Stretch Sculpture

Excursion to Public Space:

The Sculpture Meantime (2001)
by Gottfried Bechtold
in the Südtiroler Landesmuseum Schloss Tirol near Meran

At the invitation of the responsible architects Walter Angonese and Markus Scherer as well as in co-operation with the curator Marion Piffer Damiani, the artist designed a passable path sculpture on the museum premises of the ante castle. Like the other artists of the exhibition "Stretch Sculpture", he also uses the technique of 'impression'; that is a method that - unlike abstraction - radically turns to reality and, especially in the context of a historical museum, subverts every "appropriate distance" (Georges Didi-Huberman) whatsoever and proves the artist to be a "wanderer between times" (G. Bechtold).

Meantime embodies the aspect of contemporary sculpture as an experience of time in an exemplary way. At the suggestion of the responsible architects Walter Angonese and Markus Scherer, contemporary art becomes a constitutive element of the museum premises. The opinions and gestures of the invited artists are not meant to be a parallel discourse, but are fully integrated in the exhibition. Within this specific field of references to historical research, the pieces of art are to be seen as an offer in the field of tension between perspectives, as a challenge for the visitors to incorporate their individual world of emotions and experience for an unusual meeting with history: contemporary art as a stumbling block against the temptation of too straight narration or as the implementation of a historical way of thinking in the sense of Walter Benjamin's demand to "brush history against its grain".

The artist has decided to lay out a path for the visitors on the lawn between the towering castle facade on the one side and the sweeping view of the bare valley on the other. Two meter long keystone-shaped concrete slabs define the principle of the composition.
At the same time, these slab elements serve as picture carriers and represent a vast amount of various impressions, from the medieval bride's cup of Margarethe Maultasch to the contemporary tyre grooves of a mountain bike - altogether a large-scale constellation of artificially set signs.

The path as a cultural archetype on the one hand and the impression as an archaeological motif on the other form the metaphorical basis of the concept. The key is the interplay of relations in the coexistence of the most diverse signs and impressions, symptoms and identities from completely heterogeneous levels of time. The rhizomatic concept of time ensures the survival of a bit of the growing complexity of our modern world into a reductionist presentation of history.