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DEUTSCHE TEXTVERSION Letting Go | Maia Damianovic
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Walde disdains the separation of "high" and "low" while remaining highly incisive. His work offers a form of interaction beyond the simply retinal or textual. It also emphasises the role of the individual within what Julia Kristeva termed "intersubjectivity": giving a multiplicity of subjectivities an integrated voice in the performative situation, making something personal even secretive public and interactive.

Performative Interaction p. 1, 2
Green Gel p. 2
The Invisible Line p. 3
Handmates p. 4
Tie or Untie p. 4 As far as critical populism is concerned, Walde's projects tend to offer insightful yet joyful art for a broader public than the usual audience of "insiders". The work invites people to engage and participate; it does not push them into it. Such directly experiential work presents a shift on a reality paradigm, positing the "real" against the increasing "virtualisation" of life. Lygia Clark, together with Helio Oiticica, who led the Neo-Concretist movement in Brazil, replaced the Modernist idea of the artist as performer with a more open-ended interactive model. These artists, together with Avital Geva from Israel, were, from an art-historical point of view, the seminal practitioners of performative interaction, concerned with multiplicity, not standardisation. Their work was a precursor of the ideas of the directly experiential and critical populism in art. Walde, one in a small group of contemporary artists, follows their path in his own unique way. His ability to synthesise (and then perhaps breach) a number of aesthetic paradigms and historical precedents is both unique and complex.
The Big Perch p. 5
Loosing Control p. 6
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
    While the Green Gel, an oozing blob of bright gel-like matter placed on the floor or on a street, provides an undeniably scenic vision, it is not a crowdpleaser but a distraction. Its presence is at once attractive and disorienting, suggesting something both appealing and toxic: an unknown entity. Rather than satisfying our aesthetic desires, Walde is intent on twisting our perception, insidiously injecting harmony with disequilibrium. The directly experiential sidesteps mediated forms of representation to explore an art more directly connected with different life experiences and realities. Walde's artworks strive to closely relate cultural rituals and expectations, prejudices and ingrained perceptions in particular. Performative interactions, in their departure from the Modernist belief, are contemporary Situationalist works and practices that still suffer from category neglect, but that offer new, often perplexing and idiosyncratic creative situations dependent on open interaction with diverse publics. They tend to highlight public communication over more conventional forms of creative mediation. The crucial point is that of enabling different audiences to experience artwork in more direct terms.
   
   
     
   
 
 
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