After you’ve stretched it, it returns to its original state – although in this case it wasn’t actually quite as simple as that.
One characteristic of the world is transitoriness.
If you drop an egg, you can’t put it backtogether again. If you unravel a scrunched-up ball of paper and crumple it up again, you’ll
never be able to get it back to its original shape. But if you take an elastic shape, for instance made of rubber, and pull it apart, you’ve got a much greater chance of it having
enough material intelligence to return to its original form.
PW:We’re talking about a three-dimensional
process in which the manufacturing process
and the working process are difficult to
comprehend. In HAL Memory, people think it’s
a ball of paper, whereas in actual fact it’s made
out of rubber and is therefore elastic, malleable
and not clearly defined in space and time.
This means that what we discovered through
the manufacturing process of To carry around,
namely that the material approaches the state
of indefinability, is slowly transferred to the
shape, too. The material is basically already
indefinable. You think it’s rubber – but it’s
not, it’s silicone. The manufacturing process
is indefinable and the nature of the object is
also indefinable. Afterwards, though, it does
remind us of biomorphic forms, shapes of
nature and life. But at the same time, the title
Hallucigenia Products says they must be industrial
forms. And in a way they are industrial
forms because the materials used are industrial.
We have therefore achieved something
here: industrial materials are approximating
shapes which appear very natural to us. And
on the whole, it won’t be clear what’s actually
happening here. These are neither animal
forms nor industrial forms. They are neither
industrial materials nor natural materials. And
this intermediate state, I believe, is a way of
developing the three-dimensional form to such
an extent that it is no longer comprehensible
as nature, as an animal. You shouldn’t or can’t
simply say this is an organic shape! Instead, we
need to say it reminds us of an organic shape!
At the same time, this intermediate state has
been developed so far in the industrial sector,
too, that it’s not explicitly steel or a cube like
in minimal art. These are clear definitions
which have to be overcome because otherwise
sculpture will finish up a blind alley. And here
you suddenly have works whose materiality
and form open up freedom, i.e. an undefined
nature. And these are two clear achievements.
They are joined by another – namely that
instructions are connected to them, as they
are to all contemporary sculptures. That’s why
the work was also called To carry around back
in 1993.
Do what you like with this sculpture! I
believe we have now ...
