Martin Walde | Open Borders | Martin Walde and Jens Asthoff (page 5)


		Open Borders \| Martin Walde and Jens Asthoff

		continued from page 4

terms:		And so what you have to do is find out when it wants to stay. I found that interesting with The Big Perch, that's the sort of openness I wanted to start with.
Der Duft der verblühenden Alpenrose
	p. 1	Do your works often depend on the cultural background as well their precise lack of definition?
Enactments	p. 1, 2, 5, 6
Loosing Control	p. 1, 2, 5, 6	Yes, sometimes something is strengthened by the way a particular society has formalized certain phenomena. That's another reason why it's important for me to show works in different locations. Things have often been appraised quite differently a few hundred kilometres apart. In Loosing Control and the Enactments , for example, laughter is one of the most frequent reactions. There are others, and none of them is right or wrong, but they do show a typical form of addressing things. I was interested in silent film performances for a long time for similar reasons, the aspect showing how failure is formalized. Comics formalize failure very strongly, Karl Valentin, for example, or Buster Keaton. If you go a step further, into cartoons – Tom and Jerry are a well-known example – there's a whole Gustave Doré or Wilhelm Busch tradition behind that, where ultimately the chemistry and physics of living things are transformed. You laugh even when the cat explodes and the bedraggled tatters stick to the window-pane. Transformations like that go back a long way in our pictorial culture. It have been a shock at other times or in other places, but it isn't for us. There's an element of abstraction in it that interests me. One that I tried to negate completely in Loosing Control . I deliberately cut out this whole transformation element there and went back to the fundamentals of what I perceive. My subjectivity comes into play there to a very large extent.
Wormcomplex	p. 2, 3, 4
The Invisible Line	p. 2, 4
The Big Perch	p. 2, 5
Tie or Untie	p. 2, 3, 4
Green Gel	p. 3
Shrinking Bottles / Melting Bottles
	p. 3
Jelly Soap	p. 3, 9
Handmates	p. 3, 9
The Tea Set	p. 3
Fridgerose	p. 3
Clips of Slips	p. 6
NOFF #1	p. 7, 8
NOFF #2	p. 7, 8
NOFF #3	p. 7, 8
NOFF #4	p. 7, 8
Siamese Shadow	p. 8	And you come across situations of the kind you capture in Loosing Control by chance, as everyday events, when you're on the underground, by the roadside, on a bridge, etc.?
Concoctions	p. 8
Liquid Dispenser	p. 8
		Someone once wrote that I go out hunting with my camera or pencil, but I can't relate to that. It's the other way round really, I don't want to see these things. And if I do come across them, the most difficult aspect of it is describing them neutrally. That would be the greatest form of poetry, describing something like that correctly and well. Loosing Control started out as nothing more that recollecting, a record of what I have seen. And then I started being fascinated by this incredibly perfect performance. And things like that are happening all the time. Only yesterday I happened to see someone in the street getting out of a car and another person coming along laden down with files and folders. They were about to say hello to each other, ...(continued on next page)





authors:
Jens Asthoff
Martin Walde