Martin Walde | Molecules and Models | Rainer Metzger (page 2)






	Molecules and Models \| Rainer Metzger

	continued from page 1

terms:	Correspondingly – w e live in the age of "product placement" – it is the name of Walde's work. In Vienna, where it was exhibited before coming to the Kunsthaus Baseband, the work was called Blue Dolphin. But names signify nothing, and works as apparently entropic as Walde's wall inevitably play with names.
Waterpoint
Blue Dolphin
Frogs
Concoctions	Take a sandpit and fill it with two kinds of sand; one half with light-coloured, the other with dark sand. Then take a child and get it to walk a circle in the sandpit, again and again. After a while, the two sands that were so easily distinguished at first will have mixed into a muddy grey. Now ask the child to walk the circles backwards – by contrast to a film that can be played in reverse, it is impossible to reproduce the original situation. On the contrary: whether forwards or in the opposite direction, the tw o types of sand will go on mixing until they are completely indistinguishable. Robert Smithson, the Land Art veteran, liked to use this story to convey the effects of entropy. Human activity only brings confusion into the world; its law being disorder. The second principal thesis of thermodynamics makes it seem unavoidable: whatever is ordered falls apart and things that are differentiated become mixed. Man's work is the reduction of complexity. And every reduction of complexity adds new complexity to the world. Complexity is just another word for a big mess. There's nothing we can do about it.












	Walde's polystyrene is a material in perfect remembrance of Smithson. Like the tar that Smithson once poured down a slope, polystyrene is produced from a mixture of substances that combine into a synthetic "something" which costs one thing above all else: masses of energy. This mixture is now pulled and poked at in an effort to unmake it. Whether stuffed in cups or spread throughout the room, the final impression is: What on earth does it look like here? Quite entropic that's what it looks like!





	What we see and can assess for its usefulness in Waterpoint is a very special aggregate state; it is certainly solid, but not too compact, something that contains a lot of air, but also has something of a liquid quality, for it can be filled into cups. Of course Waterpoint is vague about whether it is now only waste – which in physical terms, it is– or whether, viewed practically, it may also bear a kind of usefulness. Ultimately, despite all its physieality and practicality, Walde's work finally stands for the third hitherto excluded alternative: It is art.






	Investigations into all things bubbly and jelly that give Martin Walde's work its special – should one say, aroma? – have their pendant in a form of creativity which has been granted
authors:
Rainer Metzger	the official status of art only recently.	(continued >>>)