Seeking a 'lead' project for Breaking Ground, the largest Percent for Art project in the history of the State, Ballymun Regeneration Limited (BRL) considered a choice between two artists to create a defining work for the new Ballymun. On the one hand was American artist Jeff Koons, whose thirteen-metre Puppy, a steel sculpture planted with marigolds, begonias, petunias and lobelias, sits playfully outside the Guggenheim Bilbao. Puppy has become almost as iconic in that city as Frank Gehry's titanium museum, drawing tourists outside to snap themselves standing in front of it. With his works fetching millions at auction, and on the experience of Bilbao, the installation of a major Jeff Koons piece in Ballymun would create a destination in its own right, an intriguing addition to the new town centre.

On the other hand, BRL considered the work of Jochen Gerz. With an entirely different approach to Koons, Gerz, who was born in Germany and now lives and works in Paris, creates works that are often invisible, and through a process that can take years to complete. Perhaps the best known example of this is the Monument Against Fascism, in Hamburg-Harburg Germany. Together with Esther Shalev-Gerz, the artist created what initially appeared to be a 'typical', recognisable monument; a twelve metre column, echoing the triumphal pillars, needles and obelisks seen in major cities around the world. This column was coated in soft lead, however, and Gerz invited the city's residents and visitors to engrave their names on it, so signing a monumental petition against the ideas and ideals of Fascism. As the reachable area of lead became completely covered with writing, the column was sunk into the ground. Disappearing altogether over the period between its inauguration on 10 October 1986, and 10 November 1993, the monument and its 70,000 signatures are now visible only through a panel set above it in the ground.

A testament to hidden trauma, covered memories, buried histories; the Monument Against Fascism is one of a series of anti-monuments pioneered by Gerz. Another, 2146 Stones - Monument Against Racism, installed at Saarbrüken, Germany in 1993 is an even more subtle intervention. Gerz secured the help of the sixty-one Jewish communities then in Germany to compile a list of all the Jewish cemeteries that had been in use in German before the Second World War. Engraving the names of these 2,146 cemeteries on 2,146 cobblestones, Gerz replaced each stone in the square in front of Saarbrücken Castle (the seat of the Provincial Parliament), with one of the engraved stones, secretly and illegally after dark. With the engraved side face-down, the work and its process remained stealthy, invisible, hinting at the War secrets of the town on both sides of the conflict, as well as its hidden and forgotten victims. Eventually discovered (mid-process) and retrospectively sanctioned and commissioned, Castle Square has now been renamed The Square Of The Invisible Monument (Platz des unsichtbaren Mahnmals).

These projects position Jochen Gerz and his practice on one side of the dialectic concerning art in public places. On the one hand there is art that presents a spectacle, appearing in public completed, an end-point to the artistic process, and where the audience-role is as viewers. On the other, is art where it is the interaction with the public that is a fundamental part of the work long before there is any 'object' at all. In this work, not only do the 'audience' co-author the work, but the art can ultimately be the process, rather than the object at all.

Jochen Gerz was selected for Ballymun, and his project (amaptocare) and the Breaking Ground initiative have already been extensively discussed in these pages.1 In one sense, the decision between these two artists, Koons and Gerz encapsulates many of the arguments about quantifying the value of art and its role in society. Listed by Artprice as one of the top one hundred selling artists for 2004, Jeff Koons' work turned over a total of $18,567,691 (€14,809,133) at auction in that year.2 Koons' market value is assured through institutional and private collection, where the sophisticated interaction between gallery, collectors, media and market conspire to maintain the price of his works. Meanwhile the value of Koons' work to a city like Bilbao can be calculated in terms of recognition-value, tourist euros, and sales of picture postcards. A Koons icon in Ballymun would have brought visitors from outside the town to look at it, and could over time have become a beloved local resident. But while a Koons icon would have been an addition to the Plaza at Ballymun, Gerz' amaptocare is a more integral project, one which interacts directly with the residents of the area, even though the physical results of it have yet to be seen.

This second type of art is a fluid often unquantifiable thing, lending itself less to tourist euros and picture postcards, and yet with a potential to trigger many of the conditions which provide that other 'value' to art: engagement, activation, transformation. The physical basis of amaptocare, and also of Gerz' second initiative for Ballymun, the National Memory Grove, is the planting of trees.
“I wish to go more and more outside to be among the problems of nature and problems of human beings in their working places. This will be a regenerative activity; it will be a therapy for all of the problems we are standing before.... I wished to go completely outside and to make a symbolic start for my enterprise of regenerating the life of humankind within the body of society and to prepare a positive future in this context. I think the tree is an element of regeneration which in itself is a concept of time. The oak is especially so because it is a slowly growing tree with a kind of really solid heartwood. It has always been a form of sculpture, a symbol for this planet.”3 This is not Jochen Gerz speaking, but Joseph Beuys, describing the process behind his project for Documenta 7, at Kassel, Germany in 1982. The project, 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks), called for the planting of seven thousand trees, each paired with a four-foot high basalt column. Initially of a similar height, Beuys looked forward to the time when the trees would come to dwarf the stones beside them.

