The project “Windows: Marco Polo’s Dream” is a joint installation by Markus Heinsdorff and Martin Rosenthal that addresses cultural exchange between Europe and Asia. The first exhibition in 1997 at the Zhejiang Provincial Museum in Hangzhou was, at the time, an unusual example of the presentation of contemporary Western art in a public Chinese museum. The mobile installation was subsequently shown from 1997 to 1998 at the Museo Palazzo Querini Stampalia in Venice, at the Donaufestival in Krems, at the Haus der Kulturen in Berlin, Germany, and at the Orensanz Foundation in New York. Drawing on Marco Polo’s described routes between Europe and Asia (Hangzhou–Venice), travel, encounters with other cultures, exchange and shifts of perspective became central motifs of the project.

Der Traum vom Reisen

Anyone who reflects today on the phenomenon of travel may seem bold – given the current state of world history, in which the millions of simultaneous journeys made by business travellers and tourists have accelerated nomadism more than ever before.

On the contrary, it is entirely worthwhile to think once again about a term and a name that has become a global metaphor for travel: Marco Polo. It seems sensible to trace its meaning back to those original forces that gave rise to all these journeys: to the notion of travel that arises from curiosity about different perceptions in dream and fantasy. It was this notion of travel that inspired Marco Polo, the adopted Chinese and cosmopolitan, who has become the epitome of myths, wishes, longing and adventure. Put into practice, this notion built bridges between old and new worlds, old and new cultures, and cultivated the qualities of travel – with an effect still perceptible today, visible in the widespread use of the name Marco Polo (the airport of Venice, numerous travel guides, the textile industry).

For the two artists who created the installation “Windows”, the desire to immerse themselves in the magic of travel was an important impulse, given the banalisation of travel. In their eight shrines, they enclosed not only eight times eight objects but also, in a sense, captured the act of the viewer’s perception of these objects – thereby dramatising the process of exchange between dream and reality.

In Hangzhou, thousands of eyes looked into the “Windows” and projected thousands of wishes and dreams into their spaces. Now these spaces in turn set out on a journey – laden with the gazes, memories and associations from China. The imaginary journey became a real one: the journey of the boxes in a container aboard a freighter to Venice, and from there by boat through the Grand Canal to the Museo Querini Stampalia. Upon their arrival at the museum, the travelling objects transform once again into dream objects.

Viewers who saw the objects “live” in Hangzhou and Venice are connected by the same gaze and can thus communicate through a perception that itself “travels”.

In the dialogue between “outside” (the white Chinese characters on the black lacquered shrines) and “inside” (objects that stand for “Western imagination”), attention is directed to the shift in perception and values within our cultures: while the ideological significance of our most important means of transport, the car, is declining, the need to create new images and fantasies is growing. As Agnes Kohlmeyer explains in the following text, the signs created for this purpose generate a narrative, a new aesthetic context. In bringing old cultural and living spaces into the present, art alone is capable of creating new spaces.

In the interplay of perceptions, art, together with science, has become a pioneer of these journeys – journeys on which, this time, the whole of humanity should set out together, East and West. At the end of this millennium, windows onto such new, still unknown spaces are being opened ever further, especially by artists and scientists – in a new alliance, an artescienza, such as Marco Polo, or later Leonardo da Vinci, embodied.

The emergence of visions and dreams of journeys into other worlds of perception in the name of Marco Polo – as exemplified by Martin Rosenthal and Markus Heinsdorff’s installation in Hangzhou and Venice – demonstrates that a far more suitable historical figure was found for this purpose of allegorisation than any of the heroes of antiquity or modernity. After all, as we know, even the traditional stories about Marco Polo contain numerous transitions between dream and reality, shifts and overlaps between these spheres – in any case, a field of play for the re-mythologisation of travel within the dream of travel.

New York, February 1988 (translation of the English text into German)
Elmar Zorn

Die Schachtel in der Schachtel in der Schachtel… (excerpts)

(…) In the Chinese “paradise on earth”, in Hangzhou by the West Lake, an exhibition opens at the local Zheijang Provincial Museum (…). It involves two German artists, Martin Rosenthal and Markus Heinsdorff from Munich, who for the first time as such are able to exhibit their “Western” art in a Chinese museum. Scattered throughout the spacious and artfully laid-out park, similar to the pavilions with Chinese shrines, stand eight large boxes resembling these very shrines. They are very real, very concrete, and roughly as tall and as wide as a large, stately person. In this, we could almost say, anthropomorphic presence and their wooden materiality, they appear stable and calm. They have been lacquered black in the Chinese manner, and each of these elements bears a sign on its front side, a large character painted white on black. We see these boxes integrated into the sometimes very old park, with its artfully shaped stones and, for our “Western” eyes, strange plants. They blend harmoniously into this environment, but at the same time offer an unusual sight; they awaken the curiosity of the viewer and immediately bring in the further level of perception of the script and its expressive power. From certain positions, two or more of the box sculptures can be perceived at once with the naked eye. That is to say, we already perceive part of the installation in its environment at a single glance.

