Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. Franz West was a genius of the absurd. A disrupter who found in the informal and awkward a form of elegance that you could never understand while sitting on your perfectly ergonomic designer chairs, contemplating boringly perfect paintings. West’s art is a slap given with a carnivorous smile, a dirty joke told during a pretentious dinner, and that’s precisely what contemporary art desperately needs.
When I think of Franz West, I think of Mikhail Bakhtin and his concept of “grotesque realism” which celebrates the body’s orifices, these zones of passage between the interior and the exterior. West was obsessed with the same bodily territories, these places where the absurd meets the universal. His outdoor sculptures, like these “Sitzwurst” (2000), these gigantic forms of lacquered aluminum that resemble multicolored turds, are not just gratuitous provocations, but invitations to embrace our common nature, the one we all share behind our social facades. As Rosanna McLaughlin writes about West, “he may have succeeded in something that few have accomplished: finding a form, and a subject, capable of touching an audience as fractured and diverse as the general public” [1]. This Bakhtinian dimension reminds us that the grotesque body is fundamentally democratic, we all defecate, after all. West understood this better than anyone.
The other great theme that runs through West’s work is his complex relationship with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language. If Wittgenstein wondered “what is meant to show what [these words] mean, if not the kind of use they have?” [2], West translated this question into sculptural terms. His famous “Passstücke” (or “Adaptives”), these strange sculptures that viewers are invited to manipulate, to put on, to wear as absurd bodily extensions, are investigations into meaning through use. Their deliberate abstraction, neither fully recognizable nor completely alienating, creates a space of indeterminacy where meaning emerges only through interaction. A single “Passstück” can become a collar, a vendor’s tray, a hat, or a violin depending on how it is used. West transformed Wittgenstein’s philosophical question, how do words acquire their meaning?, into a direct physical experience: how do objects become significant?
This Wittgensteinian conception of meaning as use is particularly evident in the photographs of the early “Passstücke”, some of which were taken in front of the house that Wittgenstein had designed for his sister Margarethe on the Parkgasse in Vienna. This choice of setting is not insignificant: it signals the intellectual heritage that West claims. But unlike the austere rigor of the Wittgenstein house, West’s objects are deliberately awkward, as if analytical philosophy had been translated by a genius drunk. “Where awkwardness becomes elegance,” West said of his sculptures, quoting a phrase he had read in an essay on Etruscan art [3].
This deliberate awkwardness is a strategy of resistance against intellectual pretension, but also against the grandiloquent attempts of Viennese Actionism of his time. While Nitsch, Brus and company organized bloody and spectacular performances to shock the Austrian bourgeoisie, West developed a more subtle and lasting form of engagement. Instead of splashing you with blood or shit like the Actionists, he invites you to sit on his wobbly sofas covered in Persian rugs, to manipulate his shapeless objects, to participate in an aesthetic experience that does not leave you unscathed but does not humiliate you either.
This subversive modesty is part of a post-68 reflection on the failure of great political utopias. West lived and worked in the 1970s at the Karl-Marx-Hof, one of the largest housing complexes in the world, a symbol of “Red Vienna” of the 1920s, but which, at the time of West, had seen its militant workers transformed into a passive petty bourgeoisie. As Liam Gillick observes, “a certain melancholy imbues [West’s] practice. But it is a twisted melancholy. Not a simple case of ironic detachment. It is rather linked to an examination of the collapse of utopias. In the light of this, one might as well do something” [4].
This “doing something” nonetheless manifests in West’s relationship to design and architecture. His chairs, sofas, and tables deliberately blur the boundary between art and design, between the useless and the useful. When he places his dilapidated sofas on impeccable pedestals or installs his rough monochromes above equally rough chairs, he destabilizes our understanding of what constitutes art versus design. It’s not so much that a sofa can be a sculpture (or vice versa), but rather that both share a formal vocabulary and a common mode of display.
The kinship between these furniture pieces and the Passstücke is evident: both invite bodily participation, both modify our relationship to space and to ourselves. West’s seats slow us down, allow us to contemplate art, both the art that surrounds us and the art we are sitting on, and are guided by the conviction that we truly exercise our minds, and become aesthetically sensitive, only when we are relaxed. West literally realizes Matisse’s famous desire that his paintings should have the effect of an armchair on a tired businessman.
But make no mistake: this invitation to relaxation is not a capitulation. West’s biting humor is a form of resistance just as effective as the more radical gestures of his predecessors. His collages, which juxtapose images from pornographic magazines with bright colors and consumer products transformed into blatant sexual fetishes, blond beauties charmingly grasping sausages and elegant men modeling tailored suits with champagne bottles bursting from their flies, dismantle the mind-numbing culture industry with bathroom humor and zaniness.
This approach is particularly visible in “Mao Memorial” (1994-95), where the colors of collective revolution, the blue of military-style uniforms popularized by the president and the red of communism, are transformed into joyous cushions for ardent masses reduced to a few loungers. West seems to suggest that the culture industry has become so pervasive that it can no longer be dismantled but only disarmed, with awkwardness and scatological humor.
West’s art evokes the improvised and flexible life of youth in motion, a mentality that stayed with the artist well into his sixties, probably because it had shaped him so much. As a teenager, Viennese cafes were his second home; at sixteen, he had traveled unchaperoned in the Middle East for six months; and he lived with his mother until the age of forty, first out of convenience and later as a caregiver. If West’s interest in design suggests a sincere desire for change, the invitation of his furniture to leisure provides a spiritual counterpoint to the more strident conceptions of militant art.
West’s public sculptures are particularly hilarious in their incongruity. Their garish colors and bloated biomorphic forms make them comic intruders both in desolate agricultural fields and in grand public places like the imposing Lincoln Center in New York or the venerable Place Vendôme in Paris, where several of West’s pink phalluses stood next to the iconic column of the place. One is almost shocked that mayors willingly allow West to publicly mock their most cherished monuments, and he seems all too happy to oblige.
At a time when contemporary art takes itself so seriously that it sometimes becomes unbearable, West reminds us that art can be both intellectually stimulating and deeply funny. He shows us that criticism does not need to be strident to be effective, that participation does not need to be forced to be transformative, and that beauty can exist in the most unlikely and grossest forms.
Franz West died in 2012, but his spirit lives on in every work of art that dares to be awkward, in every installation that privileges bodily engagement over distant contemplation, and in every artist who finds in humor a form of resistance. He showed us that art does not need to be solemn to be profound, nor perfect to be powerful. In an art world obsessed with technical perfection and conceptual depth, West reminds us that sometimes, the most radical gesture is to make people laugh, especially when that laughter conceals a disturbing truth about our common humanity.
- Rosanna McLaughlin, “The Companionable Franz West”, ArtReview, May 20, 2019.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, New York: Macmillan, 1953.
- Adrian Searle, “Franz West review – lumps, bumps and bawdy beads”, The Guardian, February 19, 2019.
- Christine Mehring, “Tools Of Engagement: The Art Of Franz West”, ArtForum, October 2008, Vol. 47, No. 2.
