Publicness and art : Munster Skulptur Projekt 2007

In the summer of 2007, the 4th "Skulptur Projekte" was held in Munster and 36 artists were invited to release projects throughout the city. At the outset, it was very difficult for the residents of Munster to accept such a contemporary sculpture as George Rickey's "Rottierende Quadrate" and it provoked many bitter attacks, which led those concerned to initiate "Skultur Projekt" in 1977. Now, thirty years after that, the atmosphere has changed and it has become a major event for the whole city. In this paper I shall take up the site-specific works of Isa Genzken, Andreas Siekmann, Silke Wagner and Gustav Metzger, focusing the relationship between art and publicness. As for the publicness, it should be noted that the common world presents itself in the simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives and aspects, as Hannah Arendt pointed out in her book "The Human Condition". In the public realm the art provides stimuli to the action, whose nature consists in breaking through the commonly accepted and reach into the extraordinary, although she herself restricts the function of the work of art mainly to its durability that serves for the product of activity