WTF Copyright! Photomurals At The Louvre

Revs & Cost in le Louvre !
Good grief. When McDonald’s in the Louvre made a giant photomural wallpaper from a Jake Dobkin photo of REVS & COST tags, which was included in a Hugo Martinez book, did they bother to ask either REVS or COST or Hugo or Jake for permission? No, of course not.
They just licensed the images from the French publisher, which actually didn’t have reprint rights to license. And the whole thing appears to have been settled for $800, or approximately two hours of Patrick Cariou’s lawyer’s time.
Revs & Cost in le Louvre [ekosystem’s flickr via c-monster]

Hotel Palenque Street View

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I’ve been meaning to post more about this for months, but now I’m glad I waited. In January curator/writer Pablo Leon de la Barra posted Google Street View photos of the Hotel Palenque on his blog, Centre For The Aesthetic Revolution.
I need to put a [sic] after basically every word in this sentence, but it’s pretty jarring to see a place you know only from an old artwork alive and well and part of the real world. Hotel Palenque was supposed to be a white man’s fictional, archeological non-site, not an actual site, where people stay when they come to town, and certainly not a real, surfable place on Google Street View.
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But this is all precisely de la Barra’s point, too. He originally Googled the hotel because he was preparing a text on Jonathan Monk’s Color Reversal Nonsite with Ensuite Bathroom [2009, above] for the Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City. Monk’s work is a mirrored replica of the Hotel Palenque sign, only upside down and backwards, as it would be loaded in a slide projector.
Just as the entropy of development means that once-remote earthworks are now tourist attractions on the GPS grid, de la Barra lays out how Smithson’s exoticized, Yucatan jungle ruin/playground is now more fully recognized as someone else’s [sic] home turf. And while it may be surprising to hear that Smithson’s Hotel Palenque was only presented for the first time in Mexico in 2005, it should surprise no one to learn that Smithson sounded like a drunken gringo.
REVISITING HOTEL PALENQUE THANKS TO GOOGLE MAPS [centre for the aesthetic revolution]
HOTEL PALENQUE IS ELSEWHERE: ON JONATHAN MONK’S HOTEL PALENQUE SIGN’ A TEXT BY PLB IN RUFINO MAGAZINE
Hotel Palenque, 15 Avenida 4 de Mayo on Google Maps [google maps]
Previously: non-site non-art, Smithson’s Hotel Palenque
Visiting Artist: U of U lecture on Smithson

On Size Matters

And speaking of Richard Serra. I can’t figure out how James Meyer’s 2004 Artforum essay on the problematics of size in contemporary sculpture got by me until now. It ends too soon, but it’s pretty great.
Beginning with the overwhelming Tate Turbine Hall pieces by Olafur Eliasson and Anish Kapoor, Meyer retraces the history of sculptural size and scale, and how minimalism’s supposedly non-anthropic form was still keyed to the human viewer’s presence. And how post-minimalist folks like Tony Smith and Richard Serra got into, basically, a size arms race, which manipulated the spatial power and experience of the institution instead of critiquing it or fostering self-aware perception. [I’m collapsing a whole lot here. It’s really worth a read.]
Anyway, I mention it now for two reasons, the first being that Meyer begins his history with the 1940s and Abstract Expressionist murals:

SCALE ENTERS THE DISCUSSION of postwar art within the context of Abstract Expressionism. The development of the mural canvas by the late 1940s introduced a bodily scale into painting–a scale that was variously described as one sustained between the painter and the work and between the viewer and the work; on one hand, a phenomenology of making, and on the other, one of perception. Jackson Pollock famously spoke of his drip method as a means to “literally be in the painting.” Mark Rothko noted that he painted “large pictures … precisely because I want to be very intimate and human.” Mural scale was seen as an antidote to the easel scale of Cubism and Surrealism and the illusionism this embodied. As Pollock observed in the same statement. “The tendency of modern feeling is towards the wall picture or mural.”

