It’s hardly surprising that, for many people, Thomas Woll’s room installations evoke associations with the creation of cinematic worlds. Anyone who has ever had the chance to visit a film set in a studio or even been involved in building one can’t help but be transported right back again as soon as they enter the orbit of one of Woll’s environments. The impression of naturalistic mimicry and, at the same time, artificial ‘fabrication’ conveyed by his architectural and technoid objects and spatial elements call to mind a perfectly crafted backdrop. However, those who step inside will inevitably wonder what stage presentations and performances his walk-in images were designed for. And another thing: is there a way to decode the symbolism and the enigmatic connotations and references? Or, to put it another way, is there anything here at all to be decrypted, unravelled or translated?

In the catalogue piece she wrote for Thomas Woll’s Ignis exhibition at Kunstverein Duisburg back in 2010, Anke Volkmer drew a series of aesthetic and atmospheric comparisons with cinematic artworks. Painting a coherent and highly plausible picture, she pointed to links between Woll’s installations and the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Andrei Tarkovsky, David Lynch and Matthew Barney. (1) The signature styles of these film artists in enacting the mysterious, the unfathomable, the imponderable, the unsettling, the menacing and the terrifying are truly iconic – and in some respects there is a clear kinship with Thomas Woll’s visual rhetoric. In drawing comparisons with Hitchcock, Volkmer focuses above all on carefully constructed (false) trails laid to create the near-proverbial suspense. With Hitchcock, dramatic tension is used above and beyond the actual plot to stir up a flurry of emotions – and, in some of his films, this conveys moral and even ideological or propagandist messages on a narrative level. In Woll’s case, it’s also about intensive experience – in the sense of spatial experience. However, it has no message to convey on a background level, but merely asks open-ended questions about the conditions and contingencies that go into constructing our perception, art and the world. But there is one further aspect in Woll’s artistic strategy that links him with Hitchcock: the MacGuffin. This is the name that the genre master, who was venerated by the French New Wave (2), gave to the random object which, as a seemingly self-explanatory plot focus, drives the narrative of a story and keeps it moving. In most cases, it is an arbitrary object of desire like a briefcase with valuable or explosive contents that is sought by different characters for different reasons.

For his part, Woll also integrates elements into his installations that could well be described as MacGuffins. The very different elements he uses all have one thing in common – they all suggest technical functionality. For example, we see antennas that lead us to believe that signals are being received. But who is sending what messages and in what form? And where are they being transformed into something we can understand? Or we see ventilation covers that make us wonder what exactly needs to be air-conditioned here and why? An inaccessible place or a power unit that has a function – but what function? We see inexplicable wires, pipes and cables, mysterious containers, perplexing linkages, hidden light sources and references to concealed spaces. Thomas Woll takes the ambiguous nature of his all-over installations – ambiguous on a number of literal and figurative levels – one step further by introducing his own ‘autonomous’ artworks such as framed photographic works or small sculptures. When we examine these works, the entire room installation suddenly recedes and mutates into a large surrounding framework, into an unconventional or even quirky exhibition ambience.

A number of fundamental questions that are regularly raised by three-dimensional artworks come to a head in Thomas Woll’s work: What is sculpture? What is architecture? What is space? And how reliable are our sensory impressions and their seemingly simultaneous cognitive processing? How robust – or even questionable – is our ability to interpret things? This is something that is inextricably woven together with our perception but without which we couldn’t even perform the simplest tasks, let alone engage in complex communication. The construction of his spatial worlds, which only ever reveals itself in parts, becomes an aesthetically perceivable metaphor for the constructed quality of how we view reality and the essentially very limited means we have to communicate about it. It appears as though Woll is dispatching us to still-empty stage sets that are inspired by Beckett and Wittgenstein but also by the epistemic positions of radical constructivism. (3)

Beyond all this, however, there is a desire to see Woll’s installations as proof of and a plea for the immersive power of all art. Immersion, a term that came into vogue some time ago, is prevalent in connection with the kind of new technology that is designed to allow artistic works to be experienced with the required degree of intensity. But what often goes unrecognised is that all artworks are inherently immersive. It is not their technical quality that is the key here but rather whether we engage with them – and, if so, how. Essentially, we can dive into any picture, piece of music, play, film – and even literature which, after all, is conveyed to us in the form of a complex system of abstract symbols. Thomas Woll’s rooms show to particularly impressive effect that, especially in an art context, immersive experiences have nothing to do with digital technology or special media but rather with our perceptive apparatus, with our associations and ideas, with how we feel and think. After all, no matter which senses are activated, whether the triggers are analogue or digital, and whether or not MacGuffins are involved, the immersive experience always takes place in our heads.

(1) Anke Volkmer Transformation in den Raum (Transformation Into Space), in: Kunstverein Duisburg Thomas Woll. IGNIS ortungsraum/systeme (Thomas Woll. IGNIS Location Space/Systems), Duisburg, 2010
(2) François Truffaut’s book of interviews conducted with Alfred Hitchcock, which was published in France for the first time in 1966 and then released in English under the same title “Hitchcock/Truffaut” (and in German as Mr. Hitchcock, wie haben Sie das gemacht?) remains a fascinating read for cinema buffs and general-interest readers alike.
(3) Radical Constructivism is a philosophical movement founded by Ernst von Glaserfeld in the 1970s. It is based on epistemic theories and critically examines the relationship between human perception and an ‘objectively’ recognisable reality. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_constructivism