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| A subway ride from Munich’s central train station towards Pasing. The train accelerates past the Hackerbrücke. The right window looks out onto flat-roofed halls. Two men in the foreground, on a ramp. They are running towards each other, but instead of colliding they cross each other’s path at full tilt, ignoring each other. The sculptures of “THREE-SECONDS,” by Michael Gruber and Corbinian Böhm, have their public brought to them by the subway. The artists have enacted such scenes for a year now, on the ramp in front of their studio. The idea was inevitable; the sculptors calling themselves the EMPFANGSHALLE Duo would have had a public of random passengers happening to look out of their train windows even without these performances, because the subway runs right past their studio. What made more sense than to make use of this potential? But this public cannot pause to take a closer look; it is being carried away; thus the scenes operate with this fleeting quality, lasting just about those three seconds in which the sentences can be seen from the train windows. But why are they sculptures? Work with the present moment requires that one concentrate on the culminating point of an action. What EMPFANGSHALLE makes visible must on the one hand come to a head at the acute, dramatic moment, as in the case of classical sculpture; and must be open for the viewer’s beginning thoughts on the other. |
The minimal extension of the frozen time of a static sculpture, the little game arising from this, encounters the accelerated dynamic of its viewers. In this way the mysterious bursts into the passengers’ daily routine, calling upon them to invent their own stories about the images they see. Sometimes this happens with such criminological vehemence that the police patrol car has already paid EMPFANGSHALLE an occasional visit. The reason is that the ambiguous, and at the same time acute contents of the different scenes can make it seem as though lifeless bodies are lying sprawling on the ramp or that masked and hooded persons are tampering about with objects that look like weapons. It is not only in such appropriations of imaginary film motifs that the aspect of irony plays a role here. Together with other works, the THREE-SECONDS sculptures belong to the project PLAY; that realizes playful interventions in public spaces and interactive inclusion of the public. A complex work that arose from the original spontaneous idea is presented as a video. Jochen Meister |
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