The project “Praxisinstallation” combines medical treatment and art in a holistic spatial concept with a shared focus on people and their perception. Over several years, Markus Heinsdorff transformed seven rooms of a medical practice into an artistic spatial installation in which medical use, spatial design and artistic experience are directly interconnected.

At the Roots of Existence – On the Practice of Images
The Praxisinstallation by Markus Heinsdorff

Art is constantly changing. Its values shift. Change seems to be the law of life. And do more and more artists not wish for their art an unpredestined place, one that preserves its otherness, its own character, that can be found in the midst of life, so to speak, instead of the often uniform, neutral exhibition spaces of institutionalised provenance? Markus Heinsdorff has found just such another place, one that is in itself alien to art and yet grants him every freedom to realise an artistic spatial installation encompassing the whole site. And one should bear in mind: art always and everywhere has its place, it is only the custodian of the place who does not always have the room or the understanding for the necessity of art.

In the dental practice of Thomas Vogt, obsession and profession combine into an experience rich in insight and even healing for the visitor, who is at the same time always also a patient. In his spacious rooms, he lets art become practice, and thereby enables the patient to reach an awareness far removed from the “pain threshold”. With this singular concept, which he entrusted to the Munich artist Markus Heinsdorff, he hands the patient a companion in art that, in his seemingly passive, “suffering” passage, holds up a mirror to him and, through the means of art, prompts him to a consoling reflection on human (borderline) experiences and states of mind.

With his Praxisinstallation, Markus Heinsdorff presents a concept that responds sensitively to the spatial and functional conditions while at the same time imagining a self-contained world of its own. His installation does not simply refer to the situation it found, to the theme that is, so to speak, already in the air, but designs an individually shaped, seductive “other”, which it is left to each individual to define. Here, the visitor inexperienced in matters of art can seize the opportunity for an encounter with art, while the viewer practised in the perception of art can re-examine his artistic experience and understanding in this concrete context. The more his “thinking” gaze opens up in the process, the more consciously he experiences how, before his eyes, the function-bound rooms transform into a peculiar, poetic exhibition landscape in which the supposed sufferer can finally take a stroll not only with his eyes but also with his soul – and in doing so can even push other procedures into the background.

Art thus accompanies the patient here through the various stations of his “path of suffering”. It flanks his passage as he moves through existential experiences such as pain and fear, but also relief, alleviation and healing. It does not leave him alone, but neither does it impose itself on him. Where one person can no longer be close to another, perhaps art can be – if, as here, it grows into an integrative, harmonious part of the totality of specific experiences.

Markus Heinsdorff devotes a theme to each individual room of the practice, addressing elemental situations of human existence – such as travel, everyday life, love or the past, prospect, movement and longing. Taken as a whole, i.e. in the sequence of rooms, the themes complement one another to form an impressive spectrum of life. Already in the entrance area, the patient – who now advances to become, indeed is seduced into becoming, a viewer of art – is met by the first artwork, which thus significantly marks the concept of the Praxisinstallation and, so to speak, inducts him into it. At eye level, a stele shows, in a recess, a kind of peephole, a small monitor on which an endless loop plays of people ceaselessly climbing up and down a staircase. The construction suggests the impression that miniature people are actually tirelessly scaling the stele from within and descending it again. The staircase motif has had an iconographic tradition in modern art ever since Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase; the stele, on the other hand, is a traditional architectural element like a cult monument, which in this context recalls both ancient columns and Native American totems, thereby symbolically referring to the everyday rhythm of human life. Here, the up and down of our daily existence is mirrored, at whose turning points – both the upper and the lower – the physical constituents of human existence, such as birth, health, illness and death, often stand; here the viewer rediscovers himself in his everyday course of life, while at the same time a concrete station, the visit to the doctor, is elevated into a surprising art experience.

