The Wall of Change
Since the revolution of information we have become indefinable.
In other words: we cannot be located in either time or space.
Vilém Flusser

An ARTificial track crosses reality, curves in its reflection, and comes full circle: a metaphor for the point of no return?

Time and place: in December 1986, at the new street car depot (in Austria called a "Remise") of the Municipal Transport Facilities in the Steyrergasse, Graz. The origin of the word Remise - remittere: to send back, to throw back - has been given substance in this work by Wolfgang Temmel. Remise as the theme of a so-called Kunst-am-Bau competition provoked his resistance, resistance to the distorted zeitgeist of post-modern sandwich architecture. Temmel opens up trivial architecture originally designed to accommodate in and out-going street cars and makes it a - transparent - evocative art space. Thrown back into the unreality of a useless ARTificial track which, branching off from a functioning one, questions what is not further solvable. Public transport is simultaneously the terminus and the starting point for the paradox of a self-reflecting thought space such as only art is capable of establishing.

It is precisely the epistemological function of art reputed dead in the 80s that Temmel revives in this object. The 60-m² reflective surface of chrome-nickel steel does not break a hole in the wall, but takes us to the after-images of a concept. A thought track crosses the to-and-fro course of public communication and encompasses its functional element. A tree grows between the rails, as if it had deliberately put itself in the way of progress. Passers-by experience the continuous re-conception of realities beyond all thought lines, ones which can, however, be deciphered on this side of the facade.

With this work, Wolfgang Temmel has staged a derailment. In a certain sense he has fashioned a deconstructivist gap with his architecture of the event: in the never-ending play of references, permutations and substitutions, a closed system of derailment (Derrida). Nonetheless, unlike the deconstructivist architecture of architecture, Temmel's initial point is nourished by making a topic of what cannot be represented, by negotiating a conceptual space.

The result is discernible in the - moving - reflections: with this Wall of Change, Temmel throws us back into the breadth of art's tracks and their endless ramification of existence, into the open.

Horst Gerhard Haberl