Total work of art Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg

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Joseph Beuys

The Gesamtkunstwerk Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg was a project planned by Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) as part of the City-Nature-Sculpture competition initiated by the City of Hamburg in 1983 . It was designed as an emergency rescue for the destroyed Altenwerder district and the rinsing fields piled up there with toxic Elbe silt . At the same time it was supposed to initiate a process of radical transformation of the entire Hamburg city-state. Due to a veto by the then mayor Klaus von Dohnanyi , the project was stopped in July 1984 and not implemented.

background

In May 1983 Joseph Beuys, along with other artists, was invited by the City of Hamburg's cultural authority to design a work of art for an urban area of ​​his choice in the City - Nature - Sculpture competition . This competition, endowed with DM 400,000, was part of the Art in Public Space program , which had replaced art in buildings in Hamburg in 1981 . A suggestion was sought that would supplement the design in the outdoor area with clear social references. Beuys had chosen the location of the controversial sink areas in Hamburg-Altenwerder for his project proposal. This district, a former fishing village, was forcibly evacuated and demolished after a Senate decision in 1973. From 1979, its southern part was used to deposit dredged Elbe silt, and the city of Hamburg annually deposited around 2.5 million cubic meters of Elbe sand, which is highly contaminated by cadmium , lead , mercury and other heavy metals and industrial toxins. On the one hand, this was more economical than disposal, but it contaminated large areas and endangered the groundwater.

The St. Gertrud Church in Altenwerder

The forced relocation of the residents, the complete demolition of the traditional fishing village (only the church and the cemetery remained as relics) and the destruction of the natural area with simultaneous high environmental pollution and incalculable health risks had led to massive protests by the population since the early 1970s. Joseph Beuys took a critical look at this clear priority of port and economic policy over environmental and social issues as the “greatest ecological problem in Hamburg” with his project draft of the “Gesamtkunstwerk Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg”. In July 1984 he was awarded the contract by the cultural authority, implementation was planned for autumn 1984.

vision

In his project outline, Beuys problematized the crisis of the traditional concept of art, especially in the outdoor area, “where it has largely degenerated into an external beautification and decoration technique”, and combined this with a criticism of the social design deficit in the face of impending environmental disasters. His proposal was based on the expanded concept of art of social sculpture that he had developed , which called for a radical reorientation in society as a whole. Accordingly, design encompasses all areas of human creativity, including the development of living and working conditions. The aim must be to create an ecological work of art out of shared responsibility. The project was the vision of a holistic action that reconciles the social contradictions between economy and nature in order to cope with the existing environmental problems. It was intended to initiate and drive a redesign of the entire Hamburg city-state with an ecological orientation in politics, administration, representation and outdoor space, which is exactly what the title of Gesamtkunstwerk Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg is called.

Project

The work itself had both an aesthetic and a political dimension. In direct action, Joseph Beuys wanted to throw a roughly ten hundred pound heavy, worked basalt column from his series The End of the 20th Century (1982–1983) on the sink fields , the sand of this "agricultural area that has become desert" should first be filled with seeds from fast-growing plants be mixed. This action was intended as the symbolic prelude to a process of change to be initiated: the basalt as an expression of solidified energy, its processing with lead as an indication of environmental pollution, the dropping should then be the impetus for rethinking, the seeds that are distributed by the force of a drop to transform the “death zone” into an “art zone”. The symbolic act, which Beuys wanted to bring to the public with his celebrities, was to be followed by the concrete intervention in the site as a kind of emergency aid by planting selected, suitable trees, shrubs and grasses that would have been able to deposit harmful deposits bind and at least delay further seepage into the groundwater. He established a direct connection here with his 7000 oak project for documenta 7 in 1982 in Kassel.

Excerpt from the 7000 oak project in Kassel

The political dimension of the project should be developed in parallel and from the aesthetic action, be a complex and long-term social process. As a point of contact for a forum, an office was to be set up in downtown Hamburg in which, in a permanent discourse, similar to the later-developed form of the round table , politics, administration, environmental associations, companies, university faculties and cultural representatives were involved in an ecologically oriented redesign of the entire city-state Driving Hamburg forward. For this purpose, the budget of the competition of 400,000 DM was to be brought into a foundation as a basis and continuous funding ensured. Beuys wanted to pay the cost of the aesthetic aspect, i.e. the basalt drop and planting, privately.

After the announcement of the award of the competition for this project to Joseph Beuys by the then Senator for Culture Helga Schuchardt , a two-week press polemic began in Hamburg. The then first mayor Klaus von Dohnanyi then publicly declared that the project was not art, vetoed the decision of the cultural authority on July 24, 1984 and ended the further development of the total work of art. A culturally conservative decision was put forward in order to enforce what Beuys had attacked with the project, namely economic priority over cultural, environmental and social aspects.

reception

Within the exhibition Everything in Flow. A panorama of the Elbe , which was on view in the Altona Museum from November 6, 2007 to June 6, 2010 , became an extensive documentation of the total work of art Freie und for the first time in Hamburg more than 23 years after the veto and 21 years after the artist's death Hanseatic City of Hamburg shown. In a critical review, the rejection was seen as an unworthy provincial farce, but also understood as a clear sign of how far art can have an impact in the political arena. Joseph Beuys' radical idea anticipated the insight "which today recognizes social, economic and ecological problems as a network of effects in the realpolitical guiding concept of integrative sustainability".

Another reception took place in the so-called iba sommer wilhelmsburg in 2008. In preparation for the International Building Exhibition (IBA) Hamburg 2013, the public and cultural work was under the motto Nature - Culture . Part of the documentation of the total work of art was exhibited in the associated central archive of the arts , in the building on the Vehring Canal called “Tonne”. Thus the diverse current art projects had to make a comparison with the utopia and radicalism of the Beuys project.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Dirck Möllmann: Political Landscape Elbe. “The total work of art Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg” by Joseph Beuys , in: Alles im Fluss. A panorama of the Elbe , catalog for the exhibition of the same name at the Altona Museum for Art and Cultural History, Hamburg 2006, ISBN 3-927637-49-1 , p. 63.
  2. ↑ Hamburg cultural authority: Joseph Beuys “Gesamtkunstwerk Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg” 1983/84 ( Memento from June 14, 2006 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on December 6, 2012.
  3. ↑ See above all the publication: Silvia Gauss: Joseph Beuys Gesamtkunstwerk Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg 1983/84 , FIU-Verlag, Wangen 1995.
  4. ↑ See Der Spiegel 30/1984 of July 23, 1984, p. 137 f .: Beuys im Schlick . In: Der Spiegel . No. 30 , 1984, pp. 137 ( online - 23 July 1984 ).
  5. ^ Dirck Möllmann: Political Landscape Elbe. “The total work of art Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg” by Joseph Beuys, p. 65.
  6. ↑ kunst-und-kultur.de Museum database: Altonaer Museum - Everything in flux. A panorama of the Elbe , accessed on August 24, 2014.
  7. ^ Dirck Möllmann: Political Landscape Elbe. “The total work of art Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg” by Joseph Beuys, p. 65.
  8. ↑ Heike Breitenfeld: Impressions of an art tourist - or how beautiful is Wilhelmsburg , thing-hamburg, December 21, 2008: Archive The Thing, Hamburg , accessed on December 6, 2011.