In the connecting corridor between the various treatment rooms, 16 light boxes accompany the passer-by. They show portraits of human faces carved in stone from various centuries, whose differing modes of expression, shaped by epoch or style, display the whole tension-filled spectrum of reality and art, of yesterday, today and tomorrow, of life and death. They reflect their own time and yet are at the same time elevated above the domain of time.

In the waiting room, several objects await the patient at once. Six horizontally aligned steel boxes each contain a monochrome, glowing slit of colour. The colour suggests a kind of horizon and thus conjures an imaginary landscape before the mind’s eye, one that, depending on the colour, reflects a particular mood and so becomes a kind of meditative space of the soul for the person waiting and their sensations – colour, then, especially that of the spectrum, as a mediator of human states of mind and emotions. In other words, the abstract colour forms become a mood barometer in which the viewer recognises themselves. The waiting room grows from a place of transition into a place of refuge.

On the opposite wall is another metal box in which several curved steel strips are installed vertically side by side. Entering the waiting room triggers their movement. They begin to rotate, so that in the eye of the viewer the impression arises of a flowing wave motion, whose apparent endlessness carries him and his consciousness away: the gaze, losing itself, drifts off with the wave motion.

The various objects in the treatment rooms ultimately transport people to where they come from (even if they often enough forget it, or even try to forget it): nature. It defines a meditative realm in which people become aware of both their own strengths and their own weaknesses. Imposing natural landscapes surround the patient in every phase of the treatment now beginning, as an artfully balanced mirror construction makes viewing possible from every position – sitting, lying or standing.

In the first room, the viewer experiences spectacles of nature, which are set against, and thereby placed in relation to, his own sensations and feelings, his “self-awareness”. For instance, he is shown photographic images of the world’s great canyons. In the second treatment room, images of water – sea, rivers and lakes – are staged. In the third, another impressive natural element is added: the mountain landscape. All these natural scenes connote human

affects: from sublimity and emotion, from pathos to sentimentality. They combine with travel memories, carry the viewer away and finally lead him back into reality again. In the last treatment room, the visitor encounters one of the best-known masterpieces of erotic art, Rodin’s sculpture The Kiss – here, however, captured on a light panel and divided into numerous small fields. These are illuminated differently by a random generator and thus transformed again and again into new pictorial constellations. Changing colour values additionally break up the image; it is deconstructed and, in its overall appearance, constantly reconstructed anew. The grace and aesthetics of this well-known artwork thus appear in a constantly changing view; they are simultaneously analysed and synthesised. This light image, too, can be seen from every position thanks to an elaborate mirror construction.

If all these stations stage the power of images, then one last object in the entrance area, given to the departing visitor as a kind of memorable parting gift, recalls the power of language, whose beauty becomes evident here as a script image: on a light panel, the word Speaking appears in 50 different languages and their respective scripts. Even the foreign, incomprehensible language communicates itself here as an aesthetic script image and yet remains, in its actual meaning, always language – language that not only connects but also marks the boundary of human understanding.

In his “stationary treatment” of the individual rooms, Markus Heinsdorff presents us with familiar, almost archetypal images – not to say images of images – in a newly created, overarching context that casts new light on them and their meaning. These are images in the truest sense of the word, images that, even in three-dimensional extension – whether abstract or figurative – anchor themselves pictorially in the viewer’s consciousness through their immediate force and power of association. They move and yet at the same time rest within themselves. They glide from memory, from the past, into the sphere of the timeless, the imperishable, and take the viewer along on this journey. They leave the terrain of firmly stored, rationally processed images from the internalised image pool of the human brain and reach across into the realm of feelings and sensations. In a rare way, almost like a stroke of luck, elementary phenomena of image perception reveal themselves in this “Installation for a Practice” to the attentive patient/visitor – walking room by room, image by image. The other reality of art is brought impressively into view, quite apart from well-worn art venues. And the dental practice, as a frequent site of our fears, where we become aware again and again of our existential helplessness and the discomforts of life we must endure, we leave eased, indeed even enriched by the experience we have had with art.

Udo Kittelmann