Martin Walde | Open Borders | Martin Walde and Jens Asthoff (page 4)


		Open Borders \| Martin Walde and Jens Asthoff

		continued from page 3

terms:		How can the material qualities of Green Gel be imagined? Does the stuff move?
Der Duft der verblühenden Alpenrose		No ...
	p. 1	... or is it perceptibly elastic?
Enactments	p. 1, 2, 5, 6	Yes, it is that, it's like a lava stream. It's almost solid, but if you jump, it starts trembling. And if you touch it, it's more on the liquid side. People are welcome to touch it as far as I'm concerned, ultimately it's up to the institution how people are allowed to treat it.
Loosing Control	p. 1, 2, 5, 6
Wormcomplex	p. 2, 3, 4
The Invisible Line	p. 2, 4	So the material can't be preserved? What would happen if a museum wanted to buy a piece like that?
The Big Perch	p. 2, 5
Tie or Untie	p. 2, 3, 4	They'd be given a recipe and would have to make a new exhibit each time. The stuff gets dirty as well. You can mix preservatives into it, but there are moulds everywhere, and they'll always establish themselves.
Green Gel	p. 3
Shrinking Bottles / Melting Bottles
	p. 3	Does your recipe principle also relate to Concept Art?
Jelly Soap	p. 3, 9	The work itself isn't subject to any limitations and so it's only picking up something that was the standard, accepted thing for Concept Art. But for me it was always different anyway, I linked it much more closely with Asiatic culture. And actually it didn't work in Concept Art, the things were usually preserved after all. That simply wouldn't work with a lot of my stuff, it would simply resolve the matter itself.
Handmates	p. 3, 9
The Tea Set	p. 3
Fridgerose	p. 3
Clips of Slips	p. 6
NOFF #1	p. 7, 8	So can a work take on quite different forms with regard to its object quality?
NOFF #2	p. 7, 8	Yes, and that is also linked with different degrees of participation. Wormcomplex, for example, was much more sensitively structured than Tie or Untie. Instead of just one element – the ropes – there were three: the worms, the flour and this green patch. The openness of the structure related to the element of self-repair between the public's interventions. People constantly wrote or scrabbled in the flour with their fingers. But the worms ploughed it through again at night, and the traces were gone.
NOFF #3	p. 7, 8
NOFF #4	p. 7, 8
Siamese Shadow	p. 8
Concoctions	p. 8
Liquid Dispenser	p. 8
		The circular form makes it clear that the worms are living in defined territory – they are totally surrounded by the public. So the external form of the work functions simultaneously as a boundary within an experiment affecting both sides. The Invisible Line works similarly: the rats and the public are kept apart only by an olfactory barrier...



		... yes, the works are similar in their territorial aspect. Otherwise I've done scarcely any other work with animals, I'm not specially interested in them as a subject. And when I did concern myself with the worms, say, that was more of a reaction to the fact that normally you're faced with cages, with closed systems. I wanted to do something without closed systems. A bird simply flies off if it wants to get away.(continued on next page)

authors:
Jens Asthoff
Martin Walde