All posts tagged Franz West

When Forms Come Alive: Sixty Years of Restless Sculpture @ the Hayward Gallery

This is a great, a really great exhibition. I came out wreathed in smiles, hesitated a moment, then went back in and did the whole thing all over again. And I wasn’t the only one enjoying it – it was packed, very noticeably with young families with prams and crawling babies and toddlers and junior school-aged kids. This is unusual at London art galleries which are generally full of doddering grey-haired old seniors. Word has somehow gotten around about what fun it is!

Planet organic

Why? Well, it’s billed as a massive survey of abstract, organic sculpture featuring the work of 21 international artists from the past 60 years. Obviously the broad term ‘sculpture’ can include realistic depictions of people and animals, depictions of buildings or manufactured objects, along with all manner of angular modernists creations. But all those possibilities and visions have been omitted as the curators have chosen works expressly designed to convey the shapes and forms and motions of organic life.

Bubbling foam and shiny baubles, hanging mesh and oozing tubes, wormlike mouldings and flying tutus, pendulous eggs and looping strands, tenuous tendons and metallic tangles, hidden claws and giant talons, all the works have been chosen for the way they capture, suggest, echo, are based on the endlessly moving, changing, bubbling, proliferating forms of organic life.

It’s a show of (mostly static) works which, however, suggest movement, melting, flux and floating, congeries and conglomerations, a continually impressive collection of sculptural forms that seem to ooze, undulate, blossom, erupt and sprawl all over the gallery space and beyond.

The drag of political art

Many if not most modern art exhibitions are highly themed and conceptualised – many are overtly political and polemical, such as the current exhibitions at the Barbican (the politics of textiles), Tate Britain (Women in Revolt!) and Dulwich Picture Gallery (Black artists’ takes on the genre of landscape painting).

Art works in those kinds of shows are more often than not chosen to make a political point and so are accompanied by baleful and grim text labels, ramming home the curators’ woke concerns. (I’m not using ‘woke’ in a general derogatory sense but in its original dictionary definition of ‘alert to racial prejudice and discrimination’, which is exactly what the Barbican and Dulwich shows are at pains to be.)

The joy of fun art

Anyway, that’s all by way of explaining that this show comes as quite a relief from the relentless preaching of art curators, because it is actually about art, just art, just the expression of forms and shapes for their own sake, for the fun of exploring and playing.

It feels playful. It feels fun. The promotional photos show small children looking in awe at a huge agglomeration of metal balls (‘Untitled’ by Tara Donovan) or two giant carrot shapes (‘Tunnel Boring Machines’ by Teresa Solar Abboud), and a child’s perspective is entirely appropriate to get the most from the wonderful shapes and vibrant colours on display – to the flying skirts (DRAFT) and bubbling foam (Michel Blazy) and funny sounds and neon constructions (E.J. Hill) and huge blobs and massive pink fabric worms (Eva Fàbregas) and big blob of metal lava (Lynda Benglis) and dangling fabrics (Ernesto Neto) and looming dolmen (Phyllida Barlow).

We are, just occasionally, allowed to stop feeling guilty about our part in the slave trade or institutional misogyny; we are allowed to relax and let our minds frolic and sport around and under and into weird and wonderful shapes, to be let off the leash of society’s endless worrying about ‘issues’ and let the carefree mind rediscover the primal joy of shapes and patterns created for our delight – and this is the exhibition to do it at!

It’s a welcome reminder that art can actually be carefree and fun, strange and mysterious, teasing and tantalising. For once I felt like I was visiting an exhibition of art designed to uplift and inspire me instead of attending my company’s compulsory course on inclusion and diversity.

We are allowed to smile. We are allowed to laugh out loud. We suddenly remember something we’d forgotten amid the stern and serious lecturing of those other exhibitions, that art can be liberating and light and frolicsome and funny. I’m smiling. Give yourself a treat.

