SELECTIONS FROM MOLD AND MODEL: THE GERMAN RE-UNIFICATION PUBLIC SCULPTURE COMPETITION 1991

View the “Mold and Model” Ballot

In 1991, the first anniversary of the unification of East and West Germany, I sponsored a competition between proposals for public sculptures that, in one way or another, commemorated the historic merger. The competition allowed entrants to define “public,” “sculpture,” and “site” for themselves. Either written proposals or physical maquettes were acceptable, but no submittal in any medium could be larger than 1 meter square. Professionals and amateurs were equally welcome.

Presented at Galerie Christian Nagel in Cologne, Mold and Model: The German Re-unification Public Sculpture Competition comprised thirteen novel proposals, ranging from WXRY, a luggage-X-ray cable-TV channel (“Nothing to hide. Nothing to declare. 24 hours a day.”), to an official national graffiti slogan (“1 + 1 = 1”) and massive architectural monuments honoring the contributions of the Turkish guestworker population. Visitors to the gallery were provided with a ballot that allowed them to vote their preference. All submittals were identified by letter “to avoid prejudicing jurors.”

The entire competition was a fiction.

For a nation that had suffered a traumatic past re-unification was a serious, necessary phase of recovery. Nevertheless, for me, arriving at a comic fiction about it wasn’t much of a stretch. (An American, I’d lived in Germany for more than a year prior to creating this fiction. To the natives who challenged my decision to address the sensitive subject of another nation’s re-unification, I responded that everyone has right of access to their own experience.) For politics, a speculative enterprise, already carries a seed of fiction — all those competing theories about the true social nature of Man, all those models aimed at the betterment of society… Politicians are advanced by our belief in their programs or thwarted by our lack of belief therein; either way the citizenry is being beseeched to imagine a society that might, but doesn’t yet, exist. Producing a seemingly “outrageous” 3D fiction such as The German Re-unification Public Sculpture Competition thus becomes a matter of reversing certain proportions intrinsic to politics — and, further, having the willingness to reverse them. This willingness is one of the attributes that separates the comedian from everyone else. Comedy frequently involves a certain ruthlessness, in the pursuit of truth.

Each proposal in the Competition was submitted by a separate “contestant.” At least that was the premise; in fact I had created them all. In subtle contrast to what we’ve learned to expect of hoaxes, however, I refrained from inventing names for the contestants; no “contributors” were identified. Checking my swing, I’d designed The German Re-unification Public Sculpture Competition to be an incomplete fiction. I was more interested in the idea that something like this might exist than in creating the full-on illusion that it actually did. The proposals in the competition were mostly doable. In that sense, they were ‘real’ proposals. And at a certain level the ‘competition’ too was real: the works were vying for the audience’s ‘vote.’ Aspects of the project were real, then, but what version of real were they? By refusing to follow through on the illusion of the fictional competition, I shifted the project from mere hoax to something more complex, murkier, ambiguous…. 

Excerpted from Concrete Comedy: An Alternative History of Twentieth-Century Comedy 2011