Martin Walde | The Scent of the Fading Alpine Rose and other Essences in the Poetic Labyrinth




	The Scent of the Fading Alpine Rose... \| Annelie Pohlen

	...continued from page 5

terms:	they appear diffuse giving reason for rationality to reject them as unsuitable. Depicted they might shimmer as unfinished lines in transparent colours, suddenly appearing and vanishing again in tales and anecdotes, just like the figures in Walde's Enactments; housed with no protection in unstable structures that form projection surfaces for appearances without bodily presence. Martin Walde's found and invented form resembles a soap bubble, as well as the fortune-teller's crystal ball. At sleep and in a voluntarily induced trance, they offer insights into a cosmos beyond the track of time that reflects reality in its entirety. Touching firm ground, the bubble bursts into an amorphous stain and the ball shatters to bits.
The Scent of the Fading Alpine Rose
The Scent of the Fading Alpine Rose
Enactments
Worm Complex
The Invisible Line
Tie or Untie
NOFF #1
NOFF #2
NOFF #3	The Enactments create atmospheres where something happens and vanishes again, a reason for Walde to repeatedly return to the scene of the action, in order to capture what has disappeared without destroying its ephemer quality. It is on paper and the wall or, alternatively by way of photography that Walde tries to portray the sites where the actors had left their footprints. The line is the medium to subtly shift trivial and eccentric events and objects into "interim acts" for complex projections in words and pictures. The drawings in a true sense are the storyboards for any type of experimental emotional displays between reality and hallucination. The Enactments woven into Clips of Slips thus seem to be also interwoven in the installations Tie or Untie and NOFF, so as to make Walde's complex vice versa of concentration and expansion appear as 'exemplary' instructions for handling everyday reality and its conceivable transfers into and/or within art.
NOFF #4
Can you give me something?
The Thin Red Line
Hallucigenia
Green Gel
Handmates
Woobies
The Tea-Set
Loosing Control
Melting Compactor		(11)Martin Walde in conversation with Jens Asthoff, ibid. p. 76. (12)On the visitor's participation in Walde's work, see also Maia Damianovic, ibid. p. 12 ff.
Clips of Slips	"Some works definitely had the potential to transform into rituals, scientific "rituals", for example ... and then the reaction is not what it is expected to be." (11) Rituals are firmly established instructions for a behaviour. Science follows set aims. But even science – knowing about its current limitations – distinguishes between practices aimed towards a specific goal and fundamental research the outcome of which typically is unknown. The artist is free to turn the scientific ritual into an experimental game ranging between set instructions for action and open ending. In Tie or Untie, as much as in NOFF, visitors are explicitly involved, as active researchers. (12) A great variety of action is inherent in the flexible rope, but only one in the stiff acrylic band. All of them are physical and chemical processes that can be set into motion in one way or another aiming normally at creating a working order. The unimpeded interplay in the way visitors act – all of them dependent on different cultural backgrounds – and the possibilities of a common raw material seem to bring about a poetic balance in both the heaps of entangled ropes ...(continued >>>)
Rolling Worm
The Rain has a Pleasant Temperature
The Rain has a Pleasant Temperature



authors:
Annelie Pohlen

further auhtors in this text:
Peter Weiermair
Stephen J. Gould