Wild Cube
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- Wild Cube
- 1991/2010
- steelcage, 2 drawings, 1 collage
- 100 x 100 x 100 cm
The sculpture "Wild Cube" is a cube made of wire mesh rods within which one of Weinberger's ideas of the relationship between nature and culture is condensed in an exemplary fashion. It is a cage in which, potentially, any plant could plant itself naturally, by way of wind-borne seeds, and grow there in accordance with the conditions that its location makes possible. The earliest example of the experiment of “wild” and at the same time regulated vegetation is the work "Garten – eine poetische Feldarbeit / Garden – a poetic field project" (designed in 1992, realized in 1999), which is set up in front of the social sciences and economics campus of the University of Innsbruck. In the elongated, giant cage made of Rippentor steel, which corresponds to the architecture of the building behind, 35 x 4 x 3.70 m of inner space witnessed the completely autonomous creation of an “island of vegetation” containing the most diverse plants, some of which grew into trees and, growing ever-more dense, progressively pushed through the wire mesh towards the outside. Weinberger calls this Garden a “work that opposes the aesthetic of the pure and true, running counter to ordering forces”—a statement that addresses both general themes of society and art, which are also referred to in the poetically self-contradictory word play of the title itself. S.E.