Engineering

Buried in the layout is a form of chronological order, and you could take it that way, studying the wall labels to follow changing looks and trends from the 1950s onwards. But what this approach highlights is not so much developments in the artistic imagination as in technology and engineering. In each successive decade you can see how technological developments in moulding and shaping, erecting and supporting, above all in the variety and malleability of a steadily increasing diversity of materials, allowed artists’ imaginations to bloom and expand.

Gallery

Here’s a gallery of some of the most striking works and, as I increasingly do, I’ll add in the curators’ own wall labels about them. These are italicised to make it crystal clear they are not my words.

Tara Donovan

Installation view of ‘Untitled (Mylar)’ by Tara Donovan (2011) Photo by Jo Underhill

Tara Donovan makes her sculpture from manufactured materials that are often a part of consumers’ everyday lives but she finds her primary inspiration in nature. Untitled (Mylar) is created from thousands of flat, reflective discs of Mylar (a metallic polyester film), which have been folded, hot-glued and massed into spheres of varying sizes. Together they form a gigantic agglomeration that appears to mimic the growth patterns of biological or molecular structures. As always in Donovan’s work, light is an important factor, which she thinks of as an additional material, generating kaleidoscopic perceptual shifts of reflectivity as the viewer moves around the installation.

Eva Fàbregas

Installation view of ‘Pumping’ by Eva Fàbregas (2019) Photo by Jo Underhill

‘My work aims to fully inhabit the world of the senses, to imagine other possible bodies, other ways of feeling, caring and being in the world.’

A trio of massive inflatables crawls across the exhibition space. Made from stretched fabric and inflated balls, these tangled, pulsating forms appear distinctly intestinal. The sculptures are like instruments, activated by a choreography of subsonic frequencies, elastic rhythms, and textural sounds. The bass-heavy soundtrack is inspired by the artist’s experience of sound systems in nightclubs; Eva Fàbregas intends for the low audio frequencies in her work, emitted by multiple subwoofers, to be felt and not just heard. We resonate together with the sculptures, recalling forms of communication that occur inside us – at a cellular level – and between our bodies and the world.

Marguerite Humeau

Installation view of ‘The Guardian of Ancient Yeast’ by Marguerite Humeau (2023) Photo by Jo Underhill

‘There are forms of life that will survive us. How can we take them as our guides or companions to understand how to navigate our own futures?’

The sculptures in this room by Marguerite Humeau evoke forms that exist in nature: honeycomb, gills of mushrooms, discs of bracket fungi. The tallest sculpture, The Guardian of Ancient Yeast, takes its shape from termite mounds. Working collectively, termites build enormous structures to protect and grow fungi that feed the entire colony. Humeau draws a parallel with the way yeast has contributed to the evolution of human societies through its use in making bread and beer, which have been staples of communal gatherings for millennia. Multiple musical loops, all recorded from one single saxophone, connect the sculptures through a dynamic soundscape, as if they are engaged in ongoing conversations and attempting to synchronise. This interconnectedness hints at the opportunities that can arise from the interdependence of organisms.

Choi Jeong Hwa

Installation view of ‘Blooming matrix’ by Choi Jeong Hwa (2008) Photo by Jo Underhill

Choi Jeong Hwa’s columns of discarded junk are bearers of memory across time, space and cultures. Built from a mix of man-made and natural objects that were once the stuff of everyday life, their varied textures and symmetrical shapes echo structures found in nature. Choi refers to his playful and dynamic forms as ‘stupas’ – markers for religious places of burial and/or meditation. Individually and collectively, they point to the consumerism and overconsumption that has caused the environmental loss of the plant-life they resemble.

Jean-Luc Moulène

Installation view of ‘Plongement 1’ and ‘Méduse’ by Jean-Luc Moulène (2023 and 2018) Photos by the author

With their intricate play of irregular forms, Jean-Luc Moulène’s small sculptures often convey a sense of fluid movement. Méduse (the French word for jellyfish) brings to mind that creature’s shape-shifting mode of propulsion, its tentacles floating freely behind its open, bell-shaped body. Even in his blown glass and metal sculptures that draw on the shapes of different types of knots, the artist imbues his objects with a suggestion of dynamic change and deformation.

