemorative public sculptures, in particular after 1945 and after 1989.

Meetings will be discussion-based. Students will leave this course with the resources to articulate and write art historical interpretations rooted in attentive descriptions of artworks and contextualized with reference to historical and theoretical scholarship.