Vulnerability is the Thing; The Thing is Vulnerability

Britta Peters, Artistic Director, Urbane Künste Ruhr, invited me to write a text for this book, in celebration of the Emscherkunstweg art commissioning programme in Germany. I chose to focus on the subject of destruction, reflecting on the work of Nicole Wermers and linking my text to my Archive of Destruction.

When the curators of the Emscherkunstweg art commissioning programme began discussions with artist Nicole Wermers about making a new work of art for this post-industrial landscape, conversations about potential damage went on for months, if not years. Will the work invite vandalism? Will that vandalism be more or less likely if we install the work here or there? How can we mitigate against this? What type of materials should we use? The list of questions was endless and easily transferable to any number of other public art commissioning contexts. This road of enquiry inevitably leads to a point where we must address whether what we are making is art or just really well constructed, embattled objects in space.

None of these discussions foresaw the fact that when Emscher Folly by Wermers was finally installed in 2022, it was the birds that wreaked havoc on the work, not the kids. Our feathered friends took apparent joy in pecking the bicycle seats, on the hunt for chunks of foam to construct their nests, defying expectations about who, or what, gets to destroy art. Their interaction necessitated the swift replacement of parts of the sculpture with more durable, less bird-enticing options.

What I’d like to discuss here, in this text, is the important role that destruction plays in art commissioning programmes, and how the vulnerability of a work of art is, in my view, intrinsic to its success. The ability of a work to forge a visceral relationship to its public (by which I mean human and non-human) is what gives it its traction. An artwork installed in the public realm is never a static entity - it is a hot-wire to the ever-changing political, social, and environmental contexts in which it is located, and acts as a catalyst for all sorts of engagement and activity, sometimes disturbing or hurtful, at other times joyful or tender.

A charged example of this ever-shifting, often productive terrain is Robert Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed which was made in the grounds of Kent State University in January 1970. The artist dumped twenty truckloads of soil onto the central beam of an empty shed until the structure began to crack. His aim was for the shed to ‘go back to the land’ and begin a process of ‘slow destruction’. The conceptual thrust of the work radically changed when members of the National Guard shot at, and killed, four unarmed students protesting at the USA’s involvement in the Vietnam War. This shocking, deeply traumatic event was commemorated on Partially Buried Woodshed with the words ‘MAY 4 KENT 70’ painted on the central beam, presumably by a student - forever linking the work of art and the ‘breaking point’ of the shed to the cultural shift that many consider the Kent State shootings to represent in American history. Much to the irritation of the university authorities, the work has assumed a different relation to its audience, shifting from a conversation around entropy to one that critiques the prevalence of American imperialism, and proselytises the importance of protest and civil defiance.

For public artworks that are destroyed by violent and disturbing aggressors, there may too, be scope for things reborn. When the queer bodies of Nicole Eisenman’s temporary public fountain in Münster were defaced with a Swastika and other offensive imagery in September 2017, the day before Germany elected a far right party to the Bundestag for the first time since World War II, the outrage and upset was palpable. The commissioner (Skulptur Projekte Münster) and the artist were thrown into a press frenzy that stirred up scepticism around contemporary art and its ability to forge a meaningful relation to its public. A group of local women worked with Eisenman to devise an ambitious plan to make a new -permanent - iteration of the work. This grass-roots activity has resulted in the creation of an on-going dialogue with the people of Münster about their city, the role of art in society, and the importance of constructing inclusive spaces for all citizens. In this case, as in many others, destruction became a kind of gathering action in which a space is opened up for the creation of a work that forges a more expansive, powerful relation to the world.

Artworks that have remained untouched for years can become lightning rods for the expression of public emotion at a particular moment in history. The rationale of a work may be unpalatable in a different era (as we have witnessed with the recent wide-spread dismantling of racist, colonial, and patriarchal monuments installed in cities across the world throughout the 19th and 20th centuries), or societal conditions can create a situation in which a work is just used in a different way. Tadashi Kawamata’s Walkway and Tower (2010) remained on site in Emscher largely untouched until the Covid pandemic hit in 2020 and the desire to meet friends, flee the house, and forge relationships became urgent, particularly amongst the young. This twelve-metre high wooden observation point with accompanying walkway was explicitly designed by the artist to reflect the passing of time and trace marks of human interaction, which it had done movingly for ten years. However, during lockdown, the sculpture became a hangout for young people to meet illicitly, and inevitably, evidence of their presence was left in the form of discarded bottles, litter, and tagging. Things came to head when a fire broke out, presumably the result of an ill-fated BBQ, and the was temporarily closed. Exasperating, no doubt, for other visitors, as well as the sculpture park commissioners and the maintenance team, but this is artwork as public service – a vital, live, usable entity that reflects and provides for any given moment in time.

This commitment to the acceptance of the fallout of destruction is, of course, problematic in all sorts of ways and is vehemently contested within the visual art infrastructure. Destruction, after all, is the ‘antithesis of the process of making’ - it works against our understanding of what it means to create. More prosaically, but no less powerfully, it is also a threat to the machinery of the market which dictates that the value of an artwork is dependent on its status as a static, unchanging, sellable thing.

Beyond these powerful obstacles, there is the emotional impact of destruction. Many artists and commissioners describe a deep sense of failure and shame at seeing their work interacted with in such a way, on a public stage. The scepticism aimed at contemporary art by hard-core traditionalists, often stirred up by the media, serves to fuel this anxiety. ‘The emperor has no clothes’ they seem to say – ‘see how the artists in their ivory towers are unable to communicate with the masses!’ It is only in laying bare this complex set of emotions and broader societal issues that we can begin to carve out a space where taking risks and allowing for the unknown becomes an intrinsic part of all commissioning process.

The Emscher region has a gnarled and problematic history that is born of extraction, pollution, and destruction. This is reflected in the rough-and-ready post-industrial aesthetic of the landscape, one which refutes a bucolic idea of the past and grapples with the responsibilities of the future. I like the idea that this commitment to veracity and fearlessness continues to be expressed in the artworks that are installed in the landscape - artworks which recognise that risk, vulnerability, and potential failure are an intrinsic part of what we call art.