Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth (1)

Poetry is a Utopian act in which the truth does not emerge through but in the language (see Walter Benjamin). In the poetic production process, both with physical material as well as immaterial, language enters the realm of things and the things acquire language, uniting facts and truth, form and content. This is the starting point if we want to understand the transgression of language that is represented as feedback between object and subject in the individual work groups of Manfred Wakolbinger, and in the Placements in particular. Manfred Wakolbinger is a kind of metaphysicist, constantly producing his own field of research in a new process, transforming states of aggregation, bringing them into opposition with one another and as a physical manifestation of the unsayable. He anchors his artistic work in a dual principle: If, according to Wittgenstein’s formula, the “limits of my language” mean the “limits of my world”, then Wakolbinger expands these limits by means of a reified language and at the same time plays reality off against illusion. He creates paradoxical perceptual situations, like recursive processes between bodies, signs and observers, in order to explore the basic structures and principles of the world. The artist’s persistent search for self-contained systems for a poetic language between body and signifier seems to be the basis for a structural analysis of the medium of language itself. The Placements are hybrid metal structures in different amorphous shapes that leave it open whether the viewer sees in them a system of hieroglyphic symbols or abstract, non-humanoid living beings — fossilised, or coming from the future. They look like drawings in interior and exterior spaces, cutting into them, creating both negative and positive space, and are at the same time objects that occasionally adopt a furniture-like character. So they resist unambiguous classification, questioning themselves in every attempt at interpretation and appearing as self-reflexive observers of their own formal manifestations as contraposes, symmetries and asymmetries. Perhaps they do not only have a passive relationship to their humanoid counterparts, they are also observers of the observers. Yes, these hybrids gurgle, gargle, hiss, click and move behind our backs, and are only holding still, instantly becoming silent signifiers when we are looking. But their sounds still echo in the spaces and allow us to carefully feel our way forward as graphologists of the inexpressible. The psychoanalyst August Ruhs describes Wakolbinger’s sculptures as “robot-like visual creatures, reminiscent of mutant dinosaurs”, as “body landscapes” placed in the countryside that “reveal the anthropomorphic or rather egomorphic origin of all experiences of objects and environments”.(2) With this, he undoubtedly aims at the epicentre of this alchemist’s artistic experimental arrangements. Both methods, the anthropomorphic (in which animals are attributed human qualities in relation to emotions, mind or personality, as we know them from fables and art) and the egomorphic (i.e. understanding animals through one’s own experience or reflecting the ego in the animals), proceed from the perception of similarities, i.e. a human “mimetic capacity” that Walter Benjamin saw as the central prerequisite for the development of language.(3) The reflection on this ability to perceive and produce similarity in the object- sign-subject relationship appears as the field of thought from which the “placements” have emerged.

OBJECT AND SIGN

As early as 1916 Walter Benjamin formulated the basic motifs of a radical theory of language which, despite its references to a “divine order”, provided decisive impulses for thought up to the post-structuralism of Ernesto Laclau (the unlimited nature of language as a system) or to Jacques Rancière’s current observations of the reciprocal influence of politics and aesthetics through language (Mute Speech). If we follow Walter Benjamin’s theory, language is not only a sign system but per se a powerful political instrument between subject and object. Everything therefore has a mute but powerful language that we must recognize and translate. This language exists independently of the vernacular language with which we approach the essence of things in a descriptive way and with which we create different symbolic and functional values through the translation and naming of materials, form and function. So, the thing communicates itself through its material expression, subsequently exerting an influence on us. Only in the “expression” of art, of poetry (as in the divine creation), can language, according to Benjamin, go beyond mere description, and is not only a medium of the communicable but it is a symbol of the non-communicable at the same time.(4) Manfred Wakolbinger operates on this cusp between the origin of language and its ineffability when he allows objects and subjects to meet.

