'MOOR - GEEST - COAST'
In the State Museum of Nature and Man in Oldenburg the display areas "Moor", "Geest" and "Coast" underwent a new artistic design between 1997 and 2006.
In each case, the concepts are based on a close link between material and content. In the realms of history and natural history, from early times to the present - depicted in terms of current nature protection - the exhibits are set in relation to each other and displayed in specially designed artistic spatial installations.
To mark the interdisciplinary new concept for the exhibition areas, the artists Michael Lukas, Prof. Rainer Wittenborn and Tobias Wittenborn joined forces to create the "Parameters" group for this particular project and to redesign the museum from the viewpoint of the artist.
"Moor block"
The Moor block, with a length of 11 metres, dominates the main exhibition space: 2,000 years of layered time are resolved into a monolithic informational sculpture.
Taken from the ecological system of a moor and set in an internal space, the block becomes a manifesto of a lost landscape.
"In the Museum of Nature and Man, not only Rainer Wittenborn, but Michael Lukas and Tobias Wittenborn as well were confronted with the task of lending material form to scientifically founded knowledge without forgetting that they are artists. As such, they had to be careful not to become mere designers, the central aspect of whose work is often no more than a formal implementation and presentation of the relevant material. They were able to achieve this goal only because the themes covered by the Museum of Nature and Man were also themes pursued by the artists themselves. [...]
"The long-distance view, the overview, as represented by maps, has come to assume a central role for artists in recent years. I recall, for example, the exhibition 'Mapping. Artists as Cartographers. Cartography as Art', held in 1998 in Linz and Bregenz. In 2006, an exhibition with international participation was staged in the Bavarian State Office for Surveying and Geographic Information in Munich. It was organized by Michael Lukas and bore the title 'The City and the Stars'. The gesture of the overview, of a far-reaching sense of orientation, is retained. We look down to the earth as if we were in space, only to see that the earth changes beneath our eyes; and where a sense of orientation previously seemed possible, structures suddenly push themselves into the foreground.
"Maps, schematic depictions, form a major part of all three exhibition units. Nothing is narrated here; attention is drawn to structures. Conditions or states present themselves for analysis. Maps have been a subject of Michael Lukas's independent works of art since 1989. To prevent premature explanation, some of the works have no title, but simply a code. This method of hindering the tendency to interpret works on the basis of their titles was practised by Kandinsky when he simply gave his improvisations consecutive numbers.
"In this way, after the viewer has searched in the catalogue for guidance in the form of a title, his or her curiosity is referred back to the picture. The aim is to strengthen the enquiring look, to focus attention on the structures and thus on the contents of the work. One of Michael Lukas's working principles may be clearly recognized in this, namely the use of a number of layers visibly superimposed on top of each other.
"Over a screen-printed honeycomb structure, coloured layers are added in acrylic paint and ink that allow the base coat to shimmer through. Applied over the top are thin layers of film. The phenomenon of layering is an important working principle not only in archaeological excavations, which play a central role in the present museum; it also occurs in a geological context and is evident in the shifting coastline. But whereas maps in museums are bound up with scientific knowledge, independent artistic work can discover whole new worlds. As one can see, this is not the privilege of Christopher Columbus alone.
"Other maps, like 'Belgrade', dating from 2000, are related to topical events: in this case, the NATO air attacks. For anyone familiar with these events, the colour and the map are immediately imbued with significance, and the artistic structures of the surface articulation recede into the background. Once the eyes open to the tension that is engendered between the map and the event recorded there, then, I think, a comparison with the oval of stones in the "Geest" exhibition is relevant. The didactic goal, the raison d'être of this installation is the Ice Age and the movement of masses of earth and rock in northern Europe. The exhibits are not rare objects, but stones of the kind that anyone can find. Bored individually, stone for stone, and fixed on a steel cable, they not only float in the air; they have undergone elaborate treatment and been turned into something special: an object, objects one should respect and on which one may contemplate.
"Just how clearly the oval of stones can also be viewed as an artistic formulation of layering has been the theme of photos taken from different angles by various photographers. In the light of my initial premise 'as much science as necessary; as much art as possible' - the gain is evident without any further explanation. While walking round the exhibition, the attentive and visually experienced observer will perceive an aesthetic as well as a scientific structural principle.
Museums are places where objects are collected that have their origin either in natural history or in different forms of human labour. Things, objects are created in a process, but their character is distinguished by the absence of the process; at most, they afford access to it. In exhibitions, they are arranged into a network of entities, a still life, a nature morte. The aesthetic make-up of maps, the superimpositions and layering, document the missing temporal dimension of the process. Changes that can occur only over a period of time can be presented and imagined in a view of the various forms. Using their eyes and imagination, visitors can reconstruct a process of origination and change. They are challenged to do this by the aesthetic tension involved."
2007 Prize for Innovative Design awarded by the Savings Bank Foundation (Sparkassenstiftung) of Lower Saxony, Hanover
Excerpt from catalogue:
"Küste und Marsch", Prof. Detlef Hoffmann, 2007
published at the opening of the permanent exhibition in the State Museum of Nature and Man, Oldenburg ISBN: 978-3-89995-404-3