Lueger! Lueger! Lueger!
"Lueger Temporary" is Vienna’s first attempt to artistically contextualize its monument to former mayor Karl Lueger
Servus!
Viennese readers of this newsletter may have noticed the enormous wooden structure now standing opposite and dwarfing the Luegerdenkmal, the city’s monument on the Ringstrasse honoring its former mayor, the antisemite Karl Lueger. That installation is Lueger Temporary, the City of Vienna’s first attempt to ‘artistically contextualize’ this problematic monument, unveiled on October 12 (shortly before last week’s edition of the newsletter arrived in your inboxes).
Lueger Temporary is the work of Austrian artists Nicole Six and Paul Petritsch, who were invited by the city to design a temporary artistic contextualization of the Lueger monument (reportedly without an open competition). Their design “extend[s] discussion about the monument to the entire city,” the artists themselves explain, by affixing to the aforementioned triangular wooden frame sixteen representations of “memorials dedicated to Lueger that are found in Vienna—from busts to commemorative plaques.” This greatest hits album of an installation is “a condensed stack of memorial signs showing the many different ways in which Karl Lueger was inscribed in the collective memory of the city.”
Vienna’s Greens in the guise of its culture spokesperson Ursula Berner critiqued the monument as “bombastic,” arguing the garish design enhances rather than diminishes the monument's stature. The Austrian Union of Jewish Students too protested the decision to “colorfully window-dress” the Lueger monument. From the point of view of the City, however, the color and bombast as well as people’s protestations are part of Lueger Temporary’s attraction. The installation will be, they hope, something that will draw people in, make them curious, and initiate a conversation.
But a conversation about what, exactly? The Lueger monument as a standalone piece is an honorific object that perpetuates the cult of personality Lueger himself helped construct during his lifetime: Lueger as a modernizing mayor who was a champion of the downtrodden and disenfranchised. A successful act of artistic contextualization would have to cut this myth down to size and undermine the monument’s political foundations by framing it with the information the monument doesn’t tell us: that Lueger was a Catholic supremacist, greater German nationalist, and political antisemite; that Lueger, in the words of Six and Petritsch, “developed with his radically racist rhetoric a novel populist antisemitism into a political program.”
By this measure, Lueger Temporary is a failure. Six and Petritsch’s elementary school collage amounts to little more than a compendium of what the artists learnt in the course of doing their research about Lueger monuments. It neither directly addresses nor communes with the very monument it is supposed to be contextualizing. Rather, Lueger Temporary is guilty of distracting and shifting the focus away from the Luegerdenkmal, relativizing and minimizing the subject at hand. Instead of deepening the debate about the very thing the city has spent more than two years arguing about, Lueger Temporary seeks to broaden it, making it thinner in the process.
With Lueger Temporary in the foreground, a passerby might now very well see the Lueger monument, take in its new ‘context,’ and then question why this site such a controversial one if the city contains so many other tributes to Lueger. Perhaps, then, the Luegerdenkmal isn’t much of a problem at all. And this is to say nothing of the installation’s original sin: that it presumes one representation of Karl Lueger on the square that bears his name was not enough and that we needed 16 more. Mercifully, Lueger Temporary will only be in place for a year, a bridging solution before a permanent act of artistic contextualization is selected. Let’s hope the jury1 gets it right.
Bis bald!
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I previously wrote that “Jewish Museum director Barbara Staudinger and historians Oliver Rathkolb and Heidemarie Uhl” were to be members of “the jury tasked with selecting the winning design.” They were, in fact, members of the scientific commission tasked with preparing the terms of and criteria for the artistic competition for the permanent installation. I regret the error.