Originally it was just a crazy idea. At least that’s what Karsten Neumann says and tells the story of how in 2002 he had himself put up as a city council candidate for the electoral community “Die Guten” in Nuremberg – “on list place 67, almost at the bottom” – and had to come up with an election campaign program. The artist advocated blowing up the old town wall – “that didn’t bring me many friends”. And called for the merger of Nuremberg, Fürth and ErlANGen into a single metropolis called Bethang.
His proposal did not bring him any votes. But the idea would not let him go and became his life’s work. Since the end of 2004 he has been continuously expanding his Bethang vision, transforming it into a real-utopian total work of art. Although he does not like the term utopia, he prefers to speak of the art city, which with almost 760,000 inhabitants is one of the five largest cities in Germany after Berlin, Hamburg, Munich and Cologne.
Bethang has a city map, coat of arms, place-name signs, the subtitles of which identify it as a “city of culture and spirit”. Everything is written in lower case, capital letters are only used at the beginning of the text and for proper names. In his city founding office, Neumann not only thinks about spelling, but also about renaming streets and squares, which he also implements in temporary actions.
He reworked the existing building stock of the cities photographically. He sends his deconstructions, for example the zeppelin tribune on the former Nazi Party Rally Grounds, as picture postcards with best regards from Bethang. Incidentally, a culinary specialty of the city is the “Bethangske”, sausages seasoned with turmeric and lemon.
Luckily, Neumann is a passionate performer, which is important to keep drawing public attention to his project. In 2013 he circumnavigated the 130 kilometers of the city limits in the performance “Grenzgang”. For a week he was out and about with a tent and in Bethang gear. “It’s actually illegal, but as an artist you’re allowed to.” In the meantime, the Franconian Albverein has turned it into a hiking trail with a map, marked with the Bethang coat of arms, and advertises it as the largest work of art that can be walked on. The utopia is pretty close to reality.
Karsten Neumann sees his radical conceptual art as a stimulus.
(Photo: Karsten Neumann)
Neumann describes his work as radical conceptual art. “That means the artist can’t realize his idea himself, even if he wanted to,” he says. “I’m just encouraging you to think about something like that.” Only the councils of the three cities could implement the merger. The merger would be geographically possible. Since the last municipal reform in 1972, when many small villages in the Knoblauchsland lost their independence and were incorporated, the city limits have touched each other. “Previously, land acquisition would have been necessary,” says Neumann and laughs out loud.
But when he reads an article in the “Nuremberg Today” magazine, published by the Office for Communication and City Marketing, that there are 21 towns in the city triangle, it’s all funny. Then a letter to the mayor is due, after all, these are districts, not towns. “I don’t call the Autobahn a bike path just because I like it.” He likes to rub himself against the wrong terms. And to city administrations, with whom he has enough to do when realizing his projects. For example, in the tree planting campaign “37 trees for Bethang”, deliberately based on Joseph Beuys “7000 oaks”. The number 37 results from the postal code districts. Ten trees have now been planted. “But negotiating that with all three administrations, my goodness.”
The most recent project took him three years: the conceptual artist photographed all 111 fountains in the art city, provided them with location information and made a book out of them. No cultural guide, he doesn’t believe in sentences like “this artist designed this or that fountain this year or that, etc. Everything is so beautiful here.” The “atmospheric everyday shots” (Neumann) are not suitable as postcards either, they simply show how municipalities, their residents and tourists deal with public property. Neumann rattled off every well in the 320 square kilometer urban area. “Rain, rain, rain, pouring rain, wet to the skin, cycle, cycle, cycle,” he writes in the book.
According to official lists, there are 71 fountains in Nuremberg, 28 in Fürth and twelve in Erlangen. When he asked local residents about the fountains, he always found that they were not familiar with the system, even though they were less than 300 meters away. He didn’t count how many times he clicked on the “No drinking water!” sign. met. Or the phrase “Don’t get wet!” heard. And how often he found rubbish in the well, which even he, the rather anarchic artist, demands a “OOOOOO shout of order”.
“Cinque Buddhas” is the name of Karsten Neumann’s Behang light object made of plastic waste from 2020.
(Photo: Karsten Neumann)
Neumann, born in 1963, has spent his entire life in Nuremberg apart from his first six months in Würzburg. It could be that some find him exhausting or annoying, he says, also because of the letters to the editor and emails with which he intervenes in current debates. But he’s used to arguments. He was shaped by a “primordial conflict” with his grandfather, a former Wehrmacht soldier, and his father, a police officer who had no sympathy for his son, who was a conscientious objector. “It never got better.” Neumann retained a “certain affinity for argument”. Which he thinks is good, because for him, dealing with different opinions is the basic requirement for a functioning democracy.
In 1983 he began studying art at the Nuremberg Academy, first in Ludwig Scharl’s painting class. But when he began to weld shoe racks, build furniture and do performances – “by the way, the first one was already 17 in the forest with a poncho and a deer’s skull” – it became too much for the professor. “The wholeness of me overwhelmed him.” He switched to Georg Karl Pfahler, who didn’t care what he did. “The main thing is that I did something.” This is how steel sculptures, paintings, video installations came about – “I was always on the move in a colorful way.”
In the meantime he has united his entire art under the Bethang label. Also the colorful assemblages and luminous objects that he has been making from discarded plastic waste since 2005, long before the disposal of plastic scrap became a general topic.
As for the financial side of his commitment to the art city: “I’ve been living around the subsistence level for almost 40 years.” It is not easy to repeatedly raise funding for individual projects. Or for the now ten DIN A5 issues of “Bildndn Kunst”, in which Neumann regularly provides information about progress in Bethang and his participation in numerous exhibitions. All three cities even contributed to the financing of the fountain book, a milestone in the recognition of Neumann’s work.
The artist accepts this calmly. He’s a Buddhist. If he does not experience the realization of Bethang in this life, then in one of the next. Of that he is quite sure.
Karsten Neumann: Ve FOUNTAIN[s| Bethang’da – kommunale brunnen in Bethang”. Icon Verlag 2023