City As Subject

"In The City as Subject, Carolyn S. Loeb examines three bodies of public art in Berlin in the postwar and contemporary periods: legal and illegal murals painted on exposed residential firewalls in West Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s, public sculpture created primarily during the decade and a half following reunification, and the official Berlin Wall Memorial. Through careful analysis of these works, Loeb develops a conception of the city as not only shaped by its citizens but capable of connecting Berlin's inhabitants with the past. The three structures in question each represent a distinctive body of public art that has emerged in the city--and beyond their ostensible subjects, they are all embedded within Berlin's specifically urban landscape. These bodies together demonstrate public art's reliance on the city's own forms and materials as a means of visual expression. By considering the history, contexts, subjects, materials, and formal decisions manifested in each work, as well as their relationship to a prevailing climate of citizen activism, this book shows how these bodies of public art present a vision of Berlin that counters today's homogenizing practices, and in doing so each one keeps alive citizen-activists' conversations about the nature of the city that they desire."--