Which means postwar sculpture and space becomes yet another aspect of the photomural’s history and influence I have to look into.
The other, bigger [sic] reason, though, is Meyer’s articulation of size-ism and awe-based exhibition experience. His is one of the few strongly argued critiques of otherwise-sacrosanct subjects like Richard Serra’s giant torqued sculptures and the museums that fit it, particularly Dia:Beacon and the Guggenheim Bilbao:

Having demanded and inspired the enlarged spaces that museum directors and trustees find it so necessary to proffer, Serra’s sculpture has become the contemporary museum’s major draw, an attraction of sufficient size and impact.

satelloon in the grand palais, mockup with serras
This challenge to the pervasive art world conflation of size, significance, and permanence is basically the context out of which I hatched my own idea to exhibit a Project Echo satelloon in an art space. The problem being, of course, that since all the world’s biggest, newest museums were built to accommodate Richard Serra sculptures, there are less than five venues that could actually show a 100-foot diameter spherical balloon sculpture. They’re just as prone to stylistic and functional obsolescence as a 19th century, fabric-walled salon.
Of course, the real problem is I hadn’t read it, and I really should have.
No more scale: the experience of size in contemporary sculpture, James Meyer, Artforum Summer 2004 [findarticles]

Linked Hybrid: Steven Holl Rebuilds The World Trade Center In Beijing

holl_linked_hybrid_cityofsound.jpg
So Dan Hill’s posted another of his typically incisive analysis of an urban situation. This time it’s his extended and engrossing account of visiting Linked Hybrid, the massive urban development in Beijing, designed by Steven Holl Architects, which was just opening at the time [late 2009].
holl_hybrid_wtc_cityofsound.jpg
above and top via cityofsound
After being repeatedly shooed away by gun-toting guards from what Holl had pitched as “an open and porous public space,” Hill found his way in, and eventually ended up in the marketing office where there’s this poster of–what to call it without sounding utterly inappropriate? A bombshell? A landmine? A plane flying into a tower?:

More incredibly again, the adjacent wall features another poster of exaggerated Hybrid-like building on an urban skyline, under the phrase:
“Let citizens all over the world gather under the banner of the United States with the spirit of freedom.”
What can this possibly mean in this context? The absorption of the brand of ‘starchitecture’ is easy to see in a culture shifting through the gears of consumer culture, but of the brand of the United States?

That’s no moon. It’s the proposal for Memorial Square, the World Trade Center site put forward in 2002 by Holl, Charles Gwathmey, Richard Meier, and Peter Eisenman, or as they called themselves at the time, the Dream Team.
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Memorial Square, 2002, “Dream Team,” image via renewnyc.org
At the time–the day after the unveiling, actually, at a screening of my short film, Souvenir (November 2001), which was followed by Etienne Sauret’s incredible documentary short, The First 24 Hours–I recognized the form the Dream Team was proposing as a gargantuan evocation of the fragments of the World Trade Center’s facade.
They denied the reference, even as they awkwardly argued and edited around it on the Charlie Rose Show. But I think it’s self-evident. Anyone wanting to argue otherwise to me should read those two posts and the links within first. Then I’ll tell you my story about asking Eisenman about it face-to-face.
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What’s fascinating now, though, in rewatching that Charlie Rose episode, is not the Dream Team proposal’s basis in the wreckage of the World Trade Center, but its multiple similarities to Holl’s Linked Hybrid.
eisenman_muschamp_wtc.jpg
Holl and Meier especially discussed the Memorial Square proposal as primarily a public space, one which is entered from the city by “multiple portals.” Holl even calls the structure a “hybrid.”
While the Team took great pains to deny the proposal had any “signature” style, I would speculate otherwise. The overall concept of structure capturing “a moment” in history and memory comes from Eisenman’s proposal [above] for Herbert Muschamp’s WTC charette.
dream_team_wtc_rose1.jpg
Meanwhile, the form is Holl’s, as is the idea that its entire surface would glow at night on one face. The rendering resembles nothing so much as the skyscraper cousin to Holl’s residence for the Swiss ambassador to Washington.
Dan Hill makes a persuasive critique of the simultaneous successes of Linked Hybrid as a structure and its failure as the open urban experience Holl envisioned. And it’s tempting to take comfort from afar and tut-tut the clunky shortcomings of Chinese modernization. But
are the urban and sociological failures of Linked Hybrid really any better or worse than the manipulated politicized mess that Daniel Libeskind’s World Trade Center plan has wrought?
I think the more sobering path is to recognize the remarkable extent to which Holl succeeded in realizing his Dream Team’s proposal for downtown Manhattan in Beijing–and to acknowledge that, there but for the grace of George Pataki go we.
Linked Hybrid’s marketers invite “citizens all over the world [to] gather under the banner of the United States with the spirit of freedom.” But on this day, when citizens all over the world gather to protest the continued imprisonment of Ai Weiwei, the co-creator [with Swiss architects Herzog & deMeuron] of the China’s most famous public building, the Bird’s Nest Olympic stadium, can we really say “our” public sphere is superior, or even free?
Architecturally speaking, at least, we are all New Yorkers now, and Beijingers, too.

