Enne Haehnle – Track X
Text by Anja Schürmann
»… all communication of the contents of the mind is language, communication in words being only a particular case of human language…« (Walter Benjamin)*
When is an »m« an »m«? When do the lines from a letter become a
character? With an »m« the letter must be 75% complete to be recognized;
before that it is an »n.« But this relationship isn’t applicable to all
letters, nor to all sentence structures. It also doesn’t apply to Enne
Haehnle, because it doesn’t work in printed language, only in written
language.
Track X is the name of Haehnle’s work at the Kirchplatz U-Bahn station. X
is a replaceable variable, an unknown. The reading of one’s own desire,
recognition of it, is triggered by Haehnle’s sculptural text. But
success is limited, because her writing describes more than a surface.
If one changes their perspective, an »almost space« is formed, an
erratic tangle of orange line that isn’t legible and shouldn’t be read.
In this restricted position the body can never see, nor understand,
everything. Therefore the text is not only found, it is invented: with
every act of reading it is further developed and completed by the
reader. Reading is not the recognition of individual letters, rather the
designation of word contours from patterns: the eye springs in small
increments to letter constellations that are characteristic of a word
until the line is scanned. But there is no line here, there are also no
capital letters, which are always helpful for word recognition.
Everything turns, winds, from three entrances going down, meeting at a
central light shaft, which offers the largest space for the game in
steel and color.
Here – on the inner triangularly tiled wall in the shaft – a single
word is recognizable: »sich leere« (to empty), »leert sich fülle« (to be
emptied full). Emptiness and fullness, material and space, are
traditional sculptural themes, conflicts that are treated with a
confident ease and lavish gesture: the neon glowing orange of every
ceramic line seems to be effortless, disregarding all the rules of
gravity, filling the space as uneconomically as it does irrationally. A
wealth of material that has no relationship to what is written and
reveals semantic voids is deliberately created through numerous turns.
That it actually appears to drain downwards, the »full,« is also
visually emptied and through the arches and turns, associations with
writing exercises or automatic scribbles are awakened.
With a loose reference to the cardinal points of the respective
entrances, Haehnle has conceived of four texts in a deliberately widely
spaced handwritten appearance. Together with Leipzig blacksmith Andreas
Althammer, she translated sections – formed in aluminum – cast in
orange-colored steel that hovers over the rectangular matte ceramic
tiles.
Enne Haehnle has also dealt with the borders of the signified and the
un-signified in other works. She created handwritten lines and words in
clay. Clay, which was not fired and could be destroyed by visitors or
washed away by rain. In her text works she highlights the relationship
of the objectivity of the texts with the subject of the reader: when the
two encounter each other the text can materialize, but it can also
disappear. Any form of recognition, every marking, requires one to step
out of their comfort zone of similitude, invisibility or concealment.
The English term »to mark« also covers a range of meanings that are
substantially more sophisticated and nuanced than the technical
connotations of the German word »markieren.« In English “mark” can also
be translated into track, spot, scratch, scar, injure, time, or blemish.
Haehnle places these clues as orange lines that might be compressed
into works, or perhaps even sentences. Aligned as ornamental for and
against language, her word images turn the reader into a viewer, who can
once again turn into a reader.
*
Walter Benjamin, »On Language as such and on the Language of Man,« in: Selected Writings Volume I 1913-1926, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press, 1996, p. 62. Back to top