The museum is still too tight. Despite the critics about the institution „Museum“, which determines artistic workings since the 1960s, the contemporary art production is still likely to conform to the dimensions and demands of Musial premises. Big shows are attracting masses, showing art, which is achieving simultaneously the highest prices on the “secondary art market” . These prices are quite often neither living up to the art nor to the visitor. But are these reasons enough to threaten a museum with an explosion?
In spite of all critics the museums perform the task of archiving and conserving art (history), they procure art and represent a cultural fund, of which everybody draws from, museum-visitor or not. With the value of the museums, the art, only getting obvious when almost lost, does the reflex of outrage really get followed by opposition? Or didn‘t the museums already get stealthily bombed before?
Can they still achieve the noble aim of “building and teaching” of the early 19th century or are they becoming scenery for show openings with event character?
Is it even good art that is shown today, artworks of the “artistic elite”, as Beuys said and with which he meant nothing less than the highest quality ?
The Museum ‘Hamburger Bahnhof’ in Berlin is now showing within the exhibition festival „Der Kult des Künstlers” (The Artist’s Cult) a comprehensive show about artwork and effect of the artist Beuys within a museum’s widest ranged context. Objects of stone, fat and felt of the Erich Marx Collection, audiovisual media of the Joseph Beuys-Media-Archive, added by writings and movies - and there is still only a part of his works that fits into the museum, since, according to him, art should happen everywhere.
In terms of Beuys’ concept of Social Sculpture (‚Soziale Plastik‘) society as a whole was to be regarded as one great work of art (the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk) for which everybody should take responsibility and to which one can contribute creatively. The artist group Artists Anonymous takes its part of artists’ stewardship and adjoins to the exhibition its interference „The Fictive Explosion of the Museum’s Construction”.
Starting point is the floor plan of the former Hamburger Bahnhof, the train station which has been transformed into a museum for contemporary art in 1966. Conveyed as negative oil painting on a big picture carrier out of wood, it represents a Blue Print, concept and originator for the mind structure of the intervention. The painting is cut into many small rectangular tags, of which some are inconspicuously fixed in every room. They remind us of information signs of gas and water suppliers on the streets indicating their coordinates. Contrary to the information in the exhibition’s explanatory text – that the tags are marking the most efficient detonation points – one always end up, according to them, in the centre of the room. The visitor is brought into the centre point. He is needed. We are the revolution.
Beuys pleaded in the 1970s for a „Museum in Motion“, which was meant to contribute in form of a ‚permanent meeting‘ to the creation of a dialogue between people and art and meant to strengths the awareness of individual responsibility . In this idea Artists Anonymous create a room within their installation to be able to let the visitors discuss immediately after the exhibition’s attendance. Slowly it becomes obvious: nobody has the intention to explode anything. It’s more the question of implementing the extended art term, Social Sculpture, formulated by Beuys and renewed with emphasis by Artists Anonymous.
Like this, the claim of responsibility becomes a declaration of love. To the contemplator, who doesn’t instruct but gets deliberated from his anxious sign reading. To the observer, who this is all about and who should actively participate in the construction process of society. To the museum, which has been criticised for decades and still always tries to change. A love declaration to artists who are usually critical towards institutions, like Daniel Buren. He placed 1980 his famous striped marks into the city of Lyon and quarried with it political and social statements which had no room in a museum . „Making points“: yesterday outside, inside today. It is a commitment to the “outside”, the “forest of signs”, the street, a further field conquered by art. Artists Anonymous bring it back into the museum with their „GASAG"-tags. Even back to the art, which happens to be hopelessly superficial oh so often and still can have an explosive impact. And to Joseph Beuys, who placed the fuse at the disposal.
 

Text: Katharina Helwig
(Translation german into english: Deborah J. Kreuser)