Each of these boxes has been assigned a different concept, and thus content, by the two artists. The Chinese exhibition visitor in Hangzhou understands instantly, since they can read it and gather from the figurative ideogram that it is a matter of “journey”, “sea”, “desert”, “dance”, “wind”, “light”, “form”, and “life”. When we now stand in front of the first of these boxes, we discover that, set into the middle of the large white characters, eight regularly arranged wooden flaps have been built in, inviting us to lift them so that we can look behind their façade. The visitor to this installation must now do more than merely look; they must become active themselves. They must step as close as possible to the respective exhibition element, climbing onto a low, comfortable platform that belongs to the sculpture itself. They must stretch or bend down; they may have to share the spot with others, must wait, exercise patience, until it is their turn and until they themselves are able to lift each one of these flaps.

At this point everyone proceeds quite individually. Everyone will be curious as to what might be hidden behind these “windows” in the inner life of the boxes. But some will open flap after flap thoughtfully and systematically and look inside, while others will try to seize as quickly as possible everything they can possibly see. Yet all this activity actually leads into a new, third level of perception. One suddenly finds oneself facing a single, very small lens.

Only a single eye can look inside. What is certain is that with this method – focusing one viewing eye and closing the other – concentration on what is seen can be increased. Now the exhibition visitor, who had previously been in contact with everything and everyone, is left relying solely on themselves as they endeavour to immerse themselves in this further world. Behind each of these “windows”, the viewer faces only their own impressions – visual, kinetic and sonic experiences.

Something lights up there, something turns, fantastical objects and worlds open up before us. We perceive tiny details, a postage stamp, for instance, with its own entirely self-contained small world upon it, with image and script, and we add our own associations, which can transform everything; we discover a small cogwheel, a butterfly or a miniature fan, and we think, ah, this is wind. And already we begin to dream. It is nothing but colour, light and movement, a fragment of everyday objects; yet in their actual tininess, these things can genuinely change before our eyes and in our imagination, can become large, deep and boundless. Of course, all these arrangements have been prepared with meticulous, painstaking work for the interior of these boxes. But then, when they are viewed with such concentration, when one reflects on the theme of the boxes and of the whole exhibition, it is our thoughts and our senses that send us much further onward, into the distance, on a real “journey”. Why not through deserts and across seas, accompanied by wind and light, open and attentive to forms and their sensuousness, inclined toward the dance? That is life, the whole of it, the great whole, the space that for us today no longer has any limit.

The whole, an almost endless series of Chinese boxes, can, if we wish, be lined up and continued indefinitely: an installation that grew in the minds of two very different artists, each in constant search of the connections between things, thoughts and works within their respective, ever new and different surroundings. This kind of installation, which each time also carries a risk, a venture arising from the unknown, the new and the future, came about through collaborative work. It was realised after long joint discussions, yet with clearly separate individual contributions, and was thereby brought into a cultural sphere foreign to both artists – less so to one of them, owing to his many trips to China. Respect and attention were paid to this cultural sphere foreign to us (…) The exhibition was then opened in a specific setting, tested, and perceived in its entirety. And now it sets out once again on its journey.

Following in the footsteps of Marco Polo, the boxes, together with their contents, are sent to Venice by sea. Hanghzou, Shanghai, Marseille and finally Venice – these are the stations of a long journey lasting many weeks. Upon their arrival in Italy, the exhibition elements are inspected, repaired and then set up anew in a museum space. In yet another linguistic environment, in a once again new setting, such as a small exhibition room, and consequently also in a new arrangement – half indoors, half in a small garden, in the middle of the city of Venice – the space, the surroundings, are once again shaped. The artworks of two German artists, marked with Chinese ideograms, are this time meant to be understood by an Italian audience. Unlike before (…), the exhibition elements now stand very close together, just like the houses in the city itself. One grasps them almost entirely at a single glance, but despite this greater density, the Venetian installation also possesses a particular transparency, arising from the relationship between the individual components and their surroundings. From the square in front of the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, one can already look into the exhibition space; indeed, even the greenery of the small garden behind it can already be perceived from outside. Glass, brass, water features, and an entirely different vegetation and light define the new surroundings of these “travellers”. The Chinese characters are foreign here, having come from far away, and must first be translated to be understood. Something new has been added; the images and experiences of the first exhibition are integrated into the second.

But when the visitor here too bends down and takes the step from outward observation and perception into the inner life of the boxes, it will once again depend entirely on them alone, as it always does on each individual, how far the journey is to go and how long the story can continue…

(…) One of the main figures of our “story within a story” is Markus Heinsdorff, with his kinetic sculptures, which move in their predetermined rhythm through the wind or simple motor control, performing astonishing feats, true acts of transformation with their own form. Heinsdorff’s practical installation already contained thematic elements such as travel, everyday life, love or the past, prospect, movement and longing; concepts that can be found in our world of thought and the senses, and that quite openly place certain visible artworks in relation to every possible detail of our lives. Everything is connected to everything else; “space” has become boundless. The book on the installations in the artist’s garden at Las Fosses is introduced by a quotation from Paul Valéry: “Le vent se lève … Il faut tenter de vivre!”. Just like the wind itself, everything in Heinsdorff’s works is unstable, fragile, a play of appearance and reality, of our imagination, of illusions. The delicate, fascinating goldsmith works, the moving sculptures, the objects holding surprises, the open vase, for instance, or the double clay jug from which the “eternal water” flows, and for which no one can really explain why this steady stream never breaks off.

Water basins, light sculptures resembling small moons spreading across a meadow, mosaic tables and artificial waterfalls, fish and ship motifs and forms, light and video, discussions, “bridges” to other artists and cultures, diversity and openness in every direction – these occupy Markus Heinsdorff in his artistic work.

Agnes Kohlmeyer