Robert Walsers Sprachbildlichkeit: Im Trialog mit Thomas Hirschhorns Ruinen und Mark Wallingers Schattenspielen

Abstract In the linguistic imagery of his texts and also in his consistent biographical retreat, the author Robert Walser presents the riddles of an aesthetic relationship between self and other to the world. From the diversity of his extremely relational view of the world emerges a tension-rich charge of his texts, which is taken up by numerous visual artists. The tension consists in the simultaneity of abstraction and vividness, of cosmographic expansion and extreme reduction (e. g., in the micrograms), of similarity as well as difference. Thomas Hirschhorn and Mark Wallinger are quite similar in their love for Walser, but they are far apart in their artistic consequences. They shape the extremely relational and yet always precarious view of the world either in adhesions or volatility, physicality or shadow, publicity or isolation, ruins or paths, concretizations or abstractions. A politically effective aesthetic connects the two artists with Robert Walser in a poetic trialogue, for it is a matter of communication and discursive exposition, not of enlightenment or agitation.