Walde disdains the separation of "high" and "low" while remaining highly incisive. His work offers a form of interaction beyond the simply retinal or textual. It also emphasises the role of the individual within what Julia Kristeva termed "intersubjectivity": giving a multiplicity of subjectivities an integrated voice in the performative situation, making something personal – even secretive – public and interactive.
As far as critical populism is concerned, Walde's
projects tend to offer insightful yet joyful art for a
broader public than the usual audience of "insiders".
The work invites people to engage and participate; it
does not push them into it. Such directly experiential
work presents a shift on a reality paradigm, positing
the "real" against the increasing "virtualisation" of
life. Lygia Clark, together with Helio Oiticica, who
led the Neo-Concretist movement in Brazil, replaced
the Modernist idea of the artist as performer with a
more open-ended interactive model. These artists,
together with Avital Geva from Israel, were, from an
art-historical point of view, the seminal practitioners
of performative interaction, concerned with multiplicity,
not standardisation. Their work was a precursor
of the ideas of the directly experiential and critical
populism in art. Walde, one in a small group of contemporary
artists, follows their path in his own unique
way. His ability to synthesise (and then perhaps
breach) a number of aesthetic paradigms and historical
precedents is both unique and complex.While the Green Gel, an oozing blob of bright
gel-like matter placed on the floor or on a street,
provides an undeniably scenic vision, it is not a crowdpleaser
but a distraction. Its presence is at once
attractive and disorienting, suggesting something
both appealing and toxic: an unknown entity. Rather
than satisfying our aesthetic desires, Walde is intent
on twisting our perception, insidiously injecting
harmony with disequilibrium. The directly experiential
sidesteps mediated forms of representation to explore
an art more directly connected with different life
experiences and realities. Walde's artworks strive
to closely relate cultural rituals and expectations,
prejudices and ingrained perceptions in particular.
Performative interactions, in their departure from
the Modernist belief, are contemporary Situationalist
works and practices that still suffer from category
neglect, but that offer new, often perplexing and idiosyncratic
creative situations dependent on open
interaction with diverse publics. They tend to highlight
public communication over more conventional
forms of creative mediation. The crucial point is that
of enabling different audiences to experience artwork
in more direct terms.
