500 years of stalactites in the museum: the eternity of the provisional

In 1470, Pope Paul II stood in the museum of Saint Sernin de Toulouse, some still called it the "treasury" of this cathedral of Saint Saturninus at the time, admiring the largest relief cameo on display in antiquity.

This so-called

shows emperors, legionnaires,

Victories

, a

weapon tree and above all the zodiac sign of Tiberius, Capricorn,

artistically cut out of the black gemstone on a

surface of

almost twenty centimetres

.

The Pope immediately fell in love with the work of art and offered an exchange: he would have an outrageously expensive but urgently needed stone bridge built over the Garonne in return for transfer of ownership to his collection.

Stefan Trinks

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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The canons of Saint Sernin far-sightedly refuse, since the gigantic cameo, together with other valuables and apostle relics, has been bringing in more entrance fees and indulgences than the bridge toll could for four hundred years. The stone work of art was to continue to attract visitors for almost a century. Only in the sixteenth century did the imperial cameo change its place of custody to King Franz I, then from Paris to Vienna, where it has been proudly displayed in the Kunsthistorisches Museum as an imperial-Habsburg possession ever since.

Anyone who, as an artist, longed for a long afterlife for his works worked for churches. But even if one stands in front of works of art in museums today that are a thousand or more years old, their function as a store of knowledge and time becomes obvious, a function that they assumed with the founding of the first public museum houses from 1800 onwards in the replacement and Acquired secularization of the churches as former art exhibition halls. The newly opened exhibition "Futura - Measurement of Time" in the Kunsthalle Hamburg reverses the arrow of time: What will happen to all the works of art in the distant future? At the same time, she poses the no less important question of how time can be artistically represented beyond its Einsteinian elasticity in surreally melting clocks, whether it can be exhibited in its non-materiality at all.But the art gallery has what is probably the most vivid work of art in the world, around whose twenty-fifth birthday a clever show to answer the questions has now been draped.

In 1996, Bogomir Ecker's "stalactite machine" was inaugurated.

It is designed for the biblical duration of five hundred years.

Like so much else in the museum, this work of art is

a matter of dating.

The stalactite machine always wins the prize for the most impressive dating on a work inscription in the museum: "1996 -2496" can be read in front of the room on the basement floor.

Only in Hamburg's Kunsthaus does a stalactite, recognizable with imagination, grow from the ceiling and literally shows a deposit of time through the evaporating lime sinter.

The installation winds its way through the entire museum

The installation is not limited to one room, as is usually the case; rather, the artist took the entire building hostage to his promise for the future: rainwater is fed from the roof through the house via a 206-millimeter pipe into a technical room that is normally not visible, and there in a Art Kaaba of one meter edge length collected.

With this reservoir of one thousand liters, the stalactite could continue to be fed for a year, even in extreme drought.

However, since rainwater does not carry any limescale with it, it is channeled through a plant basin with various minerals in the foyer of the Kunsthalle extension.

A periscope is located in the planter to capture a real-time black and white image of the growing stalactite amidst the lush greenery of Monsterae.