It's hard to be ahead of your time. The inventor challenges the status quo, pushes the boundaries
of received knowledge. In today's globalised
art world, an inventive artist produces independently
in the face of the almost overwhelming pressures of
pragmatic interests and the international market. It
can often be an isolated role. Ironically, it also involves
rather generously laying the path for future practitioners
to follow, who can benefit from the earlier
groundbreaking work and perhaps offer something
more palatable to prevailing tastes. Despite the
much-vaunted aims of postmodernism – ahistoricity,
subjectivity, cross-category interaction – we find
ourselves at an impasse, in a time of a disintegrating
International Style of High Modernism. So-called
postmodernist theory, in the ascendant for quite
some time, is often not practically implemented.
Simply put, practice and theory do not match, and
this is one of the main crises in art today.
Many critics, curators and artists are dealing with this
situation by promoting such issues as the beautiful
(addressed, for instance, by Dave Hickey); the aesthetic
of invisibility; the re-emergence of the spectacular,
often featuring endurance-based performances (such
as David Blaine's in London) and even reality-based
television, which offer an outdated notion of performance,
turning the viewer into a totally passive
observer. Not to mention the almost franchise-like
development of museums spearheaded by the Guggenheim.
The cause is ill served by all this – postmodernism
was supposed to advance the causes of
individuality and the inventive singular voice rather
than historical precedent. Contemporary exhibitions
and artworks are facing a challenge that requires
approaches that could override the pervasive standardisation
of artwork, and also of public perception.For over two decades, Martin Walde has been making
projects that transgress formal and categorical boundaries.
His work defies a superficial reading. Walde's
main topics are "The Other" and an investigation of "Otherness". His creative effort is underpinned by
a thorough exploration of "critical populism", the "directly experiential" and "performative interactions".
These are less concerned with the metaphorical or
mytho-poetic, or any notion of "deeper meaning" than with instrumentalising the relationship between
artwork and public in sensitive and critical terms.
Consequently, they focus on the possibility of art as
an actuality, rather than a mediated representation.
All such practices search out connections with
various social, cultural and political situations that
would not only investigate, but also broaden the
scope of artwork/public communication.