OBJECT AND SUBJECT

The term “Placements” refers to the principle of duality in Wakolbinger’s sculptures: They are positioned in spaces and landscapes as silent assertions, and at the same time they are physical manifestations. Through the connection with the human body (ill. p.X), which fits into the objects’ cavities, measuring and translating them, this postulate is explicit in the realisation, and hybrid spheres emerge as the object and the subject connect with each other. In a classical approach to the scientific categorisation of art —according to Otto Pächt’s teachings (“in the beginning was the eye”) — at this point one ought not neglect to mention parallels in Wakolbinger’s Austrian colleagues: Franz West’s Passstücke (Adaptives) and furniture works, Erwin Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures or VALIE EXPORT’s Body Configurations. However any insight beyond the essence of any similarities is not gleaned from appreciating similarities alone, it requires the parallel analysis of the dissimilarities. While Franz West initially eliminated the separation between art object and viewer through interaction between the two, Erwin Wurm unites the person with an everyday object in an unusual pose, so creating performative sculptures that change our perspective on everyday life as well as on art, VALIE EXPORT installs or contrasts her own body to existing architecture and countryside, exposing this body to the world in all of its vulnerability, Manfred Wakolbinger’s interest is to be found in the level of language analysis per se. His sculptures as well as the people are both explicitly and implicitly proactive. This creates hybrid spheres between object and subject where the forces of action are balanced. Through the constant exchange of roles between the quasi-essentially animated sculptures, which are both signs and furniture, and the quasi-sculpted people the latter not only become a static part of a system of silent language, but endless feedback is created.

OBJECT–SIGN–SUBJECT

In this network of relationships, where the balance of power between subject and object is levelled, where the observer is reflected in the observed, language appears not merely as the boundless system of a constant exchange where the human being locates and understands themselves as perceiving themselves. He can also modify this system in the feedback processes. This results from repetitions in which a system of communication is formed through communication. Only on this self-reflexive level, according to the cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster, can communication become language, the possibility of modifying the relation to the relation arises from which relations result. So, from Foersters’ point of view, a self-organised and above all dynamic system of mutual influence emerges where no objective reality exists, but only eigenvalues within the structures of relationships. The names that we give to things are merely symbols of movement competence in interacting with an object, through which we inevitably declare this movement to have ended.(5) In his lecture ‘Die Magie der Sprache und die Sprache der Magie’ [The Magic of Language and the Language of Magic], Heinz von Foerster suggests that language should not be regarded as an explicable phenomenon in the usual sense, but rather that the magic of language lies in its inexplicability. (6) For Walter Benjamin, “the primary problem of language is its magic” since the essence of things can never be completely translated into language.(7) In his fantastic school of thought, von Foerster continues to think through Benjamin’s concept of magic: Magic teaches one to deal with the unknowable without knowing how to explain it.(8) Seen in this light, Manfred Wakolbinger’s Placements appear as ongoing processes that must remain “nameless” as such. Whether one sees this as a paradox or as magic, this is where we stand, for the time being.

1 Laozi, Tao Te Ching, Chapter One, 4th to 8th century BCE

2 August Ruhs, ‘As if it Fell To Earth’, in: Manfred Wakolbinger. Up From the Skies. Cat., Vienna 2012, Pp 122f

3 Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’, in: Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2: Part 2: 1931–1934, Belknap Press,Massachusetts 2005

4 Walter Benjamin, ‘On Language as Such and on the Languages of Man’, Harvard University Press, Massachusetts/London 1996, Pp 314-319

5 Cf. Heinz von Foerster, The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name: Seven Days with Second-Order Cybernetics, Fordham University Press, New York 1997

6 Heinz von Foerster, ‘Die Magie der Sprache und die Sprache der Magie’ (The Magic of Language and the Language of Magic), a lecture given at the XIV World Congress for Social Psychiatry from 5-10 June 1994 in Hamburg Weltkongresses für Soziale Psychiatrie vom 5. – 10. Juni 1994 in Hamburg.

7 Walter Benjamin, ‘On Language as Such…’, ibid., p.64

8 Cf. Heinz von Foerster, The Beginning of Heaven and Earth…, ibid. Blickachsen 2017, Bad Homburg