Room with a view. Museum Ostwall at the Dortmunder U. Photo Hannes Woidich
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Kurt Wettengl, Director Museum Ostwall at the Dortmunder U. Photo Matthias Oertel
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Spectacular staircase: inside the Dortmunder U. Photo Hannes Woidich
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The Dortmunder U. Photo: Hans-Jürgen Landes
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The Dortmunder U, detail of the facade. Photo: Hans-Jürgen Landes
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Berenice Abbott, Floating Oyster Houses, South Street and Pike Slip, New York, 1931-32. Deutsche Bank Collection
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Beat Streuli, New York, 2002. Deutsche Bank Collection. Courtesy Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich
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Larissa Fassler, from: Regent Street Regent's Park (Dickens thought it looked like a racetrack), 2009. Deutsche Bank Collection. © Larissa Fassler. Courtesy SEPTEMBER, Berlin
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Jakob Kolding, Ohne Titel / Untitled, 2009. © Jakob Kolding, courtesy of Galerie Martin Janda
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Rob Voerman,Thistlegarden #2, 2011. © and Courtesy Rob Voerman
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Change is a
word that comes up again and again in a conversation with Kurt Wettengl,
regardless of whether the topic is art or the city. “What appeals to me is
perhaps being able to make a tiny contribution to changing the mentality in the
Ruhr area,” says the director of the Museum Ostwall in Dortmund. He refers to
his museum as a “power plant,” which, he says, should not only emit impulses,
but also absorb them from the outside, from the reality of the region and the
people who live there.
Stadt in
Sicht. City in Sight is the programmatic title of a show from the Deutsche
Bank Collection on view at the museum this spring. Museum Ostwall is the ideal
venue for the exhibition, which, featuring around 280 works by some 70 artists,
investigates artistic views of various aspects of urban life. It is the perfect
place for the show not because the museum’s exhibition hall on the top floor of
the Dortmunder U commands a view of the entire city but also because the institution
and the director fervently promote dialog between art, architecture, and urban
development.
This is an
extremely pressing issue in the Ruhr area, which has undergone major structural
changes in recent decades, transforming from an industrial region to the home of
a knowledge and service society. In the face of the demise of the coal mines
and the closing of steelworks, the Ruhr area has had to say goodbye to its
industrial monoculture and find a new identity. And this sense of self is
nowhere near as clear as it used to be, when coal and iron coke ruled the day.
Today, nearly 75% of the region’s employed work in commerce, transport, and
research. The expansion of the infrastructure is drawing more and more
companies. Still, the Ruhr area is struggling with shrinking cities, migration,
a rising number of elderly people, and unemployment. By the same token, all of these
problems are creating the opportunity to redefine what “city” means. It is not
enough to attract high-tech firms and groups of companies. Another top priority
is to develop a higher quality of living and new kinds of urban culture.
An emblem
of the new orientation is the Dortmunder U, whose upper floors have housed the
Museum Ostwall since 2010. The “U” stands for the union brewery that was built
in the center of the city in the 1920s and long stood vacant. Once a
dilapidated solitary building in an industrial wasteland, this fortress has
been transformed into a lighthouse, an open house for art, culture, and
science. The spectacular staircase reflects this open attitude. To bring more
light and a greater sense of space to the building, architects removed parts of
the ceilings of all of the floors on the east side. As a result, visitors on
the ground floor now have a view through a vertical opening to the roof, around
64 meters high. The escalators leading up to the museum pass institutions such as
the Hartware MedienKunstVerein (a platform for art and culture), a film club,
and the Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts. Taking the escalator
to the top, you can, beneath glass, steel, and gleaming white, still feel the
spirit of the brewery. “While the hall for temporary exhibitions on the top
floor has a height of 6.5 meters, the rooms on the first floor are only 3.5
meters high,” says Wettengl. “This distinctive architecture is linked to the
statics and production processes of the brewery, because at that time
production was carried out from top to bottom. The storage halls were at the
top of the building, and the lower floors contained the fermentation vats and
filling equipment. At the very bottom, on the ground floor, we again have
another impressively high ceiling. Back then, the draymen could ride in and
load up the barrels here. The concrete brick-clad building was the first high-rise
brewery in Germany.”