Plongement 1 reminded me (and the gallery attendant I discussed it with) of the Alien movies. We shared a very slight worry that, if we turned our backs on it, the metal claw would leap out of its glass container and grab us.

Lynda Benglis

Installation view of ‘Quartered Meteor’ by Lynda Benglis (1969, cast 1975) Photo by the author

‘The pouring of the material was very much about wanting to create undulating surfaces and complex planes that resist geometry; I like things to flow.’

A cast of an earlier work made from polyurethane foam (‘King of Flot’, 1969), this sculpture is made from lead – one of the most malleable metals – but its uncanny sense of liquidity is at odds with its solid form. To create the original work, Lynda Benglis heaped polyurethane into the corner of a room. Installed just away from the wall, this sculpture is strangely solid, like lava that has stopped mid-flow. The title alludes to the fiery conditions under which it could become molten again, drawing our attention to the instability of all forms.

Ruth Asawa

Installation view of sculptures by Ruth Asawa. Photo by Jo Underhill

These hanging sculptures are looped from wire using a basket-making technique that Ruth Asawa learned in Toluca, Mexico. The resulting objects have a lightness and transparency that belies their complexity, not unlike the natural forms – leaves, seed pods and spiders’ webs – that fascinated Asawa and inspired her artistic work. The nested, intersecting and continuous surfaces produce variations in density, which affect the patterns of light that pass through the forms and the shadows that they cast. Each work presented here shows a different stage in the development of Asawa’s technique from the 1950s to the 1990s.

Installation view of ‘A Subsequent Offering’ by E.J. Hill (2017) Photo by Jo Underhill

‘Thinking about roller coasters is one way for me to communicate ideas that I have about struggle and mortality and the impulse to go higher and faster and test our physical and mental limits.’

E.J. Hill has described rollercoasters as public monuments to the possibility of attaining joy, which, as he notes, is ‘a critical component of social equity.’ Although Hill’s gallery-scaled rollercoaster is unrideable, it prompts us to imagine the terror evoked by free-falling, the joy of moving at high speed, and the thrill of being propelled around its looping track. The public expression of these emotions presupposes a sense of safety that, as Hill points out, is not equally available to all bodies: ‘So much of my life in this body, in a black body, being queer, it’s not quiet, it’s very loud, aggressive and violent. That’s my experience. I feel like the counter to that, to all those loops and twists and turns, absolutely has to be a self-imposed quietness and stillness.’ For the first presentation of this work Hill lay on the platform at the centre of the installation, all day, every day, inserting his own immobile body into the scene. As a subsequent offering, this sculpture is what Hill describes as a ‘performance relic’, but one that invites us all to think about the nature of collective experience.

Installation view of ‘untitled: girl ii; 2019’ by Phyllida Barlow. Photo by the author

Writing about the nature of sculpture, Phyllida Barlow (1944 to 2023) noted that it can be awkward, unbalanced, restless and unpredictable – qualities that she seems to convoke in ‘untitled: girl ii; 2019’. Like all her sculpture, this massive dolmen-like object asks us to walk around it, wonder about it. Its figurative appearance, like a voluminous dancer en pointe with swollen, meaty thighs, seems both ominous and absurd. In a poetic text she wrote when this sculpture was first shown, the artist revealed that its genesis lay in a memory from her childhood: in an abandoned house on a wild moor, among ‘unnameable things’, Barlow recalled ‘these big shapes, anthropomorphic…dumb, curvaceous, still, biding time…’

DRIFT

Installation view of ‘Shylight’ by DRIFT (2006 to 2014) Photo by the author

DRIFT describe Shylight as ‘a performative sculpture; when you enter the space it becomes a kind of dance that is performed in front of you.’ Shylight’s fluidly ascending and descending lights are programmed to open and close like flowers whose petals furl and unfurl in response to changes in light or climate. DRIFT’s aim is to call attention to such rhythms and harmonies in our everyday natural environment. The impetus for their work can be as varied as the flight patterns of birds, a proliferation of dandelion seedheads, or the formation of a mass of clouds, coupled with innovative, cutting-edge technology.

