Texts
Barbara Hess
Schwankungsreserven [Fluctuation reserves]
About some works by Walther Schwiete
…For something to be perceived at all is for it to be perceived as part of that situation. [1] This assertion by the American art historian Michael Fried, made in his much-cited critique of Minimal Art, seems to prove true in a pointed way when viewing Walther Schwiete's large-format, cubic styrofoam objects. Too large to be captured at a glance, one moves along or around them, setting the ball-bearing blocks, seemingly hovering just above the ground, into slight motion by the resulting air suction. The perceptual irritation that ensues can be compared to the feeling one experiences on a stationary train when another train slowly starts moving on a neighbouring track. There is no doubt that the styrofoam objects are perceived by the viewer as part of the situation.
That Walther Schwiete's works tie in with some aspects of Minimal Art and develop them further has already been explained by Friedrich Meschede - with an allusion to a famous text by Donald Judd - using the example of a series of wall objects from 1989. [2] This basic assessment remains relevant to the artist's later and current, diverse and sometimes more "expressive" production. For example, Judd's observation that in the mid-1960s half or more of the best new works were neither painting nor sculpture, but more or less related to one or the other, also applies to the styrofoam objects mentioned at the beginning. Their surface was treated in various ways with a silver etching varnish, which transforms it into relief-like structures or hemispherical cavities. Thus, when certain principles established since Minimal Art, such as seriality and the use of materials from the field of technical production - for example fluorescent tubes, metal sheets, or plastics - are continued by Walther Schwiete, this is never done in an unbroken way, but always with decisive twists: For example, neon tubes are formed into empty speech bubbles, which - mounted as wall works in interior or exterior spaces - only receive their possible "contents" from the context of their installation.
It is not only the selection, but also the use of materials that is specific to the work of Walther Schwiete. From the industrially produced materials, he usually chooses those that lead a rather unremarkable existence in everyday life and can mostly be processed by the artist himself, such as styrofoam or polyethylene beads, which are actually made for simple children handicrafts. Schwiete uses them in elaborate manual work to produce small-format wall objects with glossy surfaces that do not deny their "low-tech" manufacturing process; the structure of the PE beads remains visible upon close inspection. Instead of a perfect industrial finish with its fetish-like hard, reflective surfaces, here the focus is on an individual experimental approach, which locates Schwiete‘s activities in a realm which lies somewhere between that of a tinkerer and that of an engineer - to use Claude Lévi-Strauss's phrase. That means, existing materials and technologies of industrial society are used, not to submit to their standards, but to pursue individual and headstrong purposes with them.
Occasionally, moments of technical, economic or individual failure are highlighted. For example, the visual bracket of this catalogue is a historical illustration of the so-called Bessemer saloon ship, named after its inventor, the English engineer and businessman Sir Henry Bessemer. In the 1870s, Bessemer's tendency to seasickness led to an invention to keep the passenger compartments of a ship in a horizontal position without swaying, even in heavy seas. Bessemer's saloon ship, which was to set new standards in transportation between England and the continent, remained a utopia, an unfinished project: its development, which had necessitated the founding of a shipping company, swallowed up such large portions of Bessemer's assets that he was never able to prove the functioning of his invention in practice.
The drawing, which shows a cross-section of the ship's hull, is therefore as much a symbol of inventiveness and technological optimism as it is of the abysses of economy; motifs that also echo in other works by Walther Schwiete, such as the series Kurse und Gebirge* (2000), made of polyethylene inlays - which, among other things, puts a series of stock market curves into the picture - and the video WeltHölzer** (2002), which deals with the rise and fall of the matchstick king Ivar Kreuger. [3]
While the emergence of Minimal Art historically corresponded to a mood of social awakening as well as to a growing importance of trademarks and corporate identity programs, Walther Schwiete's current works fall into the cultural and economic context of market downturn and persons in self-employment, stock exchange losses and the no-logo debate. And so Fried's dictum quoted at the beginning - that something, in order to be perceivable at all, must be perceived as part of the situation - can also be understood in an expanded sense and sharpen the view on Walther Schwiete's works.
Catalogue text, in: Walther Schwiete, MAS|SEN|TRA|EGH|EIT, Ed: Galerie Stefan Rasche, Münster 2004
1 Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood (1967), in: Minimal Art. Eine kritische Retrospektive, ed. by Gregor Stemmrich, Dresden und Basel 1995, p. 334–74.
