Martin Walde | The Scent of the Fading Alpine Rose and other Essences in the Poetic Labyrinth




	The Scent of the Fading Alpine Rose... \| Annelie Pohlen

	...continued from page 1

terms:	"In this abstract cosmos, representative signs of living nature and of the civilisation created by man appear, not without the quiet humour of simulated myths and fairy-tales, but primarily as the so called narrative pendant to an immaterial poetry of totality as a projection" These were my own words when attempting to get closer to the work of Martin Walde in 1985. (5) Three years later, Peter Weiermair wrote: "Martin Walde operates with standards of representation, visual perception and recognition [...] By altering these signs and setting up associative fields between them in his installations, in which colour also plays a part, Walde generates a character of fragility that is essential to his work." (6) More like the complexly integrating researcher of the 19th century than the present-day specialist with his addiction to definitions, Walde infects objects and documents with unstable notions and transitory feelings.
The Scent of the Fading Alpine Rose
The Scent of the Fading Alpine Rose
Enactments
Worm Complex
The Invisible Line
Tie or Untie
NOFF #1
NOFF #2
NOFF #3
NOFF #4
Can you give me something?	From the very beginning, the line dominates in fleeting registrations of competing and mutating realities. It links the "Reports" of the early 1980s, drawn and documented in photo series about his night time expeditions as a wandering star in a specially made costume, to the Enactments and Storyboards concerning strange and confusing everyday events since the 1990s. Condensed into vagabond, abstract forms, the line makes space sway. It appears and disappears, as a trace of life, in Worm Complex of 1997; at the Venice Biennial in 2001 it marked an Invisible Line drawn in scent between the territories of rats and people. It tangles into a mound of ropes in Tie or Untie of 1999, into curled forms flooding space in the installations – continued since 1997 – of NOFF (#1, #2, #3, #4); or it winds up the objects begged from passers-by in Can you give me something? (2003); it forms an 'image' of a fragile cosmos of scattered identities in a process that Walde recently set in motion as The Thin Red Line in Innsbruck. In invented objects and fictional instructions for use, in fragments of stories the origins of which appear familiar wit! out us really knowing them, Walde ties together so called functional research, longings from our collective memory – stored in memories, anecdotes and images –, and everyday observations of human behaviour. The mutually infectious expanding ways of perception in the "infinitesimally delicate web of everyday life" (7) mutate into a shimmering cosmos of poetic suggestion. For the Europalia in Ghent in 1987, the artist produced a room with two circles made of tin mounted onto the wall. On the floor was a large greenish frog with its limbs stretched out, fbt as a carpet. Both banal and poetic, the room suggests a model in which nature and the planets remain at a standstill somewhere on a time axis and it is impossible to ascertain whether this is the beginning or the end of a potential development.
The Thin Red Line
Hallucigenia
Green Gel
Handmates
Woobies
The Tea-Set
Loosing Control
Melting Compactor		(5)Kunstforum International 79, 2/85, p. 287f. (6)Peter Weiermair, in the catalogue: Martin Walde, Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna, 1988. (7)Maia Damianovic, in the catalogue: Martin Walde, Nordhorn, ibid. p. 20.
Clips of Slips
Rolling Worm
The Rain has a Pleasant Temperature
The Rain has a Pleasant Temperature



authors:
Annelie Pohlen

further auhtors in this text:
Peter Weiermair
Stephen J. Gould