Anything Goes – aus 2064
It is 40 years since James Stirling’s avant-garde, postmodern museum opened as the Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart. Now, its aesthetic and functional, structural and narrative potentials are all being renegotiated, alongside the nature of its public collection.
On the International Museum Day in 2024, students from Stuttgart’s State Academy of Fine Arts have been invited to respond to the iconic museum via a series of subtle interventions and transient performances in the galleries and on the terraces. As though irritations from the future, these speculative fictions are both critical and playful, celebrating the postmodern museum as a space for imagination and public discourse.
This is an interdisciplinary project between students from architecture, fine arts/art education and communication design – an initiative by professors Bettina Kraus, Antonia Low and Lucienne Roberts, in dialogue with Dr Susanne Kaufmann-Valet and Hendrik Bündge, the curatorial team for Modern and Contemporary Art at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.
Some interventions and performances take place at set times, others happen sporadically throughout the museum or are in fixed locations. See listings on the following pages.
Photos by: Daniela Wolf, Tommy Støckel
alintschick
Marlena Alvarez
Ian Deeg
Saskia Fischer
Samira Gebhardt
Ava Hösl
Susan Hösl
Anastasiia Iusupova
Leonie Klöpfer
Leonie Lass
Serafin Lindau
Jacob Miadowitz
Luca Oszwald
Lisa Seidel
Sarah Serve
Julie Siebels
Elisabeth Spengler Castillo
Jim Wolff
ZWEILASTER (Marie David,
Arno Kälberer)
CI-design, booklet and poster:
Nadine Bela
Emilia Detering
Nina Maise
Spurensuche
Sarah Serve, Julie Siebels
performance and guided tour
3 x 30 min
meeting-point: Foyer
Join a guided tour, taking a close look at James Stirling's building, seeking and mapping its particularities, its flaws and its signs of impermanence. How do we handle this special structure in the context of being a museum, and what potential for change does it offer?
Stirling Ballett
Saskia Fischer
performance, costumes
spontaneous appearances
exhibition halls and terraces
Postmodern architectural details such as the curved entrance window and the shapes of the travertine façades are translated into costumes and worn by performers throughout the museum. They enable the building to beexperienced in a scale and in materials that relate to the human body.
Voller Drehungen, die keine Wende herbeiführen
Jacob Miadowitz
spontaneous performance
exhibition hall
Modernity was all about creating something new – a notion considered outdated by the postmodernists. Instead, they drew upon the past, playing with traditions.
The Viennese waltz is the oldest traditional competition ballroomdance. It symbolises the unchanging – the spinning in circles. The Staatsgalerie remains the same institution with the same collection, in endless rotation.
Bubble-Gum to Go
Lisa Seidel with Elisabeth Spengler Castillo
balloon, slime, chewing gum
performance, installation
foyer and Urbanstraße 35
A pipe comes to life – its systems developing an autonomous
existence and beginning to play with the surroundings.
Explore with them the boundaries between the hidden &
visible, inside & outside, museum & urban space. Follow a pink
mass and its journey through the hidden infrastructures of
the building as it takes on different forms in diff erent places.
post play
Marlena Alvarez
foam, waxcloth, balls
staircase in the Rotunda
Through openings, along the curved façade, up ramps anddown stairs, if you look carefully new paths are openedup. Balls roll over tracks of handrails and gutters, connectedby colourful sculptural extensions in a playful continuationof the postmodern style.
Ich hefte an, um zu sehen, wie es werden kann
Leonie Klöpfer
Moss*, enlarged pins
Terrace, main entrance
This moss has not yet overgrown the Staatsgalerie, it is merely attached to it and thus the seed of a future vision of a completely moss-covered façade, making it representative
of a climate-friendly future. With its assimilating and compensatory qualities (air-filtering, temperature regulation, etc.), moss could be of interest to a postmodern museum
of the future...
*After the intervention, the moss will be replanted in nature.
postmodern ruin
Jim Wolff with design by Elisabeth Spengler Castillo
speaker, screen, travertine stone, power bank, cables, tape
changing locations
This exhibit has arrived from the future! Admire an original travertine stone fragment, along with a reconstructed sound and video recording, from a time when the Staatsgalerie
has fallen into ruin. Encounter artifacts from this crumbled, overgrown, collapsed, magical, wild and enchanted architecture for the fi rst time.
refrigerator
Leonie Lass
mixed media
skylight, exhibition hall
Imagine the Staatsgalerie as a refrigeration unit, its artifacts collected and stored above the exhibition space. What is worth preserving? What contemporaneous artifacts might
be found in the attic in 2064?
Meisterwerke im Interview
Serafin Lindau, Luca Oszwald with a design by Anastasiia Iusupova
risograph prints on paper
4 versions free to take, editions of 1,000, DIN A4
Rotunda
‘Is the museum public enough?’ – we pose this question to a selection of artworks from the Staatsgalerie. The artworks tell us, from their perspective, how this place should develop within the next 40 years. Take a comic home with you for your
collection and see which predictions prove to come true.
We are here to entertain you! 2 Euro concerts!
ZWEILASTER: Marie David, Arno Kälberer
Instruments, coin operated meter, stopwatch,
Intermittent mini music performances by donations
Museum entrance
MUSIC Á LA MACHINA by art punk band ZWEILASTER is live music played only when coins are inserted into a machine. Equipped with a stopwatch and coin operated meter,
the close connection between artists and donors in a postmodern (art) world becomes clear. The question asked is ‘can art be exploited?’ when in a neoliberal, capitalist world
it seems nothing can be had without making a payment. But be careful: putting money in the meter can become addictive!