Installation view of two ‘Tunnel Boring Machines’ by Teresa Solar Abboud (2021) Photo by the author

‘These works are a reimagination of the underground, with vibrant, finely finished elements that ooze out from the pores of the rough clay. They are hybrids between biology, geology and engineering.’

These three Tunnel Boring Machines by Teresa Solar Abboud resemble composite entities combining industrial and organic materials and forms. Emerging from clay bases, sleekly shaped ‘limbs’ painted in bright, artificial colours, suggest a range of forms – fins, propeller blades, aerodynamic appendages – all of which appear to be engineered to generate dynamic movement. In contrast, roughly-worked, heavy clay ‘joints’ function as bases or points of equilibrium for these polished elements. For the artist clay evokes the ancient, raw material of mud, which ‘always speaks to the underground, the mountains, the landscape; that which is underneath us all the time but we can never see.’

The one big drawback

The exhibition’s wall labels and individual captions, the press and promotional material and everything on the website, all trumpet the notion that the artworks capture the fundamental principle of organic life that nothing in the world stays the same, that everything is moving, changing and transforming

We are repeatedly told about the works’ ‘sensuous textures and surprising physical qualities’, and that sculpture ‘can be an indispensable vehicle for rediscovering and recovering lost dimensions of physical experience’.

All of which made it the more frustrating that you’re not allowed to touch them. Not only are there grey strips on the floor around all the artefacts beyond which you must not tread, but entrance into the exhibition is delayed while the ticket guy tells every single visitor that they MUST NOT TOUCH THE ARTWORKS.

God, how frustrating. I wanted again and again to reach out and touch and stroke and caress and run my fingers over these balls and bulges and foams and fantastical shapes, fabric and metal and glass and foam, closed my eyes and really, really let my other senses enjoy their involutions and contortions and reshaping of space.

Take the neon rollercoaster by E.J. Hill. He tells us how he spent whole days lying on the mat built into the sculpture, on the left hand side in the photo. My God, wouldn’t it be great if visitors could do that – lie down and become part of the sculpture. Or ‘Pumping’ by Eva Fàbregas, the room-sized arrangement of big pink fabric worms, just crying out, if not for me then certainly for little kids to run in and out of its arches and folds and explore, giggling and squealing!

Alas that in this of all exhibitions, which is about organic shapes and contours and materials and complex patterns, the visitor has to keep their distance, is kept apart from, detached from, prevented from enjoying, the really full all-sensual experience which the works so obviously cry out for.

And there were so many little kids on my visit, who would have loved to have run in and out of the bigger pieces, or run their hands across the surfaces of the weird and wonderful creations, generating a real sense of awe and strangeness which might last them a lifetime.

Instead, for all the curators’ brave talk of joyous this and sensual that, ‘When Forms Come Alive’ is visually stunning but remains as emotionally cold and sensually sterile as an operating theatre. Shame.

The artists

Twenty-one artists, 2 from the UK, 7 from the USA.

They are Ruth Asawa (USA), Nairy Baghramian (Iran), Phyllida Barlow (UK), Lynda Benglis (USA), Michel Blazy (France), Paloma Bosquê (Brazil), Olaf Brzeski (Poland), Choi Jeonghwa (South Korea), Tara Donovan (USA), DRIFT (Netherlands), Eva Fàbregas (Spain), Holly Hendry (UK), EJ Hill (USA), Marguerite Humeau (France), Jean-Luc Moulène (France), Senga Nengudi (USA), Ernesto Neto (Brazil), Martin Puryear (USA), Matthew Ronay (USA), Teresa Solar Abboud (Spain) and Franz West (Germany).

