Martin Walde Turns Observers into Participants with ‘Performative Sculptures’

KOCHI:
The darkness dispels to reveal a figure cowering from the searing red light you triggered on entering the apparent emptiness of Martin Walde’s space in Aspinwall House. You feel its distress worsening the longer you remain. It is mirrored in your own discomfort.
The room has been slowly growing warmer and the light has begun to pulse. Only after you leave – and the room goes dark again – does it strike you: your curiosity caused its pain. The wax sculpture, titled Multiple Choice, is thus a kind of social experiment.
“The longer and the more frequent visitors come and stay the more this figure, which is made of wax, is in distress. The softening of the material could lead to the deformation of the figure. Our presence directly threatens its materiality of the figure. But it is an accumulating process that arises from the collective and therefore difficult to notice,” Walde said.
The Austrian artist’s practice involves creating precise conditions of an artwork or installation and then giving the audience freedom to help create an intended meaning. Visitors are not passive observers. For Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2016, he has created two works that force audiences to participate in the meaning-making experience.
Walde, seemingly, puts it to visitors to decide if the wax figure dissolves into the ground or disappears into the dark. Tellingly, there is no saving it – mimicking the lack of power in real-life forced detentions. A friend’s harrowing experience with interrogation inspired the work.
“We move into the room, and suddenly we see a seated figure raising his hands in a defensive gesture against the bright red light of an infrared lamp. We never see this figure in daylight. A motion detector activates the heat lamp. If a person is in the room, the lamp shines. It is not the aim to dramatically deform and melt this figure, but to prevent this process,” Walde said.
Like the process, the material is unforgiving. “I carved the figure out of a special translucent wax that weighed 460 kg. The figure is therefore not a reproducible cast. I worked for 4 weeks at the figure. It was particularly important for me to work with a material that does not allow carelessness. This tension and concentration is trapped in the gesture of the figure,” he added.
Meanwhile, indecision – ‘should I stay or should I go?’ – traps viewers. “Joining elements that are defined by different degrees of abstraction is a feature of my work. This creates situations that confront viewers with the heterogeneous composition of our world. On the intellectual level, I would call these situations hyperrealistic because they avoid formulations of idealising uniformity and thus confuse the viewer,” Walde said.
In Chain, he confronts visitors with a thought experiment. The silver sculptural installation has links that increase and decrease in size on each end. The chain itself – suspended from the ceiling in the centre of its space – seems to disappear shortly before it touches the ground. The linkages grow continuously smaller, becoming scarcely perceptible.
The chain has little practical use, but takes on meanings ascribed to it by visitors willing to invest time and energy in it. “This chain is endless when we allow this in our minds. On the one hand, it becomes larger from link to link, and on the other hand smaller and smaller. The chain is i
nfinitely large and infinitely small in one. Visitors recognise slowly that this chain knows no beginning and no end and that in it, wishes and ideas are hidden,” Walde said.