2 Friedrich Meschede, Spezifischere Objekte, in: Walther Schwiete, Catalogue, Galerie Monika Hoffmann, Paderborn 1989, no p. ref.
3 WeltHölzer (2002) cf. the text by Stefan Rasche, in catalogue s. above.
* Kurse und Gebirge [stock prices and mountains]
** WeltHölzer [former label for monopoly matches until 1983, literally WorldMatches]
Stefan Rasche
Introduction to the exhibition BRANDWAND, Kunstverein Oerlinghausen 2017
Brandwand [Firewall] is the title of Walther Schwiete‘s exhibition here at the Kunstverein Oerlinghausen - a term that actually comes from the technical language of architects, meaning a special wall that prevents the spread of fire and smoke from one building to the next. Here, however, the title refers to the central installation which Walther Schwiete created especially for the exhibition venue.
When we enter the Kunstverein, this installation initially appears like a large white box standing slightly diagonally in space. If we then walk along the long side and turn to the left, we notice that it is not a closed volume, but an angle opens up, a kind of "residual space". This means that we are actually dealing with a free-standing, L-shaped wall, 3 metres high and 5 + 3 metres long. Incidentally the way back is the same, because the installation is positioned in such a way that you can not walk completely around it, since its shorter leg almost touches the wall or the railing.
The result is a division of the room into two parts, which particularly corresponds to the different appearance of the two sides. The contrast could hardly be greater, for as bright and clear one side appears, as dark and intricately nested is the other.
The exterior of the exhibition display is covered with polystyrene panels on which the artist has applied a drawing with silver nitro varnish, which etches deeply into the surface of the material. The content indicates the destroyed windscreen of a car with five bullet holes - maybe the result of an assassination attempt, a crime scene photo perhaps, as we know it from the media.
Now we turn to the inside, the actual fire wall, which consists of large plywood panels, a modular construction again. Walther Schwiete has worked on this wall with self-made burning irons, burning it layer by layer. The dominant pattern shows a multitude of oval shapes, reminiscent of aeroplane windows or the perforations of film strips, and at the same time in the overall view it also makes you think of a huge, dark, monotonous house façade with hundreds of window openings. Accordingly, a spatial illusion is created, just as if we were looking through the blackened wall, as if through peepholes, into a lighter room in which quite different phenomena appear. For example, we see smoking chimneys, a flame, a car with glowing headlights, skulls or grenades.
By the way, there is also a series of small-format "brandings" in the entrance area of the Kunstverein, in which individual motifs from the large firewall are taken up again and varied.
As different as the two sides of the installation appear, they are based on a comparable artistic strategy. This is expressed not only in Schwiete’s special interpretation of materials, but also in specifically for his purposes invented techniques - which he employs like an artist-engineer. Here as there, he makes concrete, physical inscriptions that act on the material, burning the stamps into the wood or etching the lacquer into the styrofoam.
And there is something else that has long characterised his work: the collection of motifs and pictorial objects, of logos and pictograms, which he gains from various contexts and then uses for his purposes. He is particularly interested in the formal shape of these icons und less in the representation of a certain meaning; and if a content is transported nevertheless, we rather find signs in an open system - just as some of these motifs can be interpreted differently in a former synagogue than in a conventional museum.
Finally, let us move on to a third group of works, the so-called PE works, which are located in the basement. Even they are based on physical inscription, for they are inlays that the artist makes using the smallest building blocks of polyethylene. From these he composes picture panels, which are then melted down with an iron to create a thin, smooth plastic skin, which is finally mounted on small wood-fibre panels. As far as the motifs of these panels are concerned, there are for instance graphic signs, such as the white speech bubbles on an orange background, but there are also atmospheric pictorial spaces, for example of smoking chimneys like from an industrial landscape or of car lights at night reflected in the asphalt - just as if you were standing on a bridge and looking out into the dense after-work traffic in the rain.
Whether the vehicle we see on the large Styrofoam wall was fired from there - that may be mere conjecture, but this exhibition also plays with this: a back and forth of references, a dialogue of motifs and pictorial objects that keeps our inquiring eye and our visual thinking in permanent motion.