In his exhibition “Unter Beobachtung” (Under Surveillance), Dresden-based artist Christian Schönwälder transfigures factory equipment and industrial containers into ritual vessels. The respective hopper and filter of Teiler (Divider; all works 2008) and Snoop still hold the residue-caked felts that were perhaps once used to extract a desired elixir from muddy sludge. Informed by the formal qualities of mundane objects, from construction-site apparatuses to shop canopies to street dumpsters, Schönwälder’s sculptures recast the routine as magic and mysterious. In Ohne Titel (Untitled), four stout wooden legs peek out from beneath insulation foam that has overwhelmed its support, hardening into a shiny, lumpy black shell. But whereas in British artist Roger Hiorns’s works of similar construction, the frothing foam that gradually envelops its generating structure brings the sculptures to life, Ohne Titel appears more like a petrified cadaver.
The stained wooden planks of Schönwälder’s sculptures are given a lustrous patina reminiscent of tribal fetish objects that have been artificially aged and “worn” in preparation for sale on the art market. As anthropologist Christopher Steiner explains, in counterfeiting authenticity, age is less important than evidence the object has indeed been used. In Schönwälder’s wooden reinterpretations of objects whose cold surfaces were originally metallic and synthetic, the sculptures’ rich lacquered skins call out to be touched. Steiner quotes connoisseur Raoul Lehuard’s affirmation that “for a sculpture to be authentic, it must not only be derived from a formal truth, but its language must also be derived from a sacred truth.” Schönwälder’s practice of refashioning ordinary objects with the aura of the theurgic adheres to Lehuard’s counsel not to fool rich collectors, but to evoke associations that force us to contemplate the transience of cultures, including our own.
