The urge to communicate: On the sculptures of André Tempel Cable ties, tubes and hoses, rainwater tanks, spiked grave vases, buckets, more cable ties. Lots of bundling. A tangle of red hoses bundled into showy tentacles, their ends peeping out of a red barrel like eyes on stalks. A high-wire act, tightly squeezed, along a steel girder in a former power plant, six meters above head height. Loadbearing capacity: 750kg. No problem. The gigantic red structure balances towards the centre of the space, aiming for a stream of yellow hoses that tumble from a rusty beam like the heavyweight hair of a huge electric Rapunzel. Something protrudes from the opposite wall: like a colossal caterpillar with spiny bristles, built around green plastic water butts, the creature seems to have wormed its way through the brickwork while secreting a little fluid that drips down the wall. It’s cool, it’s funny, it’s disturbing and, despite all the possible associations, it’s a far cry from any kind of quaint naturalism.1 Ready founds. For his objects, Dresden artist André Tempel sources materials and components from builders’ merchants and specialist stores. He works within tight timeframes, taking an approach that is both pragmatic and restless. Things have to go fast, he says. But perhaps fast isn’t the right word. At his studio in Dresden’s Cotta district, the shelves are filled with boxes and folders of sketches and preliminary ideas. This is where the sculptures take shape, designed in three dimensions using software that also checks their structural soundness. As well as models made out of wooden coffee stirrers, the studio is also stacked high with things sourced from builders’ merchants. Using found objects, the artist constructs supersize works that invite a supersize response. These superlative visual manifestations beg the question of whether, somewhere behind their technical, plastic exteriors, our industrial products might have something like an organic life of their own? Something that urgently seeks expression. What are these things trying to tell us? Or what does the surrounding space tell us about them? Symmetrical and finely ramified, an array of tubes obeys gravity, cascading from a window frame on the third-floor of a former accordion factory—and then flowing inquisitively in through a window on the floor below. Inside, the bundled tubes spread out and rest in a tangle like a rug in front of the window. What sounds must once have been heard coming from here! Were the tubes installed as a visual reminder, or do they actually make a new sound? 2 At the top of a tree in a Leipzig park we find Ablage (Deposition), a soberly titled rocket-shaped object in a military shade of green with red spikes. Did it fall from the sky and get stuck in the fork of two branches around eight metres above the ground? 3 Tempel’s sculptural installations relate to the space around them, creating a link that is both intimate and ironic. And the relationship flows both ways, as some of his excentric objets trouvés make their settings seem as dubious as the works themselves. Materials like woven plastic sheeting, gigantic exercise balls, or simple wooden laths nailed together create three-dimensional images. Like cheerful parasites, they colonize the host surface of a grey façade. Or they meander along an existing artwork. Sometimes they just relax on a roof, squeeze between two buildings, or inhabit a park: long before every child knew what a virus looks like under a microscope, Tempel had three-metre black spiked balls frolicking among tidy boxwood hedges like eerie bubbles.4 For more than a century, and especially since the 1960s, classical definitions of sculpture based on human proportions have been being questioned and expanded by artists.5 Materials previously considered unartistic have found their way into visual art, as well as fragile structures and processual approaches. Whether hardboard or rubber bands, heaps of stones or arrangements of industrial materials, sculptures less and less often result from the traditional process of carving a likeness out of stone. Instead, they tend to visualize the “mechanisms of ambiguity and sensation”.6 Not the body itself, but the things that drive it are translated into the visual work. And viewers have long since learned to actively decipher these acts of translation. Tempel wants to go further, however. For him it is not enough to reflect on the relationship between viewer and work, or to create monuments to historical events, individuals or moments. In a more complex gesture, he explicitly addresses the moment of looking itself. When you first see one of his sculptures, it’s a provocation. It poses a visual challenge, without seeking merely to overwhelm. Like the experience of finding a really fine mushroom in the forest, the discovery triggers a short, sharp sense of amazement. This elusive moment is what gives meaning to the work’s temporary existence in public space. Tempel’s objects appeal to the senses on a large scale. Strange and simple in equal degree, they challenge conventional ways of seeing: If I switch this on, will it move? Can I fill these boots with water? If I stick my tongue out, will I get a kiss? 7 The irritation is intentional, inviting a reaction. It often seems as if the object itself is conducting the conversation. A wooden chariot full of crates added on to an existing equestrian statue speaks of an unspecified moment of change; with its wooden baggage, it towers over a prominent square outside the City Royal shopping mall in Hanoi, Vietnam.8 In Dresden, a giant girl’s head made of rough wooden planks stands in the middle of a traffic island, visible from afar. Is that a shout, a scream or a song coming out of her mouth? Passersby stop and wonder. Others try to climb on the sculpture. Someone even tries to set fire to it.9 The reactions are different, but the idea of an image marking a brief moment of transition remains. Each work’s discursive fervour results from an organized mix of paralysis and hyperactivity, generously offering to open the viewer’s eyes to the many opportunities present in each unforeseen situation. The sculptures derive their impact from their interaction with the space, exerting an inescapable grip on the viewer and offering a door to astonishment, welcoming responses from bafflement to joy, from stress to tranquillity, from hilarity to sorrow. They give easy access to seeing, feeling and questioning for anyone willing to simply take a look, encouraging people to discuss these forms of action, to find in them amusement or food for thought. As Tempel himself puts it, his work gives you the urge to communicate. 1 S./pp. 5, 6, 16, 17 2 S./pp. 38, 39 3 S./pp. 90 4 S./pp. 72 – 75, 7 7 – 79 5 Das industriell gefertigte Objekt wurde von Marcel Duchamp 1913 ausgewählt und in den Kunstkontext eingegliedert. Mit Duchamps aktivem Kunstbegriff nahm die Geschichte des Readymade ab ca. 1916 ihren Lauf. Künstler der 1960er und 70er Jahre entdeckten das Alltagsobjekt in der Kunst und ihren „Erfinder“ neu. / In 1913, Marcel Duchamp took an industrially produced object and declared it to be art. With this active definition of art, the history of the readymade took off from around 1916. In the 1960s and ‘70s, artists rediscovered everyday objects in art and their “inventor”. 6 Ralph Rugoff, “Mechanisms of Ambiguity and Sensation,” in Louise Bourgeois, The Woven Child (London, Berlin 2023), 11–18 7 André Tempel: YES OR NO, 51 Zeichnungen, Salz-Verlag Dresden 2018 8 S./pp. 8, 9 9 S./pp. 56–59 7
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