[2018 UPDATE: In 2018 The New York Times reports that five women who worked with Meier, either at his firm or as a contractor, have come forward to say the architect made aggressive and unwanted sexual advances and propositions to them. The report also makes painfully clear that Meier’s behavior was widely known for a long time, and that his colleagues and partners did basically nothing to stop it beyond occasionally warning young employees to not find themselves alone with him. This update has been added to every post on greg.org pertaining to Meier or his work.]

The Satelloons Of Buckminster Fuller

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You know, every once in a while, I think that it’s crazy to be considering satelloons as art instead of what they really were–aestheticized objects designed to be seen and exhibited.
And then I’ll catch a glimpse of Expo 67 somewhere, and realize I’m still well inside the bubble.
A still from The World of Buckminster Fuller, which is on DVD, available at Amazon, not ubu.com, why would it be?
Previous Expo67 posts:
not that anyone asked, but here’s Fuller’s own idea for the US Pavilion
on the American Painting Now show, organized by Alan Solomon
the Canadian fracas over Barnett Newman’s Voice of Fire
Forgot how much I loved writing this post on art protestor/greenhouse owner John Czupryniak’s Newman knockoff, Voice of the Taxpayer
Expo 70 design finding the Expo 67 Pavilion hard to beat

Dwelling For Seclusion, By Observatorium

observatorium_1.jpg
I’m trying to remember what made me think of this. I’m coming up blank.
In 1995, Geert van de Camp, Andre Dekker and Ruud Reutelingsperger decided to work together to create space which facilitated longer-term contemplation. They called their collaborative Observatorium.
observatorium_2.jpg
In 1997, they set up their second Observatorium structure– in this case, a small, modernist house-like space made mostly of plywood bookshelves–at Snug Harbor Cultural Center on Staten Island. You could arrange to stay in it for 24 hours, a day and a night. It was like Rirkrit’s apartment replica at Passerby, but only for one person at a time. Like De Maria’s Lightning Field, only turned inward, for communing with an interior landscape.
observatorium_axon.jpg
Somewhere over the years, I’d gotten it in my head that the Observatorium was by another Rotterdam-based collective, Atelier van Lieshout, and I’d periodically try unsuccessfully to find it again.
Here is the Observatorium website [observatorium.org]
And their blog. [observatoriumrotterdam.blogspot.com]
Look, they’re at the Marin Headlands now, organizing a residency/workshop to address the use of the old Fort Barry Gymnasium building. [opentotheelements.wordpress.com]
They have a new book: Observatorium: Big Pieces Of Time [6 to 9 weeks?]

On The 2nd Through 8th Tatlin’s Monuments To The Third International

tatlin_tower_1920.jpgSo I’m slowly making my way through the 35-page press release [!! those were the days, right?] for MoMA’s 1968-9 exhibition, “The Machine As Seen At The End Of The Mechanical Age,” which included a long-lost, recently stumbled-upon in a Tempe, Arizona shed, Dymaxion Car, and curator Pontus Hulten’s freshly researched and replicated magnum opus, a life-size model of Vladimir Tatlin’s 1920 Monument To The Third International. Some choice excerpts on the remaking of:

Work was based on only four photographs (a crucial one was discovered during the process), a few drawings, some written descriptions and information from the sole living assistant of Tatlin. Troels Andersen, Ulf Linde and Per Olof Ultvedt of the Stockholm Academy of Art prepared a small wooden working model. From this, carpenters Arne Holm and Eskil Nandorf built the reconstruction, which is 15 feet 5 inches high, about the same size as Tatlin’s.
The research and reconstruction took about a year. The tower was first exhibited in the Tatlin show at Moderna Museet in Stockholm last summer. It was shipped to the United States in nine crates and reassembled by Mr. Nandorf in the Museum Garden.

