The City as Subject

Berlin, a city rich in public sculpture, is the site of a distinctive body of recent work in which artists use the physicality of the city itself to reflect on and draw from the history of Berlin as a city. These sculptures grow out of and respond to the critical processes of social-historical and urban-historical investigation by architects, planners, citizen—activists, historians, and others, undertaken in the 1960s and 1970s. They intervene in recent architectural debates to challenge currently dominant conceptualizations of the urban ground plan and to reimagine historical and spatial relationships parallel to the urban reunification process. This article examines selected examples that provide a sense of how the city is taken as contemporary sculptors’ subject in both direct and complex forms.