Art in Freiburg's Public Spaces

At the end of Red Baron's high school career, the Hamburg educational authorities found money to build a decent school building so I could move out of the "barracks" for his last two years. While the school building was under construction, I was told that 2% of the building costs must be earmarked for art.

During Prof. Martin Flashar's lecture Kunst im öffentlichen Raum in Freiburg, I learned that this law had already been passed in the Weimar Republic and was seamlessly incorporated into the legislation of the Federal Republic.

In Germany, culture is in the hands of the States. Given the ever-mounting construction costs, many States have reduced this obligatory contribution to 1%. 

Some works of "public" art in Freiburg are worth a visit. Prof. Flashar started his lecture with a photo of Olaf Metzel's Double Rolls. The construction reminds me of CERN's BEBC, the Big European Bubble Chamber.

One of the most spectacular objects is the Garden Hose by Claes Oldenburg and his wife Coosje van Bruggen at Eschholzpark:

Lacquered steel

Red Baron frequently passes Ulrich Rückriem's granite obelisk, which marks the intersection of Grünwälderstraße and Augustinerplatz.

New buildings, new art objects. Dennis Oppenheim's extraterrestrials enter Freiburg's Eleven Faculty Microtechnology Building near the airfield. Note that the stone field in the foreground is part of the installation.

Approaching ...

... and intruding ...

... into the building

The installation of Henry Moore's Reclining Figure on the lawn in front of the College Building II in 1961 provoked controversy among Freiburg's citizens and led to rejection by the Catholic clergy.

     

Lively discussions

Moore's sketches

The protests against the sculpture at the time, born of a mixture of prudery and dirty imagination, were completely unfounded. Moore's work was inspired by women who had sought shelter from German air raids by resting in London's Tube while their husbands were either at the front or working in air-raid protection.

  

In 1937, Adolf Riedlin painted his fresco with marching road construction workers in the canteen of the former Freiburg gasworks.

         

After the war, the painting was de-Nazified by painting over the arms greeting with the Hitler salute.

           

Horst Antes's Freiburg Picture, a wall installation, once decorated the back of the city's theater building. The artwork is composed of painted steel plates.

But when a cinema was built on the other side of the street, the viewing distance to appreciate the Cephalopod became too small. The individual panels were removed and stored in the municipal depot. 

Since then, the city has been looking for a suitable place in Freiburg to make the work of art visible again.

A simulation

Recently, the front of the newly constructed parking garage at the University Clinics has been proposed. However, the steel plates cannot simply be hung on the façade because of their weight. Money for an auxiliary construction costing millions is lacking. Hope now rests with the German Kulturfond and the generosity of the coming federal government. 

 Thank you, Prof. Flashar, for your illustrative lecture.

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