So many interesting things here. Andersen had been working with T.M. Shapiro, part of a group called the “Creative Collective,” which included Tatlin, who made the first Monument in 1919-20, to document and resuscitate [to use Nathalie Leleu’s term] the neglected/suppressed history of the Russian Avant-Garde. In the catalogue, Hulten wrote, “For the first time, it seemed possible that an artist-engineer materializes the synthesis of architecture and sculpture.”
Leleu took a detailed look at contemporary curators’ use of refabrications and replicas; the excerpt dealing with reconstructions of Tatlin’s Monument was published in 2007 by Tate Papers.
She notes how Hulten was “a major protagonist in at least two of these reconstructions,” the first at Moderna Museet in 1968, and then at the Pompidou in 1979 for his historic show, Paris-Moscow. The Paris model was substantially different from the Stockholm model, Leleu writes, in part because Shapiro had recovered additional notes and rebuilt a Monument himself in 1975, but also because by 1979, Hulten was able to access original Tatlin materials in Russian museums and archives which had previously been blocked.
tatlin_models.jpg
In fact, because of last-minute denials of key loans by Soviet officials, Hulten’s show in 1968 consisted entirely of reconstructions, which led Hulten to dub his show “conceptual.” As it happens, this whole Tatlin saga and the fabrication of the Monument, was unfolding while the Moderna Museet was showing Andy Warhol’s work–including the Brillo Boxes, which would eventually become the subject of their own refabrication controversy.
It’s almost as if, while showing the dominant, if controversial, figure in American art, Hulten was simultaneously constructing an alternative to the arc of modernist and postwar art history. With an emphasis on the constructing, I guess.
Anyway, after an insurance dispute, the Parisian fabricators ended up making a new, Paris-style Monument for the Moderna Museet, and then consulting, along with Hulten, on the fabrication of additional Monuments in Moscow, one in London, and one in Los Angeles.
Maybe it’s clearer in her fuller paper, but in the Tate excerpt, Leleu refers to a “reconstruction project…in Washington,” which I think is actually the model built by USC Architecture School students for Maurice Tuchman’s LACMA 1980 exhibit, “The Avant-Garde in Russia,” which later traveled to the Hirshhorn.
The Model of Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International: Reconstruction as an Instrument of Research and States of Knowledge [tate papers 2007]

Looking Back [At The Undocumented Richard Neutra House I Found]

Ah, the memories. It was A year ago today that I began searching for a Richard Neutra house that was supposedly built in Utah, a hunting lodge commissioned by a Neutra client in Los Angeles, but which had never been identified or documented.
After charging me $10 for the same one-line info I had already found a half dozen places online, I gave up on the Neutra family/office. Who also wanted me to sign over, for free, all the copyrights for any photos I may eventually take of the house, should I ever actually find it.
Cold-calling the organization that preserves Utah’s historic buildings and architecture for information about the only Neutra house in the state, I was asked by more than one person if this was an April Fool’s prank.
Anyway, since finding, visiting, and publishing the house last year, well, not much, really. That’s fine.
Beckstrand Lodge, 1950

Oh, That’s Right, Philip Johnson Was A Nazi

So I’m searching through the New York Times archive, trying different combinations of keywords to find references to photomurals at the Museum of Modern Art, and I find this intriguing 1934 headline:

TWO FORSAKE ART TO FOUND A PARTY; Museum Modernists Prepare to Go to Louisiana at Once to Study Huey Long’s Ways. GRAY SHIRT THEIR SYMBOL Young Harvard Graduates Think Politics Needs More ‘Emotion’ and Less ‘Intellectualism.’

