This Monday, the prize for the best supporting actor also goes to a work by Josep Renau, which can still be found on a GDR prefabricated building facade in Halle-Neustadt. The wall mosaic is called “The forces of nature and technology controlled by man” and from today’s point of view, one has to say, socialism is pretty stupid with one of its central theses. Humans are demonstrably in command of neither one nor the other and often enough not even themselves anymore. Of course, you can lie to yourself about the retro-futuristic art on prefab buildings as a fiction of a better world – but the very real snake at the entrance to the immigration office can hardly be hidden at the edge of the picture , which is accommodated in this – “Am Stadion 5” – just like other parts of the city administration.
That is correct insofar as the city bears 200,000 euros and thus 20 percent of the total costs incurred for the facelift a few meters further. The main thing about this visit is something that you can’t see at the moment because it has already been scaffolded. The outer skin of the second stairwell consists of the wall mosaic “Unity of the working class and founding of the GDR”, also designed by Renau.
But how do you restore such a huge jigsaw puzzle, where all the pieces are the same size (like at home in the bathroom 15 x 15 centimetres) and yet each one is unique? This mosaic consists of 10,904 raw stoneware tiles, although they were produced in series, they were then individually designed with majolica glaze painting depending on the space. The GDR survived the work of art commissioned in 1968 and completed in 1974, but after reunification it suffered a great deal from constantly changing weather conditions and erosion, so art in buildings in the East was no different than people.
Karl Marx was hit the hardest, no joke, even if Raphael Doths, one of the restorers working here, does not say so. Doths explains that the vast majority of the tiles are undamaged, with only around 500 having to be completely remade and painted. But even if a tile doesn’t come off and falls on the head of a strolling Halle resident, there can be problems with adhesion. In many cases, the mortar has come loose from the tiles or the façade, and in such cases the restorers are in demand as rock surgeons. First, the tiles are tapped for cavities, and where there are cavities, a hole is drilled into the joint to back-inject the tiles with injection glue.
In Halle you learn beautiful words, “damage phenomenon” and “artwork in urban space”
The largest art construction site, as I said: Marx. The great Marx even towers over the roof of the prefabricated building and, here too the GDR greets late, if you stick your head out, you will of course quickly have problems. Water could easily penetrate the shards over the edge of the roof, there were frost cracks, salt was stored and pushed to the surface. As a result, Marx now has quite a roof damage in Halle. Raphael Doths calls it a “harmful phenomenon” and you should stock up on this term for the probable case that you want to politely insult someone again soon.
The origins of the glass, Marx’s scales, so to speak, lie on the table like a bag of lens chips at the press conference, and otherwise one is again overwhelmed by these miserable daydreams, which, as a harmful phenomenon, should soon be examined by a gifted head plumber (m/ w/d). It’s really serious, after all, it was briefly thought possible upon arrival that Michel Houellebecq, as part of the press mob in Halle (Saale), would be open-minded, which in the world could really still be ruled out with certainty.
We draw people – a detail of the art of prefabricated buildings.
(Photo: Cornelius Pollmer)
At second glance, things were cleared up (Houellebecq wasn’t there, but a colleague from local television who looked like him), but from a purely biographical point of view Josep Renau was a piñata and could turn up again with Houellebecq. The communist Renau studied at the Art Academy in Valencia, he was a commercial artist and illustrator and is best known for the design of the Spanish pavilion at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1937. To avoid death, he fled to Mexico two years later and set up with the Familiar with Muralismo, the formerly revolutionary Mexican mural painting.
When he moved there in 1958, Renau brought this art form with him from exile to the GDR as an ideal bulky item. Renau designed a total of five murals for the GDR, which, due to its encroachment, was quite aptly called “urban art”. The work in Halle was Renau’s first major project in the GDR and his first exterior mural design ever.
Is it about coolness or about cultural heritage?
Of course, the question arises as to what motives are used to repair such a motive. After all, the GDR casts a longer shadow than the tallest prefabricated buildings, and in Halle, for example, there had recently been a heated argument, not only in the city council, over the question of whether the replacement building for the old planetarium could be built again named after the aviation cosmonaut Sigmund Jähn should be. In the end, a majority was against.
Professor Philip Kurz is allowed to speak on this question because he is the managing director of the Wüstenrot Foundation, which – according to Judith Marquardt, Halle’s deputy for culture – “shapes very, very much” with the project, which is code for: 80 percent or 800 000 euros. In any case, Kurz says that there are enough projects today that are “more about coolness than about cultural heritage”, about making something “instagrammable” that has been a dirty corner for long enough. Here, however, one is undoubtedly dealing with an “identity-forming cultural heritage” that is only partially preserved for the sake of the residents. Of course it’s also about them, it’s about the message “what you experienced is important,” says Judith Marquardt. Maintaining such a legacy is easier in this case because it is about a work of art and not about the personal speculative question of how much someone like Jähn allowed himself to be exploited by the GDR government.
Professor Kurz, who – where he has traveled so far – spontaneously takes on a small guest lectureship on site also sees this difference. As an Ossi, you have long learned to remain silent and smile in such moments, and in this case the likeable guest really has something to say, for example that “a work of art that is a monument only speaks to us when we understand it in its historicity understand when we understand and see … this is not a picture from today that looks beautiful and shines” – the work of art must rather “speak to us from a bygone era”, and this also means that the ideological character loses over time Meaning, what remains and is important is “the quality of the art that is in there”. And it’s considerable, which is slowly being acknowledged outside of the East as well. Such a renovated Renau is not important for them, but, according to Kurz, also for “the overall identity of today’s Federal Republic”.
As for this overall identity, everyone would soon have to agree on a large scale again. “Germany – the big tile picture”, wouldn’t that be something for television, moderated by the eternal Johannes B. Kerner? All Germans each design a tile, a madness mosaic made of 83 million raw stoneware tiles from the Boizenburg plant in Mecklenburg. No? Was just a suggestion.