Littmann Kulturprojekte

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2002

Engel, Basel Cathedral, 2002

A temporary art intervention by Tazro Niscino and Klaus Littmann. Over 30,000 visitors climbed the Basel Cathedral during six weeks to visit an angel in his living room. Tazro Niscino, Japanese artist and Klaus Littmann, created this installation. The little angel is a barely visible weathervane on the cathedral, which Niscino took out of homelessness and created a home for him. Thus our perception and our consciousness changed towards the legendary and hopeful angelic worlds in the cosmos of God. All the more so because Niscino, as a Japanese, was able to deal with the subject of the religious and sacred in an unbiased way.

Involved Artists:

Tazro Niscino (JP)

The Project

The repositioning of perception

The Japanese artist Tazro Niscino (*1960 in Nagoya) and Klaus Littmann provided the angel on the pinnacle of the choir’s roof with a temporary home or, to quote the title of another of Niscino’s installations, he gave it a “shelter”. On the wooden platform to which one could ascend via the tower of scaffolding on the upper choir loft, he built a room, an isolated cell. The angel resided on the flat tea table inside the provisional cabin; it temporarily became part of the inventory of a typical living room. For apart from the rather strange weathervane fashioned out of thick sheet copper, with its patina of verdigris, the room was dominated by the taste in interior design common to the middle class in central Europe. Inviting armchairs were arranged on the artificial parquet and a bookshelf with a random selection of literature stood against the wall. Had it not been for that uncontemporary creature, you could have imagined yourself to be in a run-of-the-mill living room. Anyone who climbed to the top will confirm that the grandiose view over the Rhine to the west contradicted that impression; despite the cell’s artful mundaneness, it was not cheap accommodation but something that was difficult to comprehend, rooted in a situation that was both simple and preposterous. Sensible people will have shaken their heads. The absurdity appears, in fact, to be complete: two worlds met one another and the strange adventure, the utterly surreal montage, was as concrete as it could possibly have been; it could be entered and now, following its dismantlement, those who visited it wonder whether it ever really existed.