But the Times’ archives purchasing has been acting up for a few months [it’s not just me, right?], and my 10-pack of articles has been stuck at five since October, so I can’t click through to see who these Museum Modernists are.
And a couple of weeks ago, I could have searched the rest of the internet and not found the answer, but now that Google has added the complete run of Spy Magazine, a search for “Museum Modernists” and “Huey Long” turns up one result: the devastating 1988 Spy article by Michael Sorkin detailing the fascist and Nazi activities of the young Philip Johnson.
I mean, holy crap. Gray Shirt Their Symbol barely scratches the surface. Johnson’s fellow modernist was Alan Blackburn, the Museum’s executive director. As MoMA’s archive puts it, “Both Blackburn and Philip Johnson resigned from the Museum in December of 1934 to pursue outside interests.”
Those interests ranged from donating large sums of money to and founding a youth wing for raging anti-semitic demagogues such as William Lemke and Father Coughlin to spying for the Nazis during the invasion of Poland.
Where was Philip? Spy, Oct. 1988 [google books]
Here’s an image of the Times article and photo. Amazingly vague. [uncommonplace book]

‘Do-It-Yourself Existential Individualism’

Frieze’s 20-year retrospective of itself continues apace, and wow, it’s like running into an old flame on a train platform.
I hadn’t thought about Daniel Birnbaum’s 1996 essay, “IKEA at the End of Metaphysics” in years, but wow, it’s just all flooding back.

From a Heideggerian perspective IKEA best sellers such as ‘Billy’, ‘Ivan’, and ‘System 210’ do not represent a corruption of everyday life, but have merely formalised what is already there; the IKEA catalogue only makes the tendency towards uniformity more conspicuous. Heidegger’s global ‘levelling’ is not a critique of the common forms of everyday life as such, but of their passive acceptance. At the end of metaphysics, levelling is complete – no one questions the catalogue.

Obviously–well, now it’s obvious, anyway–my own Ikea X Enzo Mari mashup project has its origins in the critical perspective of the company and its ideology which Birnbaum mapped out 15 years ago, and which I absorbed.
Also, I’m reminded how I miss Jason Rhoades.
IKEA at the End of Metaphysics [frieze.com/20/ via ronald jones]

How To Make A Giant, Steichen-Style Photomural

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Looking through the installation photos for Road To Victory, Edward Steichen’s 1942 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, I find myself asking two things:
Who took these photos, and how did they make them? [Of course, my real question is usually, Where are they now, which really means, where can I get some? But anyway.]
The first question turns out to be harder to answer than I thought. The MoMA Bulletin for the show states that over 90% of the images are from government agencies, military sources, or wire service/news agencies, but they lack any credit line. It’s slightly amusing that most of the photocredits in the Bulletin turn out to be for the installation photos, not the subject photo murals themselves. If Edward Steichen and Carl Sandburg are the creators of Road To Victory: The Propaganda Artwork, then Samuel H. Gottscho is a rephotographing appropriation artist 40 years ahead of Richard Prince. I’ll have to do some digging for an image checklist in the exhibition’s archives.
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As for how these things were made, though, there is actually a footnote for that. And the answer is surprisingly painterly:

To make the large murals, the negatives were enlarged in sections upon strips of photographic paper forty inches wide. The museum wall was first sized, then covered with a layer of wallpaper, next with one of cloth, and then the photographs were pasted on the cloth by paper hangers. The seams were lightly airbrushed, imperfections were retouched by hand, and finally the whole mural was painted with dull varnish to eliminate the glaring reflections rendered by the surface of photographic paper.

Fascinating. Photo wallpaper? Overpainted photomurals?
While large prints in the show were mounted on boards, and some murals were affixed to freestanding walls and panels, others were applied straight to the museum’s walls. Given the anonymity of the images, I’m going to guess that approximately none of these prints or murals survived the exhibition, much less the war.

