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Willy-Brandt-Gesamtschule und FOS Nord für Sozialwesen und Gesundheit, Freudstraße 15, 80935 München

Skulptur Die Unterschrift des Willy Brandt: Aluminium pulverbeschichtet, Neonröhren, Acrylglas, 740 × 110 × 10 cm
Skulptur Synonym für eine Strecke von einer Fläche zu einem Punkt: Holz, Ölfarbe, Stahl, L: 1600 cm, Ø oben: 25 cm
Skulptur Signaturendrehscheibe: Edelstahl elektropoliert, Ø: 200 cm, Breite: 15 cm

Architecture: HASCHER JEHLE Architektur, Berlin

Landscape architecture: mk.landschaft, München

Photos: Peter Neusser

Text: Mag. Martin Behr

The signature, that reflection of a person’s personality, is in crisis. Qualified electronic signatures and digital signatures compete with handwritten signatures and are also legally valid. The era in which characteristics of a signature, including its legibility, angle of inclination, and size of letters, allowed conclusions to be drawn about a person’s personality, is gradually coming to an end. Autographs are also increasingly being replaced by image documents, including selfies with celebrities. At a time when digitalization is triumphing, Austrian artist Markus Wilfling is preoccupied with the idiosyncratic signature of German Chancellor Willy Brandt (1913-1992). In his threepart art contribution for the new Willy Brandt Comprehensive School (WBG) with the Technical College for Social Services and Health Munich North (FOS), Wilfling installed the signature in white neon lettering on the canopy of the main entrance, which is characterized by glass and blue steel elements. The signature of the school’s namesake shines like a sculpture as a result.

Brandt’s handwriting is animated, dynamic, and abstract; if one did not know his first and family name, one would be hard-pressed to learn it from looking at his illegible script. The eccentric signature of the man, who was born Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm and adopted the pseudonym Willy Brandt in 1933 to escape persecution by the Nazis, caused considerable irritation in the past. An information board bearing the signature in the school’s previous building provoked questions and complaints. The supposed “Arabic characters” caused a stir – a misunderstanding that prompted Wilfling to address the disturbing effect of a signature. He positioned the Brandt lettering in striking three-dimensionality on the canopy of the school’s main entrance using a blow-up process. Willy Brandt signs the building designed by HASCHER JEHLE Architektur, lending it an aura of officialdom and commitment. Wilfling’s basic idea for the work “Willy Brandt’s Signature” is not intended to provoke, but to foster tolerance.

In his second installation, Wilfling installs a suspended, 16-meter-high, colorfully painted sculpture made of tulipwood into the shaftlike atrium of the five-story building. He calls his intervention “Synonym for a Distance from a Surface to a Point (Colored Version)”. It is a slender, inverted cone shape consisting of 16 one-meter-long sections, each painted in bright colors with oil paint. Visually, it is reminiscent of a monumental Mikado stick or an equally precisely sharpened colored pencil, which stands out clearly from the wooden fixtures and white painted architectural elements and creates different (color) impressions on each floor. The oversized yet delicate structure unites all the floors and accentuates the clearly structured space with its precise placement. Its color chart aesthetic suggests warmth, vitality, and imagination.

The third part of Wilfling’s artistic installation, “Signature Turntable”, is a polished, convex, rotating stainless steel disc that invites all students to leave their signatures using different colored permanent markers. Over the years, this creates a graphically condensed, multicolored portrait of the names. Wilfling’s interactive installation follows Beuys’ claim that everyone is an artist and also promotes identification with the school building, where one can leave their mark, immortalize oneself, but do so in analogue form rather than in the pixel world. Hand, color, form: all three works intertwine to form an artistic statement for (human) diversity, individuality, and open-mindedness.