WEMDING, Germany — You could pass for an abandoned construction site: a row of rectangular concrete blocks on a bare, square base.
But last month, about 300 people gathered outside the southern German town of Wemding as a crane lifted another block into place alongside the first three. Some spectators had traveled from as far away as San Francisco.
They came to see the most recent stage of the construction of the “Pyramid of Time” (“Zeitpyramide”), a public artwork that the citizens of Wemding are assembling at the rate of one 1.80 by 1.20 meter block every decade. There are 116 more to add before the “Pyramid of Time” is finished, when it will be 7.30 meters high. That won’t be until 3183 AD.
The artist Manfred Laber, a Wemding resident who died in 2018, proposed the “Pyramid of Time” project in 1993 to commemorate the 1,200th anniversary of his city. While he specified the material, dimensions and order of placement, he left it to the citizens of Wemding to decide how it evolves. In 2003, he and city officials established the Wemding Time Pyramid Foundation to manage and fund the artwork beyond its lifetime.
Foundation members have respected Laber’s plans so far, but that could change over the next millennium, as social norms, technologies and ideologies change. Barbara Laber, the artist’s daughter, said her father was calm that the project would “leave out of his personal control and go its own way.”
One resident, Karl-Heinz John, a retired auto industry manager who was at the ceremony last month, said he had attended every block-laying event since 1993. He recalled a mixed reaction to the “Pyramid of Time.” initially in the city. “There were those who said ‘this is great, a really progressive idea,’” he said; others thought he was crazy.
One of the biggest sticking points was the use of concrete, which some residents found ugly and monotonous.said Barbara Laber. But her father “was deliberately aware of the material,” she added. “He chose the concrete to be visually neutral. It is not a valuable material, it is purely functional.” Another type of rock, like marble, she explained, would have carried other meanings and made the pyramid more “monumental.”
Klaus Schlecht, a member of the Wemding Time Pyramid Foundation, who knew the artist for many years, had another interpretation: Laber played with the double meaning of the word. He may have been seeking to make time more concrete, more tangible, Schlecht said.
Other long-term artistic projects have been initiated in Europe and beyond, including a musical performance in Halberstadt, Germany, that will last 639 years; a poem that unfolds over centuries in the cobblestone streets of Utrecht, Netherlands; and a giant clock in Texas that will run for 10 millennia.
Last month in the audience were several generations of Wemding residents: children, parents, grandparents. Before the ceremony, a group of children had climbed the blocks of 1993, 2003 and 2013, jumping between them. One of them was David Dinkelmayer, 9 years old. Claudia Dinkelmayer, his mother, said she remembered attending the first ceremony, when she was about 5 or 6 years old. For people who live in the town, remembering the progress of the pyramid helps mark periods of their lives.
Later, after the crowd had left, some ephemeral graffiti was visible on the newly placed concrete block. Someone had finger painted the date in mud. It will fade away. As will all the people who were present that day.
But the blocks will endure, perhaps even 1,200 years from now: a concrete representation of the slow passage of time.
By: RICHARD FISHER
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6931163, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-10-10 21:50:08
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