Erwin Wurm
The verbal
instruction, the world of trivial use objects, the user, the mediums of
photography and video and the elements of traditional sculpture such as the
wall, floor, room, and pedestal combine in a new form of sculpture: the
behavioral form. Among the works The
extended Sculpture (Andreas Spiegl), The
Zero Point of Sculpture (Jerome Sans), The
Sweater as Plastic Process (Roland Waspe) or Sculptural Statements (Rainer Fuchs)- Wurm’s singular achievement
consists of bundling together the claims and traditional lines of twentieth
century avant-garde and neo avant-garde into a new concept of sculpture.
Sculpture as a behavioral form replaces abstract sculpture and the sculpture of
the object as innovations of twentieth century. Predictably, Erwin Wurm, in a
new work phase that continues his metonymic operations and sets furniture
pieces side-by-side (without anthropomorphism) or thickens objects (such as Fat Car, 2001), thus once again dives
into the solitary world of objects with the arsenal of his contiguous language
operations. And it is in this way that it becomes possible to avoid the
theatrical performativity of Vanessa Beecroft or Felix Gonzales-Torres, who
also imply the behavioral form of sculpture through the medium of photography.
The behavioral patterns which Wurm designs question the border between art and
daily life and allow the sociability of behavioral patterns to occur in
individual activities through the noted cybernetic circulation (of sculptural
process, consisting in three elements: instruction, participation, and the
medium of photography). Socially relevant work is not depicted, but, rather,
released from abstraction through sculptural behavioral patterns. The ambiguity
of what is art and what is not art, created by Wurm’s sculptural system, is
furthered through critique, irony, paradox, and the allowance of the hitherto
inadmissible, through to the admittance of deterioration. The admittance of the
everyday, of the non-art in art, as well as the admittance of the deterioration
is known to be the achievments of art, which Wurm now sharpens in the
contingency of the subject in the One
Minute Sculpture. The idea, the instruction, the algorithm, the machine for
the production of art become a sequence for the creation of future, an ensemble
of experimental systems where the time structure itself plays a part in the
works. The objects and operations of the acting persons leave behind traces
through the medium of photography. The sculptures become inscriptions of the
real in the dispositive of photography. In the representational space of
photography, the sculptural elements become a writing game in which letters are
shifted around and put together. Each new sequence, in which not only the
artist as subject but also the user as object participates equally, creates a
world of traces (like dust, like signs).
Wurm’s
sculptures are signals for research into a world of traces, which hinder the
closing of the subject through both the anthropomorphic dimensions and the
weight of the world (the objects!).
Peter Weibel, Erwin Wurm: Behavioral Forms of Sculpture (excerpt) in catalogue Erwin Wurm, edited by Peter Weibel, published for the exhibition Fat Survival, Handlungsformen der Skulptur (Neue Galerie Graz Am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz 2001-2002 / Centre National de la Photographie, Paris 2002 / Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Bologna 2002 / ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe 2003).
Unlimited Contemporary Art
