The human body between concrete and movement

Shortly before the SCHIRN temporarily closes its doors and moves to its interim quarters in Bockenheim, the “Body and Building” festival invites you to experience the “old” rooms anew for the very last time. The classical artworks give way to the living bodies of the performers and their audience. The title “Body and Building” is deliberately ambiguous. It references the contrast between the living bodies and the static building – in this case the post-modern exhibition space with its characteristics stretched shape beneath a white, pointed gabled ceiling. Of course, the word “building” also points to building as a productive active and here something is being built by bodies. If one then combines the two words to form “bodybuilding”, then they evoke a sports discipline that focuses on exaggerated nurturing of the body through hard physical training and which at first sight seems to be fairly out of place in a museum.

A quite different event elbowed its way straight into this spectacle, namely a symposium entitled “Articulate Muscle: The Male Body in Art”. The museum announced the event as a scholarly format. In reality, it was an advertising format pure and simple. And what it advertised by the film production “Pumping Iron” with no less a lead actor than the young Arnold Schwarzenegger. The film makers had run out of money and were therefore banging the drum to find new sponsors. Since one of the film’s main propositions was that bodybuilding was a kind of sculpting of one’s own body, it seemed quite obvious to host the event in a museum space.

The New York festival and the symposium both took place in what was then the Whitney Museum building on Madison Ave., a Brutalist icon designed by Marcel Breuer. It stood out at the time for its dark natural stone floor and suspended concrete coffered ceiling that contrasted sharply with the colorful and vibrant works on display. Moreover, the few windows there were all remained covered creating a kind of dark theater space illuminated only by spotlights. In the SCHIRN, the opposite will be the case: Specially for the festival, the entire window frontage which is normally covered over as it forms the surface on which the art is displayed, will be opened up. This will create not only new lines connecting the exhibition and urban space, but through interaction with the living artworks offer completely new spatial experiences.