With City
in Sight, Wettengl is not engaging with aspects of urban life for the first
time. Even before the move into the Dortmunder U, when the museum was still
located on the Ostwall, he continually ventured down unusual paths. Long before
the Dortmund-based Gerber architectural office won the competition to rebuild
the union brewery, Wettengl presented the architects in his museum. His
condition for an exhibition was that the architects set up a functioning office
in the exhibition space. “They actually ran an office in the museum for ten
weeks, working on designs. Their projects were displayed on the walls, and they
even won two competitions during the exhibition. The audience could see
something being planned that would affect their own lives.”
In the
framework of an exhibition about kiosks, or “Büdchen,” as they are called in
the Ruhr region, the museum director even founded a club: the 1st Kiosk Club,
which is devoted to researching and cultivating kiosk culture. On the club’s
home page there is the “World Wide Kiosk Map” and information about regular
tours. Like the excursions that the museum offers under the slogan Dortmund –
A Place for Us! the tours serve to inspire people to come up with their own
ideas. “The Dadaists offered strolls through cities, and later so did the
Surrealists and the Situationists. The sociologist Lucius Burckhardt further
developed this notion of dérive, or drifting around a city, into promenadology,
the science of walking. You stroll through a part of a city you are not
familiar with, or on the periphery, and vigilantly make observations, take
notes, take photogaphs. In this way, you shift from an unconscious to a
conscious perception of the city, urban space, and architecture. I’m very
interested in this, because it is also something that trains the senses, not in
a museum context, but outdoors.”
City in
Sight transfers the principle of strolling back to the museum. Originally, the
exhibition was to be based on urban sociological categories and urban-planning
considerations, says Wettengl. But in the end they opted to devote the
exhibition of works from the Deutsche Bank Collection to views of cities from
diverse artistic perspectives. The oldest work in the show is close to home, as
it were. Josef Albers, who was born in Bottrop, a city in the Ruhr area, became
world famous for his paintings of squares. But in his series of lithographs
from 1917, he realistically represents the workers’ housing so typical of the
Ruhr. The most recent work in the exhibition, on the other hand, is a dystopian
vision. Rob Voerman’s Thistlegarden #2 (2011), shows scenery reminiscent of
New York, in which organic, parasitic anti-architecture sprawls amidst angular
high-rises. It is nestled in the city’s only remaining green area like a
gigantic foreign body, heralding the city’s downfall and thus a new era.
A century
lies between these two works. “City” is not only a central motif for artists,
but an experimental field in which people critique, archive, intervene, and
think further. Fears and hopes are projected, utopias and prophecies of doom
conjured up. The exhibition leads through the centuries of cities not only chronologically,
but also based on certain themes. With Otto Dix and George Grosz, the excursion
through city life leads to the nightclubs and cafes of 1920s Berlin, and with
the Iranian photographer Shirin Aliabadi, to the streets of Teheran, where young
women are partying in their cars. Whether Imi Knoebel projects crosses of light onto building walls, the Moroccan artist Yto Barrada photographs new buildings
in Tangier as though they were sculptures, or Dayanita Singh makes illuminated streets
look like neural pathways, the exhibition shows how artists distort,
aestheticize, and intervene in the city.
At the end
of the exhibition are visions and utopias “which send the audience home,” as Wettengl
puts it. They include the futuristic designs of Buckminster Fuller, who in the
era of the Cold War dreamed of a more social world, and of the young Dane, Jakob
Kolding, who, like Alice in Wonderland, shows us a different reality behind
modernist satellite cities. “City in Sight” not only means seeing the city from
new perspectives. The title of the exhibition in the Dortmunder U also suggests
that we are on a journey toward the future of cities. Where this journey is
heading, the exhibition shows, depends not least on whether each individual
seizes the opportunity to help shape the city of tomorrow.
Oliver Koerner von Gustorf
City in
Sight - From Feininger to Gursky
Works from the Deutschen Bank Collection
Museum Ostwall at the Dortmunder U
April 20 – August 4, 2013
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