Artists Left a Boulder in the Middle of a Highway and Won’t Say Why

For collaborative studio Borgman | Lenk, context is everything.

December 21, 2016, 2:45pm

All images courtesy of the artists

If you happened to be driving through Denmark and thought you saw a boulder in the middle of the road, don’t worry, you didn’t. But you didn’t hallucinate, and you don’t need your eyes checked, either. Wurf III, a work by Berlin-based collaborative studio Borgman | Lenk, is the third part in their Wurf (Throw) series. It was installed on a highway in Denmark, but while it may look like an enormous stone, it’s actually an abstract sculpture made from wood and papier-mâché.

Because expectations play such a crucial role in the reception of their work, Borgman | Lenk are consciously elusive when they talk about how the sculpture came to be on a deserted Danish road or how long it is or was there. The duo, which is made up of Danish artist Anna Borgman and German artist Candy Lenk, tells The Creators Project, “An important part of the installation is the questioning and we don’t want to anticipate the answers to the viewers too soon.”

The Wurf series began in a backyard in Berlin. Wurf I was placed inside a greenhouse, where, “Like an incubator, it was tightly enclosed by the glass case.” Wurf II brought the sculpture to the interior of a German monastery. And, in this case, Borgman | Lenk defied the expectations of viewers by suspended what looked like a very heavy object on a thin wire, just above the floor. Finally, in Wurf III, the sculpture was placed in the middle of an empty stretch of highway in Denmark. “The stone acts as a resistance to the otherwise fast moving cars on a highway near the Danish city Silkeborg. It's resting load is placed against the linearity and movement associated with the place,” says the duo.

While they may not seem connected, each of the situations in which the Wurf series was displayed relates to the concept of a stone being “thrown” and the distance it covers. “The whole project deals with the relationship between sculpture and space. With each phase of the project, the same stone abstraction is placed in a new context. We call it “throw,” as a metaphor for the transportation. The stone is thrown again and falls into a different situation. There, it re-establishes new relationships with its environment. Each distinct scene tells a new narrative. The environment gives the stone a new meaning.”

Context does indeed seem to add a narrative arc to the Wurf series. In the first installation, for example, the sculpture was in an incubator. And in the second time around the work was kept tethered. Then, by the third installation, it seems as if Borgman | Lenk had mothered the work, watched it grow up, and cut the umbilical cord to send it out into the world and find its way its own, just like the rest of us. This narrative element that the viewer projects onto the series certainly does support the duo’s claim that the work should be appreciated without giving the viewer too much information. “When you see the [photos] of the scene, you should have time to think it over for yourself before you read too much about it,” the duo says. They were, however, willing to admit that the installation of the work was on the up and up, “But, in any case, we can tell [you] that the Danish Road Directorate gave us the permission to use the highway. Without it we couldn’t have carried out the idea.”