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 6

terms:	... and curls between chaos and the harmonious flow of action and form.
The Scent of the Fading Alpine Rose	The video installations use fragments of peculiar events found in everyday life, which – overlaid and accompanied by text – circle the room via slide and video projection. These overlap, scatter, collide and density in varying patterns of movement. There is a certain resemblance to chemical processes and their common "rituals", by which incoherent substances are mixed, when events mixed in Clips of Slips (2002) settle into the viewer's perceptive laboratory as an experimental brew to create independent realities, then disappear again before finally amalgamating with other events in the imagination as it roams between memory and longing. Grown by man for everyday use, the scent of the fading Alpine rose loses its hallucinogenic appeal. In everyday life, the frog the princess throws against the wall does not turn into a prince, but remains the ugly, slippery animal lying flat on the floor in Martin Walde's early installation, whose innumerable metamorphoses are reflected in the wobbly mass of Green Gel. In common reality, images of longing mutate into poisonous processes that are about to discharge in acts threatening or even destructive to man. It is the never-ending story about obsessions of liberation and destruction, of the escape from circumstances, from helplessness, through free fall and of the innumerable entanglements by useful inventions and unsuitable conditions. We see its ultimate plurivalent proof by the inner tube of a lorry tyre. (q.v.: Rolling Worm ; note) Into drawings, collages, texts, photos, etc. are folded interwoven stories of bombers that cannot be captured, of great inventors turned into murderers, and those who escape their frustration in adventurous designs of inflatables on the infinite stream of water where some founder while others are sent back to try again. In Cahors (13) it was decided to let the tubes drift downstream. In Innsbruck the tyre is immobile, however, it is the water that flows – as a video projection – in endless turns and twists through the exhibition space; it stops, gushes and runs on along on across a fragile construction made of lengths of fabric and fishing rods. Neither the incomplete image of the video, nor the sound is able to live up to the flawless concept of the great visions. At this point, the line comes to a halt and begins all over again in Enactments, which latter "break through the protective shield of our normal everyday being." (14) The rain has a pleasant temperature when rationality and machine lose control over the flowing water, the circulating scents and stories and all the other commonplace objects and events, and when the energy of the self-consuming candle discovers its origins scattered in the universe of fictions.

Enactments
Worm Complex
The Invisible Line
Tie or Untie
NOFF #1
NOFF #2
NOFF #3
NOFF #4
Can you give me something?
The Thin Red Line
Hallucigenia
Green Gel
Handmates
Woobies
The Tea-Set
Loosing Control
Melting Compactor		(13)Printemps de Cahors, Cahors 2000. (14)Martin Walde, Nordhorn, ibid. p. 49.
Clips of Slips
Rolling Worm
The Rain has a Pleasant Temperature




authors:
Annelie Pohlen		The text »The Scent of the Fading Alpine
		Rose and other Essences in the Poetic
further auhtors in this text:		Labyrinth« appeared in the catalogue:
Peter Weiermair		»HUMMING«, Galerie imTaxispalais and
Stephen J. Gould		Kunsthaus Baselland (Ed.), 2006.