The City as Subject

Public Art and Urban Discourse in Berlin

Carolyn S. Loeb

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781350258648
• eBook ISBN: 9781350258617
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

In The City as Subject, Carolyn S. Loeb examines distinctive bodies of public art in Berlin: legal and illegal murals painted in West Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s, post-reunification public sculptures, and images and sites from the street art scene. Her careful analyses show how these developed new architectural and spatial vocabularies that drew on the city's infrastructure and daily urban experience. These works challenged mainstream urban development practices and engaged with citizen activism and with a wider civic discourse about what a city can be. Loeb extends this urban focus to her examination of the extensive outdoor installation of the Berlin Wall Memorial and its mandate to represent the history of the city's division. She studies its surrounding neighborhoods to show that, while the Memorial adopts many of the urban-oriented vocabularies established by the earlier works of public art she examines, it truncates the story of urban division, which stretches beyond the Wall's existence. Loeb suggests that, by embracing more multi-vocal perspectives, the Memorial could encourage the kind of participatory and heterogeneous construction of the city championed by the earlier works of public art.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Public Art and the Affirmation of the City
• 2 West Berlin Walls, Street Art, and the Right to the City
• 3 City Spaces: Contemporary Public Sculpture in Berlin
• 4 The Memorial Landscape of the Berlin Wall
• 5 Conclusion: Public Art within an Urban Discourse
• Bibliography
• Index