Artist Beckons Viewers to Step Inside for a Look

Franz Erhard Walther’s responsibility ends where his exhibition at the San Diego State University Art Gallery begins. You, the viewer, are in charge of completing the work, he says. You must define it.

“Is it flat sculpture or dimensional painting? It has pictorial qualities and sculptural qualities when you stand in front of it, but, once you enter it, you can no longer see it. It becomes an implement, a kind of pedestal,” he said, “and the body can become a work of art.”

Walther, a German artist who spent several formative years in New York, says he started “too soon” in art. Now 50 and living in Hamburg, he is so deeply enmeshed in a dialogue with form, space, structure and time that even their contradictions nourish him. The concrete and the conceptual chase each other in perennial circles through his mind, while in the air, his hands briskly sketch their meeting.

In town last week to install his show, “Wall Formations,” Walther discussed his work, but showed contempt for the mere description of its appearance.

“Description doesn’t make things more clear,” he said. “It makes them less clear. It’s a limitation.”

Solid, saturated colors--mustard, red-orange, gray, black--and geometric shapes predominate the heavy cotton structures. Boxlike compartments, some open and some filled with collapsed fabric forms, divide each work. These openings need the human, according to Walther, and he encourages viewers to stand in them, to fully experience the work in terms of sculpture, architecture and the space of the imagination.

“When you stand in one of these pieces, you really change, you are something special,” he said. “You are elevated in a way.”

Like earlier works by Walther that consisted of gallery visitors wrapping themselves in an oversize fabric book, or the artist’s own prescribed movement through a field, these wall formations marry idea and act. Walther considers the cerebral and the physical experiences of his work to be equally important, but he rejects interpretations that have commonly linked his work to conceptual and performance art.

“Conceptual art is just the bones,” he said. “I add flesh and blood.”

This introduction of the body as an integral aspect of the work also distinguishes him from minimal artists, with whom he associated when he lived in New York from 1967 to 1973.

“The measurement of minimal art was not related to the body but to space,” he said. However, his wall pieces do share minimal art’s predilection for repeated geometric forms. Sewn and dyed by others, they show little trace of the artist’s own hand, another common trait of minimal art. Walther and his contemporaries had lost faith in painting as illusion and instead concentrated on art as pure material object.

In the early ‘60s, Walther began a fervent exploration of artistic processes, bypassing traditional materials to experiment with coffee, oil, soy sauce and even air. Though his work has fleeting affinities with artists as diverse as Lucio Fontana and Robert Morris, Walther claims to have no deep connection with the art of his peers or artistic ancestors.

“I was always eager to relate to something, but nothing related directly to my work,” he said.

Strange as it sounds, he added, “one of my father figures was Paul Cezanne, for the simple reason of his open structure and the possibility of getting involved. You see in Cezanne’s late work parts of the page he left uncovered. I thought the spectator, through his imagination, could complete it.”

Walther, too, holds the viewer responsible for completing his work, though the traditional distance between art and its audience would probably prevent most from seeking the physical involvement he hopes for. In some exhibitions, he hangs drawings with the wall works, diagrams that read like instructions and “give ideas of what can be possible.”

Without these visual cues or supporting text, the viewer is likely to remain aloof, Walther concedes.

“It’s a matter of information. If people don’t know the questions behind the work, they don’t know what to do with it, but that’s the drama of modern art.”

If viewers do “complete” his work through their physical and mental engagement with it, can they, too, be considered artists?

“No,” Walther said. “I think Joseph Beuys’ statement that everyone is an artist is nonsense. Average people just see things. The artist sees form and structure.”

What his work can do, however, is present an opportunity for the viewer to develop his potential to see form and structure, his potential to be an artist.

“If I didn’t believe in that,” Walther said, “I wouldn’t have anything to offer to the public.”

Walther’s exhibition, supported by the San Diego State University Art Council, continues through March 17. A dialogue with critic Joshua Dekter and art historian Robert C. Morgan, titled “Franz Erhard Walther and Contemporary German Art,” will be held March 5 at 3 p.m. in room 512B in the SDSU art building.