Berlin-based artist duo Awst & Walther are just the sort of interdisciplinary operators who can make critical mouths salivate. Their heady studio practice puts out minimalist sculptures of a time-based variety and process-oriented paintings that reference colonization of the body by technology. Meanwhile, the two artists might also be preparing a dance, set amid gently arching neon tubes and the audience itself, for a European tour.
When Manon Awst and Benjamin Walther met, on New Year’s Eve of 2006, neither had ever truly made an artwork. Originally from the small island of Anglesey, off the Welsh coast, Awst had just moved to Berlin after graduating from Cambridge University with a degree in architecture. Walther, born in Dresden, was on a precipitous but increasingly unfulfilling fast track toward fame in Germany’s theater scene, having once been named the country’s top young director.
Since 2008 the two artists have been actively showing work under the moniker Awst & Walther, at the Hannah Barry Gallery, in London, as well as numerous other venues across the U.K. and the Continent. Their partnership has blossomed, resulting in a promising art career and a family. They now look back nostalgically on their early days. “We started dating and the dates became interventions in a strange way,” recalls Awst, 29. “A couple of weeks after we met, I created a situation for Benjamin: a found bath, an empty industrial room, lots of snow, and a small cooker. He took it as a challenge and created another situation for me.”
This artistic flirtation quickly gathered steam. “It was the start of an intense mutual creative energy,” says Walther, 34. “We never even really discussed working together; the challenges just turned into a practice.”
This reciprocal process allows their work to benefit from a seamless integration of their respective intellectual backgrounds, while also providing what they liken to a third life apart from their discrete biographies. Take Latent Measures (Component 11), 2011, formally, two black rectangles of industrial gelatin, each pierced through the middle with an aluminum pole and placed on a raised platform in the Hannah Barry Gallery. The length of each rectangle corresponds to the individual height of each artist. Conceptually, the piece draws from the theories of Czech architectural thinker Dalibor Vesely, who taught Awst at Cambridge. “He talks about this latent world, the silent backdrop that’s here and ever present, things as simple as the day being divided into light and dark, our physiology, the deep structures that hold everything together, that define how we experience the world,” Awst explains. “They’re completely obvious but not often considered.”
Gelatin, a substance that the artists often cast in sculptural forms, encapsulates this hidden duality owing to its composition from animal by-products, skin and bones mostly. “When it’s cast, you get these solid, strong architectural forms that are very shiny and seductive,” Awst says. “But when you realize what they are made out of, it’s repulsive as well. It also changes over time: It stiffens and becomes more like a relic or a fossil, almost a document rather than a piece itself.”
This emphasis on time factors greatly into nearly all their three-dimensional output. “With the gelatin, we’re not creating sculptural objects,” Awst says. And Walther concurs: “Latent Measures (Component 11) was about creating a space in which there was nowhere to hide. It quite directly mimics how we live in Western society. That is where the stage comes in, to exhibit the visitor as much as the object.”
As is the case with certain types of theater performances, the viewer is asked to react, to play a part. “Activating is really important,” Walther adds. “I understand Oblomov’s mode of just lying in bed and not doing anything, waiting until life comes to him,” he says, referring to the hamstrung character in Ivan Goncharov’s 19th-century novel of the same name. “But I also really like the concept of being active, to take life or a space on and alter it. In an ideal setting, the pieces offer a moment to stop, rest, and consider that something may be different from your habitual way of thinking.”
This tendency toward subtly challenging norms can also be seen in Latent Measures (Component 28), 2012, a series of polished aluminum poles that pierce the walls of six rooms in the recently rehung Boros Bunker, collectors Karen and Christian Boros’s private Berlin museum in a former World War II bomb shelter. The work perhaps dares viewers to climb on or touch it. Great comment has been generated by the marks of spackling left around the poles’ entries and exits into the concrete walls, which Awst likens to scars: “The poles are really sleek and polished, while the entrance marks give a certain contrast.”
“Imperfection speaks of process,” Walther adds. People don’t “want to see what goes behind the end result they’re presented with, but we find beauty in it.” Often an attractive veneer is a means to an end for the two. “Beauty is a Trojan horse,” he continues. “You need it to trigger something in the viewer in the first place, whatever the end result may be.”
Adds Awst: “The work can be appreciated on this purely visual level, but should you want to, you can start to unravel and go deeper and deeper.”
That unraveling might take the viewer though tomes of sociological theory or into a more personal deconstruction of experience, but it generally begins at an instinctual place. Inspiration for their recent “Biometric Paintings,” acrylic-on-paper layerings of the pair’s index-fingerprints arranged in a circle, came during the couple’s trip to New York in October 2011. This being Awst’s initial visit to the States and Walther’s first return in many years, they were surprised when U.S. Customs officials at John F. Kennedy International Airport demanded their fingerprints, a routine discomfort in the post-9/11 security climate. The artists began thinking about how it related to their previous works’ treatment of abstract bodily or societal traces. “I’m obsessed with these fingerprints as the most primitive form of mark making,” Walther says.
Awst is particularly fascinated by the increasingly intertwined nature of technology and biology. By incorporating something as accessible as a fingerprint, the works are opened up to many audiences: A child might relate to his kindergarten painting experiments; a convict, his incarceration; and a collector, the authorization required to access his Swiss account.
With each piece in the series, the artists present an analytical field for better understanding of social relations. For Awst & Walther, these artworks provide a chance to read, explore, and continue to challenge each other, and, as Walther puts it, jokingly quoting Lenin, the possibility of “learning, learning, learning.”
A year into their creating the biometric-oriented series, the two artists are now trying to conceive of ways to bring this concept off the paper. “We’re working on how those physical traces of the body can be brought out into space,” says Awst, adding that they have been looking to various 3-D modeling and printing techniques. “We’re starting with the same point, uses of the biometric, but looking also at how technology affects the way we experience space.” When considered as a representative case study of their practice, the paintings provide a rather apt summation. The pieces look simple, just as Latent Measures (Component 11) might look seductive. But viewing them can become a matter of going beyond the surface. As Awst puts it, “People want a product, but I don’t think our work is easy to consume. It needs a certain investment from whoever is looking at it. There might be a framework in which to see or understand the work, but it’s not prescriptive,” she says. “We don’t pretend to have answers.”
This article appears in the April 2013 issue of Modern Painters.