Public offering: Elizabeth Schambelan talks with the curators of Skulptur Projekte Munster '07

EVERY TEN YEARS, sculpture's still-expanding field maps itself across a particular geographical terrain: the streets of Munster, Germany, where Skulptur Projekte Munster was inaugurated in 1977. The show, which brings together a diverse array of practitioners to create projects throughout the city, is at once a kind of think tank for considering the relationship between art and the public sphere, and an ambitious state-of-the-medium report. Two projects from this year's lineup--Bruce Nauman's Square Depression, 1977/2007, an "inverted pyramid" incised into the lawn of the city's Institute of Sciences, and Dora Garcia's production of John Gay's Beggar's Opera, staged so as to be "barely distinguishable from real life"--suggest the broad continuum that the exhibition will traverse. Staking out various points along it are some thirty-five artists, including well-known figures (Pawel Althamer, Isa Genzken, David Hammons, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Mark Wallinger) and less familiar ones (Nairy Baghramian, Guy Ben-Ner, Maria Pask). In conversation, the organizers--Brigitte Franzen, curator of contemporary art at the Westphalian State Museum of Art and Cultural History in Munster; Carina Plath, director of the Westfalischer Kunstverein, also in Munster; and Kasper Konig, director of Cologne's Museum Ludwig and a founding curator of Skulptur Projekte--cited the radical oeuvre of one participant, underground eminence Gustav Metzger, as a conceptual fulcrum of sorts. Beyond that, they hesitated to posit overarching affinities or trends, refraining from imposing lines of demarcation on the varied artistic topography they seek to survey.

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ELIZABETH SCHAMBELAN: Ostensibly, Skulptur Projekte Munster isn't thematic. Unlike Documenta or the Venice Biennale, Skulptur Projekte doesn't adhere to an umbrella concept that provides audiences with a frame through which to think about the work on view. But were you nevertheless guided in your decisions by a particular set of ideas?

BRIGITTE FRANZEN: One idea we had from the beginning was to see the exhibition as a long-term study. What's really distinctive about Skulptur Projekte in terms of those other shows, I think, is its ten-year rhythm. This summer will see the fourth edition of Skulptur Projekte, or its thirtieth anniversary, by which point more than 175 artists will have participated. With that in mind, we invited some artists who had participated before--Thomas Schutte, Isa Genzken, Michael Asher--who could function as points of reference for the show's changing context.

ES: I know that Michael Asher is doing his "Caravan" project--a regular car trailer, a readymade, that he moves to a different site in Munster each week--for the fourth time. In fact, he has used the same trailer and gone to the same sites in '77, '87, '97--and now this year?

KASPER KONIG: Yes, it's like "Play it again, Sam." But each decade the project has a different meaning. Michael was suggested to us for the first Skulptur Projekte by Dan Graham, who said, "This guy is on a completely different trip." And so Michael came and did his "Caravan" project, and of course nobody understood this kind of urbanist California metaphor. Then he did it again ten years later, and insiders thought it was a pastiche of Conceptual technique. The third time around, however, it was taken very seriously. In looking at the project over time, you can see not only how the work's reception has changed, but how the city has changed--even regarding things like zoning, which obviously affects where the trailer can be parked. This time, Michael spent days and days working out how the parking regulations have changed. Munster is kind of cute, but it's as complex as any other modern city.

CARINA PLATH: I think it's important to understand that Skulptur Projekte's format has very specific consequences for the artist-curator relationship. The curatorial team doesn't really pre-formulate a set of ideas for audiences, but then, we don't lay out topics for the artists, either. They have to respond to the situation themselves and develop the projects on-site. On the other hand, we do have a tradition that generates a set of questions about the relationship of art and the public, and about the negotiation of publicness--which is a term you have to think of in the plural and as more contested than in previous years.

ES: How has that relationship--between art and the public--changed since 1977?

KK: Well, it might be significant to note that Skulptur Projekte came about because of a local controversy that had a great deal to do with the changing nature of the public sphere. In the mid '70s, a local bank was privatized, which upset a lot of people; and so the bank paid for a public sculpture more or less as a gesture of appeasement. And in response, Klaus Bussmann, the curator of the Westphalian State Museum, decided to present a survey of the history of modern sculpture, from Rodin to Calder, along with an exhibition of autonomous sculpture in a park. Bussmann asked me to curate a presentation of public works at various sites within the city. Many American artists were invited, including Donald Judd, Richard Serra, and Carl Andre. Their projects went beyond the parameters of autonomous sculpture, because the artists chose their own sites and did things on a very large--radically large--scale. The works were so big that their size gave them a kind of plausibility in people's minds, as constructs that made sense.