Publikationen

Martin Vosswinkel - Die Windharfe

The flood plain - with lowland meadows and willow scrub at the edge - lies as it always has. Nothing reveals to the uninitiated that a TUMULUS was erected here, a grassy mound, round and steeply convex on the outside, octagonal within, with an opening to the sky. On top the aeolian harp, sounding in the wind all year round.

Martin Voßwinkel, the painter and object artist, having made his home in Northern Germany's plains, has designed this piece of art, this space figure of natural magic, within himself and realised it through persistent work. By sticking, with the same consequence, to the project's spirit, i.e. its existence in the cycle of natural time, he undid , that is to say abolished it.

Right from the start the design, realisation and testing of this work of art were paralleled by the forming of equivalents in the categories of memory and documentation. Stories of those who have seen, entered and used the TUMULUS in the meadows in their own respective ways may serve as a memorial form of the after-image. Photographs are of special importance in memorising by concrete imaging like that process of land art or nature related object art. So are the drawings of the idea and for its execution and the texts about derivation and with explanations.

Now this which is added in time and space - chronologically as well as spatially - to the really central material work, forms the other, second part of its performance. Performance means, for both parts, fathoming the content of ideas and the experiences with the object. This second part thus realised is in essence the exceptional other element necessary to enliven the duration of the first after the period of its immediate performance which can, in this manner, be imagined afresh, i.e. be filled with magic.

For a long time the mural, panel painting, sculpture or statue took priority in the fine arts. For about three decades more recent forms of presentation, i.e. the mounting, the environment, the happening and the performance have asserted themselves more and more. The objects in the landscape, i.e. in the man-made and the virgin landscape, represent a particularly forceful and complex form of staging. Such works of art which are linked with processes in nature are somewhat succinctly termed land art. The theme is the interplay of landscape and work of art. In the emergence of these kinds of ideas of works of art, conceptions of the archaic and mythical were present from the start. The temples in Egypt's deserts or in the jungles of Mexico or Thailand, Stonehenge, Machu Picchu, the fields of tumuli and barrows in Northern Germany resonated in the idea of putting "signs of today's art" into the landscape.

Martin Voßwinkel talks of the ritual components, of walking around in the art object, of the sensual experience of outdoor light, of scents, of natural sounds, of the bond to the earth and to vegetation, of the encounter with air, water and fire, of the old unity of the four elements. This complexity of the sensual is called upon in shaping as well as in perceiving, the creation as an emergence and the dismantling as a decay, end and death. It is the idea of bringing art to speak parallel to life itself, parallel to the life of nature, basically even in uniting with it, with its archaic being.

All works of art have their place in the history of their discipline. This art movement has expanded and taken on special prominence after Richard Long in particular aroused world-wide interest in his works of land-art. Transitions emerged in sculpture parks, in video art, urban environments and musical productions. After Long, Heizer, Gerz, Perejaume and Timm Ulrichs, especially Hansjörg Voth must be mentioned in context with Martin Voßwinkel's work.

There is a similar cycle of emergence, being and dissolution comparable to Voßwinkel's "Windharfe" (wind harp), whilst in other projects like Walter de Maria's Blitzfeld (lightning field) in New Mexico, the insistence on a long duration perpetuates the traditional claim of the work of art to eternity which in league with nature is actually dissolved and only intoned indirectly.

However, one should consider, and herein lies Martin Voßwinkel's own approach and also his importance in the field of these versions - one could also say visions - of art, that the mound, the TUMULUS, is designed not only to attract people but to draw them into its interior, to allow them to experience the meditative form and silence of the room inside, to even use it and share their experiences of it with others. In this the artist has also gone substantially beyond his other landscape objects. This feature of perception and behaviour, at its best a communicative and interactive quality, adds a peculiar social component to the work. In a certain planned, verifiable way the cohesion so often desired between art and life is immanent to the work. It transforms into an object of use and may as such outlast itself as an object of art. On the other hand, the object's upper portion eludes usage. Here only the wind, air's breath, can play the strings of the harp of the Gods. Only the tones the wind produces may sound. It is an ethereal song, an unearthly tone, a distant tune from king David's harp "Kinor", from Homer's descriptions, a spirits' tone from the realm of the dead, sign of transience, reminder of the world's harmony being far away like in the song of the stars. Herder, Mörike, the Romantics have dreamt of it. The Jesuit priest Athanasius Kirchner has described the "Phonurgia nova". Martin Voßwinkel has implemented it in his burial mound, in the interior of which the living hear the "outer nature".

Prof. Klaus Matthies, Bremen - Translation: Joan Leisewitz