ATTACK ON ART
Disoriented city planning in Vienna?
The sculpture “Smashed to Pieces in the Still of the Night”, by Lawrence Weiner from 1991 – one of just a few authentic contemporary works of art in the cityscape of the art metropolis Vienna – is intended to give way to a profane, aesthetically expressionless, masking of the tower from the Nazi era.
“This is what is supposed to follow Lawrence Weiner’s manifesto—as far as one can see from the published rendering—it does not even meet the slightest design requirements, let alone the self-consciousness of a “cultural” metropolis.”
Peter Noever’s statement in response to the open letter by the director of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
CAT – Contemporary Art Tower project
With their Contemporary Art Tower project, the planning team NOEVER / MÜLLER / EMBACHER have developed a radically new programmatic strategy that comes up to the complex requirements of today’s artistic productions. CAT suggests to adapt an antiaircraft tower in Vienna’s Arenbergpark built in 1942/43, a memorial to never forget the Nazi regime and its war, to an international center of contemporary art. After intense study of the CAT project, Jenny Holzer (New York) and James Turrell (Flagstaff/Arizona) have worked out artistic interventions for the site. The CAT project was presented under the title “heaven’s gift” – an exhibition shown in Moscow, New York and Berlin.
