Markus Heinsdorff’s Isarinstallation combines art, architecture and nature in public space. Above the Isar Canal in Munich, Germany, seven mobile objects responded to wind, water and light, drawing the cityscape directly into the artwork. One of the main works was a 9,5 × 4 metre mirror floating on the water, on whose 38 m² reflective surface sky, light and water were constantly, newly overlaid by current and movement. Gottfried Knapp describes the work as “inventor’s poetry” and a dream of flying, in which technical construction and the elements of nature play together.

Playing with the Elements

The most pressing existential experience of the past twenty years was without doubt the discovery that “nature” on Earth threatens to “run out”, that the ecological balance of creation has been disturbed, that man has irreparably damaged the planet on which he lives, and that the world is destroying itself. The visual arts, too, have reacted to this shock of realisation. Indeed, one of the decisive counter-movements against the constraints erected by the post-war avant-garde and against the value systems established by the art market in recent years pushed directly towards nature or the environment. Artists engaged with the Earth’s dwindling resources and with the growing volume of waste; they brought the four elements – earth, water, air and fire – back into art, or documented how man does violence to the Earth’s landscapes.

The sensory appeal of these works arises from the staged contrast between frame and content. Materials from nature or the urban environment, whose home is outdoors, in the open, take on a vital aura once brought indoors, into the exhibition space, into the gallery, into the museum. The confrontation of heterogeneous elements alarms the senses; it clarifies something about art. At least on first encounter, one believes one can feel a fresh breeze in the room.

That this contrast between the outside world and the world of art can also be staged outdoors, with reversed signs, is something Markus Heinsdorff has demonstrated in recent years with his installations in urban landscapes. Heinsdorff places objects – largely objects that could also exist indoors as sculptures, or that evoke associations with built structures, that is, are indebted to architecture – outdoors as models at a scale of 1:1, confronting them with a piece of nature or a piece of cityscape, thus making use of the discrepancy between two incompatible systems. The deliberately placed artwork animates the outdoor space, charges it with energies, puts it on display, makes it an equal partner. But the space is not merely a backdrop and mirror for the movement games of the objects; it sets the scale within which movements first gain any meaning at all.

The open space thus interprets the installation, while the installation defines the space, makes it conscious, puts it on display. The theme of the frame (closure, boundary), without which no artwork can exist, is here playfully broken: Heinsdorff has hung empty light-metal frames over the Isar Canal in such a way that they move, constantly capturing new images, constantly cutting new segments out of the surroundings. The cityscape frames the technical artwork, which in turn frames the cityscape.

From a viewing platform, reached by a flight of steps, one could, back then in September 1990, look down onto the stretch of canal bounded by the embankment walls and the two pedestrian bridges, onto this rectangle flowing with the waters of the Isar, this moving picture painted in watercolours on the ground; one could walk around the living picture and observe the airy elements hanging from the steel cables: sometimes the metal frames floated flat above the water’s surface, sometimes they rose up into steep portrait format, sometimes they rotated on their own axis. They filled with images, displaying now the water, now the sky, now the dome of the Lukaskirche, now a classical landscape excerpt with a horizontal horizon and trees building up on the sides like stage wings.

So what was it, then, that occupied passers-by for six weeks back then: purposeless architecture, a playful technical construction, a piece of designed cityscape, an installation in public space, a kinetic artwork or a temporary sculpture? Probably all of these at once. And yet something more still: a piece of inventor’s poetry, a dream of flying that made a pact with the elements of nature, was anchored to the earth, moved by the air, mirrored in the water and played with the light. Each element contributed something different to the overall effect: gravity tensioned the cables, ensuring taut lines in the suspension; the wind moved the strict geometry; the water broke up the straight lines and dissolved them into meandering movements, and the sunlight by day, the spotlights by night, set a manifold, moving play of shadows in motion. Heinsdorff’s open-air installations are socially communicative sculptures that would have to function even in desolate cityscapes. They mediate, in an unforced way, between architecture and nature, between two realms of experience that have become extremely estranged from one another in the 20th century, indeed that, as experience shows, almost always rob one another of their possible effect and are therefore perceived and treated as strictly separate phenomena.

The visual arts, too, had the greatest difficulty in the first seven decades of our century in dealing with nature and the built environment. The sculptures placed in public parks communicate with their surroundings neither in material nor in form; they seal themselves off as solitary objects, however far they may reach out; they adorn themselves with the atmospheric charms of the outdoors, yet themselves emit only disruptive signals to the outside world.

The relationship between architecture and art fared little better in the modern era. There were, admittedly, architects who painted or sculpted quite respectably – the monkish purist Le Corbusier, of all people, was one of them – and there were artists who built houses, like Hundertwasser. But what was produced there as a sideline is, at best, worth a footnote in art history. Everyday life in the murky niche between art and architecture is called “art in architecture” and marks one of the deepest troughs in the intellectual landscape of our century.

Only in recent years have the walls of ice between the three mutually hostile realms of experience slowly begun to thaw. So it can happen today, here and there, that architecture, art and nature engage in a relaxed conversation, complementing one another playfully in their opposition, indeed perhaps even effectively setting one another off – as once happened at the Isar Canal in Munich, Germany.

Gottfried Knapp