The Road To Victory And Beyond

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So in my ersatz zigzagging through the history of photomurals, I kind of skipped from Edward Steichen’s landmark Family of Man exhibition in 1955, where Paul Rudolph deployed enlarged photo prints for content and experience, as well as architectural elements in his exhibition design; to Capt. Steichen’s 1945 exhibition Power in the Pacific, which featured the work of the US Navy photography unit he commanded; to Steichen’s participation in MoMA’s first photography exhibition ever, a 1932 photomural invitational, which was intended to serve as a showroom for American artists, who faced stiff mural competition during the Depression from south of the border.
Sensing a trend here? Wondering what I missed? Wow. Michael from Stopping Off Place just forwarded me the link to MoMA’s bulletin for Road To Victory, a stunning 1942 photo exhibition that rolls up so many greg.org interests, it is kind of freaking me out right now. And the man who is bringing it to me? Lt. Comm. Edward Steichen.
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I mean, I kind of stumbled onto the photomural trail last October, when a vintage exhibition print of Mies’ Barcelona Pavilion came up at auction. Its size, scale, and iconic modernist subject suddenly made the photomural seem like a missing link in the contemporary development of both photography and painting. And yet it’s also seeming like not many of these pictures survived, because they were merely exhibition collateral, functional propaganda material, no more an artwork than the brochure or the press release.
And yet these things existed. Is it possible at all that any of these prints still exist in some art handler’s garage?
Anyway, it’ll take me time to process this Road To Victory show, so I’m just going to skip across the most stunning parts: the show’s awesome, explicit propagandistic objectives; the utterly fresh painterly abstraction of these giant prints; the spatial, experiential design of Herber Bayer’s installation; the texts surrounding the exhibit, which traveled around the country in 1942 to apparently wild, patriotic acclaim; and the ironic, complicating aspects of authorship of the show and the work in it.
[Hint: they barely identify, much less mention the actual photographers at all. I, meanwhile, am happy and grateful to credit PhotoEphemera for these small versions of much larger scans of MoMA’s 1942 documentation of the show. Definitely worth diving into.]

Continue reading “The Road To Victory And Beyond”

La Tour Eiffel Vu En Ballon

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In 1909, balloonist/photographers André Schelcher and Albert Omer-Décugis took this picture from about 50m above the top of the Eiffel Tower. It is one of 40 images they published that year in a book titled, Paris vu en ballon et ses environs.
I just found it in my new Leon Gimpel catalogue, but it turns out to be included in Thierry Gervais’ 2001 article on the beginnings of aerial photography, which I posted about before.
With that angle, I would’ve said Schelcher’s photo looks more Bing than Google Maps, but Google’s got it.
schelcher_eiffel_google.jpg
Previously: Le début du point de vue Google Mappienne

Gerhard Richter Subway Station

It’s hard enough for me to wrap my head around the fact that Gerhard Richter and Isa Genzken were married for 13 years. Now I find out they made a subway station together. A subway station about their relationship.
In a 1993 interview, Hans Ulrich casually asks Richter, “What works of yours exist in public spaces? The Underground station in Duisburg; the Hypo-Bank in Dusseldorf?”
And at first, I’m like, “Oh, right, besides the underground station in Duisburg.” But then when I looked it up, I see that it was only completed in 1992, so the Duisburg Metrocard in Hans Ulrich’s suit pocket probably still had two weeks left on it.
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Anyway, the work seems remarkably undocumented. These are about the only pictures I could find. Genzken and Richter received the commissioned for the König-Heinrich-Platz U-bahn station in 1980. All the pieces of the project seem to be enamel on steel wall panels installed throughout the station.
Genzken made two murals facing each other on the train platform, with arcs from circles with radii of 3 and 5km, which relate to scaled down diameters of certain planets,” according to the Google cache of one mobile travel site.
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Dietmar Elgar’s bio of Richter quotes Genzken’s project statement: “One curve corresponds to the curvature of Mars on a scale of 1:1,000, another curve to VEnus on a scale of 1:30,000.” Elgar then notes these references were “no coincidence. She was alluding to her romance with Richter.” [Richter apparently painted two abstracts, titled Juno and Janus, in response. Which is adorable.]
As for the station, Richter’s abstract mural adorns the west lobby, while in the east station entrance, the couple installed 24 enamel signs with historical facts about Duisburg. Frankly, I’m not feeling it. Maybe if someone were to go to Duisburg and shoot a flickr photoset of the station, we could get a better sense? Bitte-schoen?
Or maybe the thing to do is to stop looking for art, then you can see it. Here are some photos of the station from the web which happen to show some of Richter or Genzken’s works:
duisburg_genzken_raino.jpgfotocommunity.de
duisburg_genzken_rg_team.jpg
by R + G Team Dülmen, via fotocommunity.de
colourful subway
by ati sun via flickr
U-Bahn Kunst [duisburg.de]
Previously: giant Richter triptych commissioned by BMW