The City As Subject Public Art And Urban Discourse In Berlin Carolyn S Loeb by Carolyn S. Loeb 9781350258600, 9781350258631, 1350258601, 1350258636 instant download after payment.

In The City as Subject, Carolyn S. Loeb examines three bodies of public art in Berlin in the postwar and contemporary periods: legal and illegal murals painted on exposed residential firewalls in West Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s, public sculpture created primarily during the decade and a half following reunification, and the official Berlin Wall Memorial. Through careful analysis of these works, Loeb develops a conception of the city as not only shaped by its citizens but capable of connecting Berlin’s inhabitants with the past.
The three structures in question each represent a distinctive body of public art that has emerged in the city—and beyond their ostensible subjects, they are all embedded within Berlin’s specifically urban landscape. These bodies together demonstrate public art’s reliance on the city’s own forms and materials as a means of visual expression. By considering the history, contexts, subjects, materials, and formal decisions manifested in each work, as well as their relationship to a prevailing climate of citizen activism, this book shows how these bodies of public art present a vision of Berlin that counters today’s homogenizing practices, and in doing so each one keeps alive citizen-activists’ conversations about the nature of the city that they desire.