On Vienna’s famous Ringstrasse there stands a twelve-foot-tall bronze statue of Karl Lueger, who served as the city’s mayor from 1897 until his death in 1910, and did much to give the city its current form. A leader of the staunchly Catholic Christian Social party, Lueger was one of the very first successful politicians to make anti-Semitism a key plank of his political platform. The anti-Jewish fervor of Lueger’s loyal voters, more than anything else, convinced Theodor Herzl that the Jews would never find enduring security in Europe.
Last week, the city Vienna—responding to controversy in recent years concerning the statue of Lueger and his place in the city’s history—unveiled an installation intended to “contextualize artistically” the Lueger monument. Liam Hoare examines this “enormous wooden structure,” created by Nicole Six and Paul Petritsch and titled Lueger Temporary.
The Austrian Union of Jewish Students . . . 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, it hopes, 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 . . . and political anti-Semite.
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 learned 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 Lueger monument, 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.
Read more on Vienna Briefing: https://viennabriefing.substack.com/p/lueger-temporary-installation-vienna