The tactile cultivation of Handmates acted as a sort of ›fast-breeder‹.
Walde’s works hence keep returning to
myths of creation and fantasies of origin, theevocation of which is mainly borne by the materiality and state of the substances used.
Gels – macromolecular mixtures between familiar states – are ideal for this given their
partly literary tradition, even if they are dubbed jelly, slime or jellyfish rather than gel
(short for gelatine). In the late nineteenth century, when researchers’ attention turned to
simple marine organisms in the search for the origins of life prompted by Darwin’s theory of
evolution, Odilon Redon depicted fascinating yet disconcerting forms of life in his
1896 series of lithographs devoted to Gustave Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony.
Shown as rag-like creatures with tentacles each with a single pharynx instead of a selfcontained body, they appear to be gripped in a state of permanent transformation. Although Redon had studied medusas (13) (as jellyfish were known around 1900), his drawing showed a form of life which could not be classified under any particular genus. Nevertheless, the flexible creatures – like jellyfish – appear to consist of jelly, the embodiment of a natural gel. The medusas filled the imagination of marine biologist as well as of writers and artists. Redon called his life forms »The beasts of the sea, round like leather bottles«, hence referring to Jules Michelet’s La Mer, which talks of the »nation of working molluscs« and the »poor little workers« of the sea. (14) Jellyfish and octopuses were frequently similarly described and even amalgamated in stories owing to their peculiar materiality and their tentacles. Victor Hugo described the giant octopus about which fear-laden tales still persist in his novel Toilers of the Sea as a »slimy mass«, writing in detail about the revulsion produced by »Contact with that animated gelatinous substance, … that soft and yet tenacious creature which slips through the fingers …« (15) Despite his distaste, Hugo also expressed the enormous attraction of the eerie, mollusc-like material which has constantly entranced artists partly because of the fantasies of creation launched by its flexibility.
The closeness to the head of Medusa
with snakes for hair probably caused
Walde to photo-graph a lump of
deep-frozen fish while thawing and
entitle it Medusen.Quoted from: U. Harter: »Die
Geburt aus dem Meer. Odilon Redon
und Jules Michelet«, in: Re-Visionen.
Zur Aktualität von Kunstgeschichte,B. Hüttl, R. Hüttl, J. Kohl (ed.), Berlin, 2002, p 179.
Victor Hugo: 4th book, in: Begleitbuch
zur Ausstellung: Das Meer
im Zimmer.VonTintenfischen und
Muscheltieren, Landesmuseum Joanneum Graz 2005, pp 61 – 62.A similar fascination – albeit under different
circumstances – is exercised by the formless,
permanently changing jelly-like material
in science fiction films like The Blob. (16) In the
late 1950s, the dawn of manned spaceflight,
the dangerous, living jelly emerged from outer
space rather than the sea. The all-conquering
polymorphous material which had arrived out
of the cosmos like a meteorite was presented
as a deadly material out to destroy all life on
Earth. In contrast to the colour of Walde’s
Green Gel indicating organic life, The Blob,
dir. by Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr.,1958 Cf: Anselmo Aportone: »Beware the Blob! Look out for the
Blobs!«, in: Plastik. Eine Ausstellung
zeitge-nössischer Skulptur (exhib.
cat.), Württemberg-ischer
KV Stuttgart et al, Düsseldorf,
1997, pp 88 ff
