Memorial for the Unknown Artist

Memorial for the Unknown Artist extends Schütte’s work on the theme of memory from the 1980s onwards. What’s specific about the Memorial for the Unknown Artist is the way it makes the individual, anonymous figure into a conduit for col­lective commemoration. This sculpture subverts the codes of traditional funerary art and is reminiscent of the debates that took place in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s around the erection of statues for the victims of communism after those dedicated to its heroes had been toppled. A funerary anti-monument, the Memorial for the Unknown Artist is in close dia­logue with one of Schütte’s earliest productions, Mein Grab [My Grave] (1981), in which he imagined his own burial and inserted a provisional date of death: March 25, 1996. This sar­castic gesture expressed the clear-sightedness of a young artist who had accepted the vagaries of fame and the chance nature of any artistic career.