What kind of sensuous motivation is needed to melt a bottle? Melting Compactor shows what may be motivating. The arrangement is made up of a wax clod and an infrared lamp. Slowly but surely the heat radiated by the lamp, which hangs above the wax clod, melts a spherical lake into the pristine surface. At first the work cosisted of a solid wax clod, but later I replaced the clod by wax powder and pressed it against the surface. For me this had a
lot more to do with general handling and ritualized manipulations. On the one hand, the work may be created and recreated by everybody because of the wax powder. On the other hand, the powder suddenly formed a malleable and yielding mass, so that I was able to observe here and there how the loose powder along the edges was "fed" into the liquid center in the wax by the hands of curious people. The fact that the permanent heating process makes evaporate a certain amount of wax is not a factor that harms to the work. On the contrary - after a prolonged period of time the work has depleted itself. The only way to
prevent this from happening is to add further wax powder. I did the same setting again and called it Self-Containing-Reservoir. But here I observed another phenomena. The difference lies in the way the work is seen expressed through varying titles. Both works are based on the original script. The script made it possible for me to return to the point of departure at any time and to create a new work. Whenever I return to the original script, something completely different will evolve – depending on whether I place emphasis on the shrinking bottles or on day-to-day problems with relationships... Even though I have published and displayed my scripts several times, this has gone unnoticed. The simple, abstracted sensuality of the work Melting Compactor pushed aside the narrative content of the scripts.