The art of Erwin Wurm assumes myriad forms - drawings,
sculptures, installations, photographs, videos, bookworks - but at
its heart lies a concern with expanding the concept and principles
of sculpture. This solo exhibition, his first in Britain, reflects on a
decade of sculptural work realised in photography and video.
Traditional sculptural concerns such as the movement from two
dimensions to three; the relationship between object and
pedestal; the function of gravity; the increasing and decreasing of
volume play through all Erwin Wurm's work, and yet the final result
is the antithesis of sculpture understood as monument, model, or
maquette.
Wurm's sculptures are wrought from the human body
choreographed into absurd, witty and often perilous, relationships
with objects of everyday life - vegetables, crockery, chairs,
cardboard boxes, brooms, balls, and bicycles. Riven with a sense
of imminent failure, each sculpture exists for barely a minute,
before gravity triumphs, everything collapses, and the only thing
to remain is a photograph or video. These works collectively titled
'One minute sculptures' redefine the concept of sculpture into
one of dynamic 'act' rather than static object.
Ever since Marcel Duchamp selected his first ready-mades and
speeded up the process of making sculpture, many artists, from
Richard Serra to Bruce Nauman, Gilbert and George to Charles
Ray, have worked to reinvigorate the static unchanging art object
by introducing ideas of process, action, and the living body into
their sculptures. Erwin Wurm is similarly interested in the
relationship between time and sculptural form. Spontaneity and
brevity are key to his artistic vision, as is the idea of endless
permutation at the expense of a final, fixed form. These temporal
investigations have allowed him to bring sculpture into a very
particular dialogue with the media of photography and video.
One minute sculptures can happen anywhere, anytime: on the
street, at home, in a hotel room. They have been described as a
sculptural variant of situation comedy and the effects are certainly
similar: usually funny, often ridiculous, occasionally pathetic. On a
metaphoric level, they can be read in terms of the momentary
successes and inevitable failures that tend to define all of human
life. Wurm also points to the awkwardness and limits of the human
body in relation to the things which surround it.
Erwin Wurm very often works collaboratively with the audience at
his exhibitions, inviting visitors to create their own sculptures in
situ in the gallery. Earlier pieces the 'do it' series, for example exist
in the form of written or drawn instructions. Anyone can follow the
instructions, photograph the result, and then send the
photograph to the artist who signs it and delivers back a valuable,
validated artwork. Wurm designs not ready-mades, sculptures
fixed into an unchanging form, but works which are constantly
ready-to-be-made.
Increasing, remodelling or removing volume the habitual interests
of many a sculptor are given a new twist in Wurm's work. The piece
From Size L to Size XXL, 1993 for example, presents
easy-to-follow instructions on how to gain two extra sizes in just
eight days. Structured like a recipe book, it contains detailed
advice on how best to ingest huge amounts of calories, at the
same time as conserving maximum energy and minimizing weight
loss through normal bodily functions. The reading of the book and
the resulting mental image of the abruptly enlarged person who
takes shape in the mind of the reader, is here, what constitutes
the sculpture.
In a related series of video works, such as Fabio Getting Dressed,
1992, a sculpture is created through the very ordinary activity of
putting on clothes, pushed to absurd lengths as Fabio eventually
manages to struggle into the entire contents of his wardrobe.
The humorous quality of Erwin Wurm's work belies a serious
investigation into the relationship between performance,
sculpture and photography. If someone is standing still, do we
define it as a happening or an object? At what point, he asks, does
something change from an action into a sculpture, from a
sculpture into a photograph?
Erwin Wurm was born in 1954 and lives and works in Vienna. He
has had solo exhibitions at the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung
Ludwig Wien, Vienna; at Kunsthaus Bregenz, and at FRAC
Limousin in Limoges. He has also featured in many important
group exhibitions including, most recently, Partages
d'Exotismes, the 5th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art and
the forthcoming Taipei Biennal.
IMAGE:
Erwin Wurm
One minute sculptures
Self-service series, 1999
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