MAGDALENA HOLZHEY: FLEXIBLE TENSION (COPYRIGHT: 2006 AUTHOR. TRANSLATION: LAURA SCHLEUSSNER)
FLEXIBLE TENSIONTilman Wendland’s constructions and insertions emphasize, shift, and even overtake the given character of a site without the help of complex sculptural materials. With a confident sensibility for the humor inherent in form, Wendland probes a given space for possible adaptations that would allow room for artistic intentions to assume form. For example, at Kunstverein Mönchengladbach, he utilized the overhead heating system—which, in accordance with the laws of physics, was not particularly effective—gave it a formal accent, and extended it. Possibly the strips hanging from the ceiling indicate the conduction of heat into the space below, but this interpretation is by no means definitive.
Wendland’s central aim is to create a specific relationship between an object and its surroundings, to offer the viewer new ways of seeing, as the sculptor Richard Serra would say. In contrast to Serra, Wendland prefers to use simple materials: PVC, paper, MDF, or, as in this installation, an ensemble of white-coated fiberboard. Here, individual boards have been pushed into form, draped, and pinned down to the point that give way to gravity, bend, and sag. A modern, cheap, anonymous material with no history whatsoever—often used for the backings of shelves and cupboards—is suitable for Wendland’s purposes, most of all for its combination of stability and flexibility.
In his text titled Anti-Form (1968), the American Minimalist artist Robert Morris claimed that loosely hanging or stacking a material causes it to randomly lose form (Artforum, April 1968, p. 33f); he wanted to shift attention to the quality of a material and the pull of gravity as means of creating forms without determining them in advance. Morris largely made reference to his objects created from strips and pieces of felt that were hung from the wall or piled up on the floor. The nature of the material and the conditions of gravity inverted the traditional relationship between material and form; material is not subjugated to form, but form results from specific laws inherent in material.
Tilman Wendland has developed his own kind of “planned coincidence” that always responds to the given conditions of a space. Wendland’s interventions could not be simpler. In Berlin at Galerie Carlier | Gebauer, he draped a large, white piece of cardboard, balanced at its central axis, over a partition wall in the center of the room. Not only did the furnishings of the gallery become sculpture, but bending under its own weight, the cardboard also seemed to perfectly mirror the arched ceiling of the space.
This kind of site-specific process always entails a certain degree of unpredictability. The artist never knows how the installation will look when he starts to work with a space. In a recent exhibition at the Berlinische Galerie, the only element that remained at the end of his working process was a 2 x 2.85 m piece of white paper attached to the wall at one end. Since this size of paper only comes in a roll, Wendland took advantage of a quality inherent in the standardized product. The paper bends and rolls up at one end all by itself, creating a small space in front of and behind the paper. In a moment of freedom, the material is left to itself. A formal notion develops a will of its own. Nevertheless, the artist knows how to make sure that the auratic, white surface retains a sense of irony: the tension within a standard consumer product is what generates form in such a nonchalant manner.
For Wendland, maintaining an economy of materials largely means harvesting the potential of the everyday; it also means knowing how to productively use the logic and practice of the working space. An old ping-pong paddle lying around in the studio, an object from an old work, can easily serve as a source of inspiration for an object made of corrugated cardboard. Or perhaps the rediscovery of the ping-pong paddle simply recalled the old artwork that was then included in an exhibition in Poland—as a photograph. The pamphlets that Wendland sometimes produces to accompany his exhibitions often talk about this open-ended working process, which continues to unfold almost as a series of associative analogies. The artist is continually examining how objects relate to one another or how an installation can function as an echo of a space.
For an exhibition in the temporary Gagosian Gallery, founded as a parallel program for the last Berlin Biennale, Wendland exerted a good deal of force on his material to bring it into a precarious state of balance. In order to create an atmosphere paralleling the uncomfortable and difficult exhibition situation, he compressed nine standard fiberboards from a building supply store into an eight-square-meter storefront, so that the boards held each other up and remained in place.
At the Kunstverein Mönchengladbach, the artist brings together a number of sculptural principles from his previous works. The space, which creates the objects around us, is characterized by a strong contrast between tension and levity. The works do sometimes push the substantial flexibility of the material to its limits, but this does not disrupt the impression of a playful, light touch to the interventions in space. This impression of lightness is underscored by an association of the white-coated fiberboard with large pieces of paper that have simply been pushed together and held up between two walls to form a tunnel-like passageway.
One almost has the feeling of being inside a model that is testing out sculptural adaptations as progressions in space, as spatial processes that have the quality of a sketch. Lines and directions are defined; width, length, height, floor, wall, ceiling, and doors are measured with the help of sculptural interventions. The viewer makes his or her way through a kind of obstacle course, in which the objects work together and seem to be passing on formal ideas from one to the next.
The vestibule-like installation at the door blocks the entryway and serves both as a threshold and portal into the space the installation defines. Its bent form, creating a space of its own, continues that of the tunnel-passageway, which has a rounded shape that is carried over into the arches of the constructions hanging from the ceiling. Similarly bent and pliant under their own weight are the structures that are supported by the architectonic details of the space—the large installation at the door and the long, outstretched tongue on the wall. Wendland has established an extremely subtle technique for taking over a space. He pinpoints the places where the work and the space begin to communicate with one another. The heating pipes on the wall, the strutting on the ceiling, and the opening of the door serve as underpinnings for the work and are even integrated into his objects. The installation occupies the space, and the space gradually belongs to the work.
Magdalena Holzhey
Düsseldorf, September, 2006
MMIII Kunstverein Mönchengladbach, September 3—October 1, 2006