More Hayward Gallery reviews

Hayward Gallery reviews

Franz West @ Tate Modern

Franz West (1947 to 2012) is best known for his unconventional objects and sculptures, installations and furniture work, which often require an involvement of the audience.

This is a big exhibition, taking up no fewer than ten rooms at Tate Modern and the overwhelming impression you get is that West relished amateurishness, the cack-handed, graceless elevation of the everyday into ambiguous and intriguing objects – like this set of sculptures made out of bottles and baths and rolls of carpet and toilet seats and plates stacked on each other in no particular order and covered in papier-mâché and painted a horrible vomit-brown.

Redundanz by Franz West (1986)

His works’ determined lack of grace and finish ought to be off-putting but I came out of the exhibition really liking them.

Deliberate amateurishness

A modern artist like Jeff Koons gets his kicks by making objects and sculptures which are manufactured to a technicolour-bright, smooth, hyper-real perfection. Their gleaming finish satirises the impossible perfection of airbrushed models, movie stars, and adverts. His sculptures are satires on, ahem, modern consumer capitalism.

West makes the same general point (i.e. isn’t capitalism, advertising and consumer culture awful?) but with the diametrically opposite strategy.

From the start of his career in the late 1960s, through to the end – as an award-winning showstopper at the Venice Biennale and numerous other international art festivals – West set out to undermine the shiny world of western consumerism with determinedly hand-made and amateurish artefacts, where you are meant to see the joins and the glue and the shabby lack of professional finish.

Big papier-mâché sculptures

Thus the most characteristic – and memorably enormous – works here are huge, hand-made, hand-built, wonky, papier-mâché sculptures which look like they could have been made by enterprising schoolchildren.

Installation view of Franz West at Tate Modern 2019. Photo by Luke Walker

The exhibition builds up to a climax in the last couple of rooms which contain vast, pastel-coloured, abstract sculptures all made out of wood and cardboard and gauze and papier-mâché. Are the bright but gentle pastel colours symbolic of something, packed with artistic meaning? No. In a typically off-hand, deliberately unpretentious way, West is quoted as saying he got the idea for the colours of these big works from children’s pajamas 🙂

Epiphanie an Stuhlen (2011) by Franz West. Photo by Luke Walker

Early drawings

The road towards these monster sculptures began in the late 1960s, when West (born in 1947) was a well-known alcoholic and trouble-maker on the periphery of the Vienna art scene. He was arrested a couple of times, and took part in friends’ ‘happenings’ and installations in those far-gone, heady days of revolution and sticking it to the bourgeoisie. Only slowly, and relatively late (around the age of 26) did he begin to make anything like ‘art’ himself, in the early 1970s.

Initially these consisted of really bad, amateurish drawings. There are several walls covered with them, sets of human figures drawn with breath-taking gawkiness. Some are funny, most are notable for a kind of confident ineptitude.

Untitled (1972) Private collection © Estate Franz West © Archiv Franz West

Many of his pictures and collages satirised contemporary pornographic magazines. Apparently, he made the images ‘absurd’ by ‘decontextualising’ them – as you can see by this one, a penetrating study of the wickedness of contemporary pornography.

West was, according to the wall labels, keen to satirise the Freudian theory that human behaviour is based on sexual drives. Hence lots of crudely drawn images of men with erect penises about to penetrate women with crudely drawn breasts.

Frohsinn (1974) by Franz West

The Passstücke

But West’s real breakthrough came when he invented the Passstücke (Adaptives), abstract papier-mâché pieces which were intended to be picked up and played with. These are as rough and amateurish as his drawings, but it was the contexts he put them in that began to make them interesting. For example, there are a handful of replicas of the early hand-pieces and visitors are encourage to mess about with them in what look like department store dressing rooms.