Gerz echoes Beuys' ideas about the value of trees, “trees are a symbol for nature's strength and aura, and in our modern world for social turnaround, healing and orientation. They improve and restore the quality of air we breathe; they break up the concrete lines, add visual appeal and life, they attract birds.  They change with the seasons and grow stronger and taller over time.”4 Where amaptocare and the National Memory Grove differ from 7000 Oaks is in the way in which the artist uses the planting of each tree as a mechanism to engage individuals with the process of the artwork. Each tree in amaptocare must be donated, with prices ranging from €50 (for limes, oaks, wild cherries and willows) to €295 (evergreen oaks). 600 trees have been donated to date. Alongside each tree will be a plaque, the text a response from the donor to the question If this tree could speak, what would it say for me? The texts come from individual meetings between the artist and each donor. It is in this process, argues Gerz, in which the value of the work resides. “The art is not the art's end. If you can do something through art it is to give people a sense of how something could be.”5

Initially there might seem to be something problemmatic in soliciting money from a group already socially and economically disadvantaged. Gerz understands, however, the importance of transforming individuals from recipients to participants, and sees in this context, money as a tool for the shift in position. Equally, in putting a notional value on each tree (although they are in fact subsidised), and insisting that the community meets that value through donation, Gerz goes some way to promoting an idea of ownership and thus protecting the trees from the threat of vandalism.

While Koons' practice seems directly involved with the economics of capitalism in terms of market value and collection, Gerz' process-based work, often seen as something outside it, can nonetheless co-opt capitalism's logic to meet its own agendas. Here, the financial transaction involved in the donation of each tree is crucial to the value of the work as a whole. Gerz describes the credit that people give themselves for participating in amaptocare as being like a credit in the bank; of value. “The object of this work is that people did it. This is a region that is poor, where you get subsidies to get what is lacking, and I say 'no', things must be donated…”6 Handing over money engages the donors as partners in the project, alters the dynamic from that of 'victim' to a kind of victor. Instead of insisting that art should be a freely-provided spectacle (a Koons Puppy), Gerz' art demands agency and participation from those it engages.

In a project like this, it is difficult to conclude exactly where the actual 'artwork' lies. In the trees, in the panels, in the text-meetings with donors, in the 'monument' which Bally-mun will also get (a large-scale map indicating the names of the donors, with lights to show where their trees are growing)? And perhaps it doesn't really matter. “Art,” says Gerz, “is like a little laboratory,” a series of experiments which, for this artist, is constantly changing through practice and engagement.7 Coming to Ballymun, Gerz considers that the only thing he knew was what he did not want to do. It was in this organic way that the idea for the second part of his project came about. “The National Memory Grove came from people coming to me in the text meetings and saying what about the towers, and what happens when they are gone?”

Realising that in the names of the towers of Ballymun reside the memories of the signatories to the 1916 Proclaimation of Independence, and that with their demolition, these memories will be eroded, if not obliterated, the idea of the Memory Grove is to commemorate the ideals of the 1916 Rising, as well as the signatories themselves. Subscribers to the trees (limited to 400, at €60 each) are also invited to contribute a text on ideas of freedom, justice and democracy. Gerz sees democracy as something forgotten by young people because it is taken as a given in their lives. “It will be 400 oak trees with a lectern beside them, and I want to get people to talk about about things like democracy.  And I want young people to be there, I think they are lacking in the renewal process. Young people are looking out of another window. Democracy is there, republic is there, freedom is there, so how do you get people to think about things that are already there? It is the same with art. Art exists, and most people can't think that it wouldn't. Most art of the twentieth century came out of a fear that art would cease to exist. The fragility of something is part of its generosity.”
For their Percent for Art money, BRL (and the people of Ballymun) will get an artwork that physically primarily consists of an awful lot of trees, rather than a piece that could potentially be quoted on artprice.com. The real value is hidden, like the inscriptions on the stones in Saarbrüken. Dublin City University (DCU) is initiating a major study into the role and effectiveness of art as a tool of urban regeneration, using Ballymun as its own investigative laboratory. It will be interesting to see what they conclude about the price and the value of this kind of art.

footnotes
1 Gemma Tipton, ‘Social Politics, High Rises and Some Art’, CONTEXTS issue 2/3, 2003 p. 4-14; and Sarah Browne, ‘Green Concrete’, Contexts issue 3/3, 2004 p. 17-26
2 See Artprice annual report Art Market Trends, 2004, downloadable free of charge at www.artprice.com
3 Joseph Beuys in conversation with Richard Demarco, 'Conversations with Artists' Studio International 195, no. 996 (September 1982), p. 46
4 Quoted from amaptocare information sheet, March 2004
5 Jochen Gerz, interviewed by the author, 12 April 2005
6 ibid (and all subsequent quotes)

This article first appeared in Contexts issue 4.3, published in 2005 by CREATE, the national development agency for collaborative arts


Links
Breaking Ground
Jochen Gerz
Jeff Koons
Joesph Beuys - Portrait of an art performace
Civic Engagment @ DCU