... the Cold War the sinister, hostile jelly in The Blob was red. The fact that the living material, which in the film (rather like the jelly in Walde’s drawings) continuously expanded and penetrated through cracks of all sizes before immediately changing back into a mountain, was conceived as jelly is demonstrated by its heat sensitivity – for in order to make the hostile thing immobile and hence harmless, it had to be frozen in the Arctic.
In more recent science fiction films, too,
like Aliens, jelly-like masses form the matrixfor the emergence of strange new life forms from distant planets. (17) Walde declared the
»glutinous floating mass« moving in irregular puddles along a river to be »alien substance ... which could not be mixed by means of emulsification or homogenisation with any known fluid or substance.« Other works such as Concoctions from 2001 show bubbling substances in casks used to transport radioactive liquids. (18) Once again, we are confronted with the material visualisation of imaginary new possibilities to show what
could arise from the yet unformed. Walde shares his interest in the generation of new life
forms with science fiction, even if his works do not tell any horror stories but instead put
generative and evolutionary potentials up for discussion. They do so by using physical
materials of the present and with the help of dimensions such as temperature or tactility,
which just a few decades previously had no place in fine art.
Artists of the 1960s, too, above all Joseph
Beuys, used extremely heat-sensitive materials
for their works such as grease, which can
be easily reshaped by body heat. But although
grease symbolised life as both a bodily substance
and a foodstuff, this material did not
operate within the framework of a biogenetic
field of reference. And this is what fundamentally
distinguishes Walde’s studies of materials
from those by the artists of the 1960s.Cf e.g. Aliens, 1986, directed by S. WeaverMartin Walde in the exhibition catalogue mentioned above:
Martin Walde, Städtische GalerieNordhorn, p 84.
