The City as Subject - by Carolyn S Loeb (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In The City as Subject, Carolyn S. Loeb examines distinctive bodies of public art in Berlin: legal and illegal murals painted in West Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s, post-reunification public sculptures, and images and sites from the street art scene. Her careful analyses show how these developed new architectural and spatial vocabularies that drew on the city's infrastructure and daily urban experience. These works challenged mainstream urban development practices and engaged with citizen activism and with a wider civic discourse about what a city can be.

Loeb extends this urban focus to her examination of the extensive outdoor installation of the Berlin Wall Memorial and its mandate to represent the history of the city's division. She studies its surrounding neighborhoods to show that, while the Memorial adopts many of the urban-oriented vocabularies established by the earlier works of public art she examines, it truncates the story of urban division, which stretches beyond the Wall's existence. Loeb suggests that, by embracing more multi-vocal perspectives, the Memorial could encourage the kind of participatory and heterogeneous construction of the city championed by the earlier works of public art.

Review Quotes

""Grounded in a close and critical reading of a number of works of public art and monuments in contemporary Berlin, The City as Subject draws on a sophisticated array of scholarship rooted in critical urban studies and the history of memory, providing something of a blueprint for activist artists and citizens in other places."" --Joe Perry, Associate Professor of History, Georgia State University, USA

About the Author

Carolyn S. Loeb is Associate Professor Emerita in Art & Architectural History in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University, USA. She has published on public art and urban redevelopment in Berlin, among other subjects.