DAILY PIC: A visitor trying out one of the 58 fabric elements in Franz Erhard Walther’s “First Work Set,” a series of interactive objects made between 1963 and 1969 and now on display at the Dia Art Foundation’s Beacon campus. Other elements in the set invite you to climb inside a kind of 6-man sleeping bag, or to stick your head into a tube of fabric with another person at its other end. Dia calls them “provocative meditations on art as temporal, subjective, and self-guided acts of doing,” and that seems about right. All art only becomes complete when an observer has experienced it, and Walther makes that fact the fulcrum of his work.
The only thing is, in Dia’s ultra-clean spaces, where Walther’s pieces can only be experienced under the closest supervision, the obvious humor in his propositions – the fact that he’s inviting us to play with art – gets drained almost completely away. In yesterday’s Daily Pic, I wrote about how perfectly the sober Dia ethos suits its great abstractions. With Walther, that almost sacral sobriety does more harm than good. Rather than protect Walther’s originals, as relics of the moment of their making, I’d let visitors use them to pieces, then remake them to be used up again.
(Photos by Paula Court, courtesy Dia Art Foundation, NY)
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