Sculpture

-2021-

Cast concrete, various materials, approx. 3.90 x 3.90 x 2.90 m

In this work about commemorative culture, Jankowski opens up a dialogue between sculpture and buildings. What happens to an architect’s vision when it is memorialized in a monument? What happens to a sculpture when it is used as a building? He takes existing figurative monuments to great architects and uses them as tools to create concrete pavilions – or Bodybuildings. In outward appearance, a Bodybuilding resembles a simple dome-like dwelling. But inside, the perfectly smooth interior is molded from a monument’s facial profile, rotated 360 degrees. Only at the edges of the opening does the human likeness reveal itself. Props provide suggestions for meeting basic human needs: people may engage with the Bodybuilding by making a fire, singing, resting in a hammock, sheltering from the rain. To the observer, these activities become a symbolic act and the Bodybuilding a platform for contemplating people’s reactions to their habitat.

A billboard in Metzler Park, Frankfurt, announced plans for possible Bodybuildings, adapting the body shapes of Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, alongside a realized Bodybuilding named after Mies van der Rohe. Based on a bronze bust by Rolf Biebl, the structure offers seating for up to twelve people (courtesy of Mies’ jowls) and a special acoustic for conversation, a pantheon to be used by anybody. Through the gap carved out for the entrance, visitors have a view onto a manmade landscape. The production process is laid bare: a pond fills the hole in the ground where the concrete was cast and pulled out by a crane, alongside a hill formed from the excavated earth. This changing landscape expands the idea of a monument as something to inhabit and respond to.