Passtucke mit box und video (1996) Photo Luke Walker

There are several very rough, amateurish video films and lots of photos of West’s friends in Vienna’s 1970s underground art scene putting these funny, odd papier-mâché shapes on their heads, wearing them like clothes, or – in one striking scene – there’s a topless woman using a plate-shaped piece of papier-mâché to lift and move her naked bosoms while a fully dressed man sits nearby and plays improvised jazz on a trumpet. A naked woman! With boobs! Improvised jazz!

You can still smell the wild, crazeee, avant-garde vibe of these subversive rebels 40 years later. I bet they smoked pot. I bet they stayed up all night talking about philosophy and the meaning of life. Crazeee.

Friedl Kubelka. Graf Zoken (Franz West) still, 1969. Courtesy Friedl Kubelka © DACS, London 2018

Bigger, brighter, and with added furniture

After two or three rooms acclimatising you to West’s relatively small and amateurish early art, and to the 1970s world of flairs and slacks and beards and long hair and bare boobs which it came out of – the visitor walks through a doorway into the first of a series of far larger, much more open spaces, in which Franz is suddenly making much, much larger sculptures and installations.

There’s a big one comprising four walls made of papier-mâché which create four office booths, each of which contains home-made furniture. For Franz had started to make furniture.

Wegener Räume: an installation of four gouaches, four sculptures on wooden bases, four seats, wooden walls, paper, cloth, gauze, plaster and metal by Franz West (1988)

The office furniture was, originally, meant to be sat on and used, just like the Passstücke are meant to be handled, twirled round your head, worn on your wrist or whatever.

West wanted to make art that was functional – art and furniture at the same time.

BUT – I couldn’t help smiling to read, on a whole succession of wall labels that – unfortunately, regrettably, sadly – this or that piece of furniture or hand-held sculpture was now too old and fragile to be touched. Please don’t touch the interactive art. Ne touche pas. Nicht tasten.

Some furniture by Franz West, namely: Caseuse (1989), Untitled (1989) and Untitled (Stuhl) (1989)

Furniture usable and unusable

One of the wall labels says that West was interested all his life in blurring the border between art and the useful, sculpture and the everyday, which involved interrogating the notion of the gallery as th enly place where are could be displayed, etc etc.

An intention which, you can’t help thinking, must be judged a complete failure seeing as a) you are not allowed to touch any of his interactive art b) this entire exhibition is taking place in an, er, very traditional art gallery and c) that the exhibition costs a fairly steep £13 to enter.

As long as you don’t take the po-faced wall labels too seriously, this is a very enjoyable exhibition. It’s full of silliness.

In 1987 West made Eo Ipso, for a survey of sculpture in Münster. It’s made from his mother’s old washing machine which he unravelled into a twisted approximation of a bench and then painted a dire lime green. And then photographed his artist mates sitting on it (not for very long, I imagine).

Eo Ipso by Franz West (1987)

Here are some big papier-mâché heads he made out of plaster, gauze, cardboard, iron, acrylic, foam and rubber.

Lemurenköpfe by Franz West (1992)

According to the wall label:

In Roman mythology lemurs are tortured spirits living in limbo because they were never buried or because they committed crimes during their earthly life. At the beginning of the 20th century the term Lemurenköpfe was coined by the Viennese intellectual Karl Kraus to describe the Social-Democrat political group, who did not manage to prevent the rise of extremism. When they were first presented at documenta [an exhibition of contemporary art which takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany] West invited visitors to fill the mouths of the Lemurenköpfe with garbage, creating sculptures with ‘bad breath’.

