Opening: Friday, 05 September, 6–9pm
‘Higher, faster, further’ – the parameters for success in sports – are of little relevance in the visual arts. Here, the criteria for success are ‘different, new, future-oriented’. Breaking with the familiar and introducing new, previously unknown aspects to the kaleidoscope of our perception of the world are crucial. Overcoming the art of the ‘ready-mades’ of artists such as Haim Steinbach or Jeff Koons from the 1980s, but also the magical-mystical spaces of Joseph Beuys, and countering them with a new view, is therefore an approach that the sculptor Wilhelm Mundt pursues with his works.
With a new, significant space, drawing on a previous experimental installation at the Neue Galerie Gladbeck, Wilhelm Mundt now provides the key to a different interpretation of his oeuvre and at the same time raises the question of how it should continue from here. Mundt calls this environment Totes Kapital II (Dead Capital II), making an ironic reference to both Joseph Beuys and Karl Marx.
In a room lined with anthracite rubber mats, the sculptor displays objects at various stages of their creation, offering visitors an insight into the technical processes behind these enigmatic sculptures. Here, visitors can discover how Mundt binds together objects with which he is, in his own words, ‘finished’, objects that no longer interest him – including a stack of car tyres and an older, discarded work – into a large form. He uses lashing straps to force them into a rigid form that can no longer move. He combines them into an unwieldy block, which he then wraps in white adhesive tape to create a first draft that still has edges and corners, appearing almost plaster-like and pale. These monstrous white structures, resembling accident victims encased in plaster, are then covered with layers of black plastic. Gradually, the corners and edges are replaced with smooth curves, and nothing remains of the original forms hidden within these ‘lumps’. These shapeless clumps glow in a greyish tone under a neon lamp in a stuffy, blackish room shell that smells sharply of industrial rubber and all kinds of plastics – an oppressive feeling may creep over visitors to this place. These black-grey ‘stones’ allow for a completely unique and different perception, which differs fundamentally from that of the finishedTrashstones in the white cubes of regular exhibition spaces.
With their hermetic nature, the white and grey black ‘non-forms’ that confront visitors in the sound-absorbing, odour-intensive room conjure up images of prehistoric burial chambers, while the finely nuanced anthracite colour of the objects is reminiscent of lead coffins in princely tombs. This dull grey-black colour of the objects forms a conceptual bridge to lead, a material and colour traditionally associated with death. In his 1913 essay Das Motiv der Kästchenwahl (The Motive of the Casket Choice), Sigmund Freud impressively explained this relationship between ‘mute’ lead and death.
Wilhelm Mundt leaves visitors no choice: once they enter the room, a seemingly hopeless gloom and a silence coupled with a disconcerting quietness envelop them. This quietness is associated with the realisation of the inevitability of their own mortality and of having once been dead. The very fact that visitors cannot view the room from outside, but are physically inside it, leaves them with no choice in the matter.
From an art-historical perspective, Wilhelm Mundt’s impressive room forms a striking contrast with the works of Joseph Beuys. His lead-grey objects are reminiscent of the enormous basalt blocks in Beuys’s installation Das Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts (The End of the Twentieth Century), as well as the experience of the space in his object room, Zeige Deine Wunde (Show Your Wound). However, Mundt contrasts these found objects (ready-mades) with ‘non-forms’ of his own invention.
Moreover: Wilhelm Mundt’s installation not only carries the anthracite-lead grey of death, but the white ‘non-clumps’ in their stereotomic oval shapes also evoke the germinating hope of a new beginning, a ‘resurrection’, and in any case the possibility of recycling. As a twenty-first-century artist, Mundt has created a space in which he does not hide or conceal the methods and materials that give the impression of being in a space of deadness, but deliberately displays them, exposed to the glaring light of neon tubes. This ‘making of’, showing the materials used and the potential to transform these ‘intermediate stages’ into colourful objects, analogous to the pupation of larvae on their way to becoming butterflies, gives the space its impressive, multi-layered and hopeful character. There is also a promise in the display of how these objects are made, in this gradual process of transformation from bound, industrially manufactured objects and production residues, through the plaster-white first form, to the anthracite pupation and finally to the colourful, butterfly-like object. For it becomes apparent that these objects contain not only transience, but also the potential for future life.
© Gerhard Finckh (This text is released for unrestricted publication)
