Instead of a rigid, unchanging form, visitors are invited to try their hand at shaping the works anew.
In Production Limits for instance,
Walde spotlights the interaction between
body and malleable material by means of
a simple thumbprint on a cube of Fimo, a
type of modelling clay which hardens when
baked in the oven – and by setting out a large
number of small Fimo cubes offers visitors an
opportunity to share the experience. In the
video film belonging to the installation, the
thumbprint thus obtained is expanded into
an ideal shape for an armchair, reminding us
of Peter Behrens’ scheme of sitting down on
a large lump of clay and sinking into it like an
armchair in order to discover the most appropriate
shape for the human body. (3) However, it
was only the synthetic materials which Roland
Barthes lastingly enhanced in his legendary 1957 essay (4) and which he described as beingsomewhere between “raw, telluric matter” and the “finished, human object” that enabled
the forms thus obtained to be translated into elastic materials. (5)
brought home by Walde’s 1997 Worm Complex. The flour scattered on the floor about a centimetre deep in a circular shape may well remind us of the material experiments which
in the 1960s led to the study of variable forms arising more or less autonomously as a result of the material’s characteristics. Amorphous substances like earth and also flour were used at that time for all sorts of experiments of form, such as in the works by Barry Le
Va (6) and Bruce Nauman’s Flour Arrangements documented in photographs. For these works, Nauman spent a month rearranging the same material in new shapes on the floor of
his studio, photographing the results. (7) However, the worms placed in the flour by Walde
demonstrate a shift of interest since the experiments in the 1960s. Rather than concentrating on the informal trails of the creatures wriggling about in the flour, which was also fingered by curious visitors and moved about with their shoes before being turned over
again by the worms every night, the work took on the appearance of an experiment being conducted in a science laboratory. This impression was partly due to a round, greenish
spotlight shining onto the flour, suggesting that something was about to hatch – an idea
reinforced by the association of the illuminated circle on the expanse of white flour with
a fried egg. As well as revealing the behaviour of the worms, the indoor biotope also bred the notion that the flour was being consumed by the worms and hence transformed into growing populations of mealworms, demonstrating a fundamental and apparently also
Fritz Hoeber: Peter Behrens, Munich1913, page 7.
Cf : Roland Barthes : »Plastik«, in:
idem: Mythen des Alltags (1957),
Frankfurt/M., 1964, pp 79 – 81.Sebastian Hackenschmidt, Dietmar
Rübel: ‘Mehr Flexibilität’: Soft
Design, in: Formlose Möbel (exhib.
cat.), MAK Vienna, 2008,
pp 34 – 63.Cf : Dietmar Rübel: Plastizität.
Flexible Mater-ialien und flüchtige Formen
in der Kunst des 20. Jhds.,
doctoral thesis, Hamburg, 2006,
p 267.Paul Schimmel: »Pay Attention«,
in: Bruce Naumann (exhibition
catalogue), organised by Kathy
Halbreich, Neal Benerza, Walker Art
Gallery Minneapolis and elsewhere,
Minneapolis,1994, p.71
