... what is to be done with them and at what point
in the active intervention the moment of insight is to
be expected. Visitors may be cutting fictitious labels
out of a strip of material with a large pair of tailors'
scissors (Woobie #2), feeling strangely soft objects
that flatter their hands (Handmates),
sensing they should answer a ringing mobile phone
(Sleeping Beauty) or walking through a wall of
pliable poles that is suddenly in their way (Switch) – but whatever they are faced with, Walde
never makes any concrete statement about what
visitors could or should do, and he certainly doesn't
say whether and how the exhibition management
should channel, prevent, promote or merely put up
with the resulting actions. Walde's communicative
installations require visitors to take responsibility for
themselves, ascribing a high degree of charisma to
the individual objects. And amazingly, this approach
works: if the exhibition venue manages to create a
stimulating atmosphere that makes people curious
around the presentation, then the degree to which
the objects can be used, the amount of care or
decisiveness needed are conveyed in a way that
facilitates constantly new dialogues between visitors
among themselves, with the works and within the
museum, until the very last moment.
At the same time, in many of Walde's installations
the individual is directly confronted with the consequences
of his actions and those of other visitors,
because they directly change the work and develop it
further. Acts of communication, action and reaction
are not merely demanded by projects like Tie or Untie, Can You Give Me Something? or NOFF #4, they are immediately incorporated, so that
the effects of action and change become part of the
work. Many of these projects – Tie or Untie is the
perfect example of this – travel round the world with
Walde's exhibitions. They go through individual performances
(Walde calls them "Enactments") rather
than simply being installations. The challenge to the
visitor is this: one question is constantly raised:
whether and how visitors should relate to the work
and to what their predecessors have done.– Narrative as documentation. Something that is
pretty well a central theme of the Enactments is
also an important driving force in many other work
complexes by Walde: the power of narrative. Martin
Walde tends to place the stories he tells so well
essentially diffusely in the space, he knows how
to conceal them subtly in experiments or allows
narrative threads to break off abruptly: hence the
viewer's narrative delight shifts increasingly into
the foreground. So for example it is not particularly
difficult to imagine a story in which a sentence like "The rain is at a pleasant temperature" would suddenly
make sense, far from all absurdities and psychological
echoes.
(contined on next page >>>)
