Where as the video work by Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset showed an attempt to take the work out of museums and place them into a different context, Thomas Schutte’s work, “Model for a Museum”, was made on a theme that focused on the idea of museum as a place.

Thomas Schütte, Model for a Museum

Shutte’s work itself consisted of transparent Plexiglas that surrounded an existing water fountain, concrete blocks on top of the Plexiglas, and also an orange-tinted Plexiglas tower at the top. Assuming from the work title, the orange part seemed to be the element that represented the museum. The museum part stood imposingly like a Pyramid that nobody could reach, as if it was there to be worshipped. As mentioned earlier, this Muenster Sculpture Project was meant to serve as a symbol of Public Art. Its purpose was to have pieces of contemporary art installed or exhibited all over town in order for people to adopt them into their everyday life.

Thomas Schütte, Model for a Museum (Detail)

With this said, Schutte produced a work that was “a model of museum acting as a metaphor for the storage of human civilization, yet it could not be accessed.” Inside the construction model was empty. A work of three massive dolls that Shutte produced for the 2006 Berlin Biennale also contained nothing in them. The little “working people” figures, which would often appear in many of Shutte’s architectural model series, stay inside the orange model and looked over the distance. In the catalogue, these figures meant to be “the ones that proceed cremation”. I wondered if they were the kind of existence that would burn all the art works born out of human civilization.

Thomas Schütte, Model for a Museum (Detail)

On the stone of the water fountain, which had already been there since before the installation, there was also a figure that looked like an immortal. This made me wonder if this immortal could be the one that looked over the water as a natural resource.