And it’s taken hard work hard to create this form, bei it a person or an abstract figure, a cube or a cuboid, etc. But it’s different with you – for here the form is subordinated to the action. In other words, the form is produced by the action. It’s still sculpture, but the principle has been reversed. Whereas previously the hand and the action were slavishly subordinated to the intended form, now the form has become the product of the hand and the action. It’s sculptural work, but different. And in this way, an entirely new concept of sculpture has emerged.
MW:Let me briefly demonstrate that with
these ashtrays. I first used them at a workshop
with young architects whom I wanted to give
an instrument they could use at any time to
draw and organise their sketches. It’s actually
a simply organisational form. If you trace the
contours in this way with an ashtray, the result
is a geometrical form consisting of a very simple
yet extremely complex outline. (compare with Solaris; note)PW:And as we can see, the form is the result
of an action, not the other way round.MW:For example, in order to operate Battle Angel, the viewer/user is confronted withimprovising a series of movements, as otherwise the whole thing will remain on the floor
once it’s collapsed. I continuously provoke these new, unfamiliar hand movements. I once
tried to formulate this as follows: What would happen if instead of laces or Velcro, we woke
up one morning to find completely new ways of doing up our shoes? It would be chaos!
Even if the new method was very simple, we wouldn’t understand how it worked. Manual
operations and mental operations become automatic and part of our vocabulary – just as
with language.
PW:Hence the tools need to be completely
thought out. It’s the ambivalence of theinterface between sculpture and nature which is repeatedly challenged. Would you like to
say anything else about those paper objects over there?
MW:Bag-Turn-Brick is something I spontaneously
developed just before the exhibition I saw the paper sacks
and brought them here without any idea of
what I was going to do with them. I thought
to myself that I would make a hollow form,
a brick out of this paper sack. Then I developed
the cardboard for it. Paper sacks often
used to be made in prisons. That was always
simple assembly-line work done not yet by
machine but by human workers who were
very cheap. The fact that this paper sack in its
non-volume presented a great challenge for
teamwork was something I noted in a number
of photographic documentations of my exhibitions. People worked together on an object in
