(Urban) Society as Social Sculpture

An Ethnographic-Explorative Case Study on the Sociology of Artistic Intervention in Esens and Duisburg

Abstract

(Urban) society as social sculpture: An ethnographic-explorative case study on the sociology of a visual artist's intervention in Esens and Duisburg. With his article, which is based on an ethnographic-explorative case study, the author would like to contribute to answering the questions of how visual artists intervene in the city and society and which specific patterns and strategies of action concerning the visual arts come into play. On the way to his goal, the author first looks at convergences in the understanding of intervention in the visual arts characterised by Joseph Boys and current sociology. This is followed by a biographical sketch of the Jewish-Persian-German artist Cyrus Overbeck, who lives in Duisburg. This is followed by ethnographic observations of some of his artistic interventions. The author describes how he experiences a ‘social sculpture’ (performance) by the artist, in which the artist creates a rollercoaster of emotions in both himself and the audience, transforming them into moments of passage in his art. The author also provides an ethnographic insight into Overbeck's attempt to transform a court case into an artistic performance and in this way to intervene in the city and society. Building on these and other observations, it is then shown that the social logic of Overbeck's intervention art is based on at least three productive social (not logical!) paradoxes: 1. the strategy of not acting strategical, 2. self-positioning through coquetry with the outsider label and 3. conflict resolution through conflict escalation. The artist himself must not resolve these paradoxes on pain of failure. Rather, he must make them permanent in order to wrestle with them in order to advance his creative process and his interventions in the city and society. These paradoxes manifest important characteristics of Cyrus Overbeck's intervening visual art. However, there is another aspect to the determination of the obstinacy of his artistic interventions - namely the biographical mandate anchored in his family history to do everything in his power to ensure that Auschwitz was not repeated, despite numerous death threats, damage to property and violent assaults directed against his person.