Tenso is a large-format kinetic installation by Markus Heinsdorff, suspended between two buildings in Munich, Germany. Five moving wings, carried by a network of stainless-steel cables, respond to wind and air movement. The work combines architecture, technology and nature into a constantly changing spatial image.

Tenso

Since 1996, a work by Markus Heinsdorff has defined the Munich Pfennigparade: the permanent kinetic installation Tenso. Steel cables form a network that bridges the passage between buildings and, in the arched central section, carries the horizontal axes of five identical rotors. These rotors are symmetrical bodies that each move both around the horizontal axis and around a central axis; their slightly curved cover surfaces of corrugated aluminium sheet convey an impression of technical precision, as do the bearings with their cylindrical sleeves and balancing rods. The whole thing has a distinctly high-tech character.

The line pattern written into space by the tensioning cables, the whirling motion into which even a light breeze sets the rotors, the constant changes in rotational speed, and the swaying of the whole ensemble that alternates with wind strength, the play of light and shadow on the shimmering metal surfaces – all of this gives what is technically coherent a turn toward its own intrinsic value. In other words, a high degree of technology has been deployed for the sake of the aesthetic, which – unlike Heinsdorff’s earlier cable installations – does not invite questions about potential secondary purposes. Indeed, the collaboration of structural engineers was necessary to ensure the required reliability of the tensioning system; and bearing and branching elements had to be used, of the kind customary for highly stressed technical constructions.

Markus Heinsdorff’s artistic imagination moves between two poles: on the one hand, a technicality that owes itself to a poetic approach and remains rather metaphorical; on the other, the engineering-style construction, whose task is to produce an aesthetic – that is, in its own way poetic – effect. The artist moves freely between these positions; and he is able to do so because he possesses remarkable technical knowledge and a developed sense for complex structures. That he began as a goldsmith may explain a good deal; more important is an alert interest in what, in the technical field, can be put to artistic use. For what remains decisive is form with all its implications – including, indeed, the technical ones. As a member of a generation of artists for whom individual style no longer has anything to do with commitment to a found formal language, Heinsdorff takes the freedom to unfold a basic concept in various directions. His works therefore cannot be arranged in a strict sequence, but at most assigned to groups of works that are themselves, in turn, diverse.

As original as the solution of the permanent installation in the Pfennigparade is, Tenso stands in a tradition that reaches back to the early days of modernism. In 1920, Naum Gabo presented his Standing Wave, a simple but immensely memorable kinetic construction whose electrically generated rhythm of movement made time into an immediate experience. A little later, namely between 1922 and 1930, László Moholy-Nagy created his famous Light Prop for an Electric Stage (Light-Space Modulator), an ingenious piece of machinery that made evident the interplay of body, space and light in the sense of a “vital constructivity”. In his Bauhaus book Vom Material zur Architektur, the artist defined kinetic sculpture in 1929 as the “highest sublimation of volume content, the formation of virtual, yet extremely tension-filled designations of volume”; and as a preliminary stage to this he understands what he calls “floating sculpture”: “While static sculptures resting on a base occupy a particular position in relation to their surroundings and, within this position, contain directional relationships to the earth – horizontal, vertical, oblique – floating sculpture initially, in theory, possesses its material or volume relationships and all associated attributes only in relation to its own system.”

With such works and ideas, the way was cleared for an exciting development that radically rejected all conventional dogmas of three-dimensional design. The branch of kinetic art favouring motor-driven propulsion has, to this day, produced an almost unmanageable abundance of solutions. No less inventive was, and is, the other branch, which relies on the natural forces of wind and water. Alexander Calder’s mobiles could be named as generally well-known, though technically comparatively unrefined, examples of wind-driven works; the kinetic objects of his American compatriot George Rickey as prime examples of what can result from the combination of concise formal thinking and engineering calculation.

Markus Heinsdorff knows how to pull out all the stops in his kinetic inventions. In the three-part spatial installation Arbeitszeit, in the Klöckner-Humboldt-Deutz-Turm in Cologne, Germany (1994), for example, he employed electromagnetic means. But even more often he has seized the opportunity to put human muscle power or the wind to work in his pieces. Muscular movement is answered, for instance, by the Begehbare Maschine of 1985; wind impulses are responded to by the rotating tower on the grounds of the Technische Universität Berlin (1987), the seven-part group of propeller-bearing supports in front of the school in Munich-Perlach (1994), or the arch in the courtyard of the IBM building on Munich’s Leopoldstraße (1995). There is also a series of temporary works, such as the colourful group of objects Colori di Vento, which spanned a street in Cagliari in 1988, the kinetic tower object Jetlack, erected in Munich in 1989, or the multi-part installation over Munich’s Isar Canal from 1990.

In terms of solutions detached from the ground and the ceaselessly produced virtual volumes, Tenso comes close to Moholy-Nagy’s vision of a floating sculpture, yet it is by no means related only to its own system but is composed into a given architectural situation that was largely binding for the type and manner of its installation. For all its technicality, the transfunctional character of Tenso is entirely decisive for its effect. One experiences the rotation of the rotors and the vibration of the tensioning cables as a play that testifies to the presence of nature amid what is built. This may sound paradoxical, but seems crucial, for is the object’s movement, induced by air movement, anything other than a natural signal directed against the static stability of the architecture? The concept of play thus gains a dimension beyond the merely pleasurable and self-sufficient: the object, which satisfies technical requirements, proves itself, thanks to its capacity to respond to forces that humans cannot influence, or can influence only to a very limited degree, to be a bearer of meaning in its own right. In Tenso, the freedom from purpose characteristic of the aesthetic has convincingly allied itself with meaningfulness.

Peter Anselm Riedl