Satirising the art world

The same childish simplicity is on display throughout. In a darkened room there’s a projection onto a big screen of a characteristically amateurish film titled Vier Gellert Lieder. According to the guide:

West show this video with Bernhard Riff between 1992 and 1996. they recorded several meetings with artists and curators at openings and dinners, often giving artists absurd instructions to talk to camera. They then set the images to the music of Beethoven’s Six Lieder which had themselves used the texts of poems by Christian Furchtegott Gellert. When editing, they cut up and repeated clips of dialogue, slowed and speeded up the footage, and distorted colours. The video is a surreal portrait of the art world as a clique of weirdos and obsessives, rather than a place for the refined creation evoked by Beethoven.

What’s sweet about the film and the guide text is the touching belief that most of the world doesn’t already think of modern art as rubbish and modern artists as con-men and art dealers as slimy crooks.

Watching some of the leering, goonish, freakish artists and their simpering dealers and curators, and comparing them with the old-fashioned but pure and graceful music, had the – presumably – intended effect on me, which was to ponder how far, how very, very far, modern Austrian, German and, by extension, European art has fallen in the past century.

A Franz west living room

The final room features a number of bookcases holding the typically modish books Franz liked to read (Freud, Nietzsche, Sartre, Benjamin, all the usual suspects), some relatively small papier-mâché sculptures, and a couple of sofas on which you’re meant to sit and watch another, really amateurish film recording West and a bunch of mates assembling ‘The Hamsterwheel’, an unofficial group show that took place during the 2007 Venice Biennale.

British artist Sarah Lucas has worked with West on a number of projects – in fact she designed the plinths and backgrounds and the design of a lot of this exhibition – and was involved in the Hamsterhweel project and features in the film. Of the Hamsterwheel she’s quoted as saying:

We all spent a couple of weeks together, knocking things up, and nobody what it was going to be, really. It all seemed a bit chaotic, but by the time it was done, it had a sublime quality – everything worked and it had this amazing elevated feel to it.

And next to the bookshelves, hanging on the wall, is the poster West made for this show. It recycles one of the deliberately crude and graceless drawings from his 1975 series, Sexuality. Has a kind of amazing, elevated feel to it, don’t you think?

The Hamsterwheel by Franz West (2007)

Post-war Austria

Walking among the many posters West has created, and amid the steadily more enormous papier-mâché sculptures, enduring the terrible videos, and reading solemn references in the wall labels to West’s use of imagery of penises and turds… you can’t help feeling you’re walking amid the ruins of a once-great civilisation.

It is as if a great holocaust, a vast devastating event, has ruined western civilisation forever, destroyed old beliefs in traditional forms and genres and ideas, and left its survivors like children scurrying amid the ruins, filming women’s boobs, drawing men with penises, creating coiled turds and melting, grungy, barbarous shapes out of papier-mâché.

And of course, it did. West was born in 1947 into an absolutely ruined Vienna, one time stronghold of Nazi sentiment and now divided between the four victorious allies, setting of the grim Graham Greene story, The Third Man. For anyone with a soul, an imagination and a conscience, it must have seemed like the old traditional values in art and life had been broken forever.

West’s posters

But then I looked up and saw another one of his overgrown baby toys and told myself to stop feeling so tragic. A lot of his work is fun and inventive and colourful and interesting. Looking back on the exhibition afterwards, I realised I had under-appreciated the long line of posters he produced, initially publicising small art events or friends’ music concerts, eventually he developed a recognisable brand or style of poster which he used to publicise his numerous exhibitions. As the curators put it:

West showed at major museums and large galleries, and would always produce collages and posters to accompany his exhibitions. He loved to combine photographic images with paint, and to use kitschy and crass typography. In this way, he refused the elegant design so often used to brand art institutions.

They’re deliberately scrappy, messy, amateurish and anti-polish… but oddly effective, strangely more-ish.

Plakatentwurf (Die Aluskulptur) 2000. Franz West Privatstiftung/Estate Franz West, Vienna © Estate Franz West © Archiv Franz West

Every rebel becomes an Establishment darling

What started out as anti-Establishment rebellion in the late 60s had turned into the art for a new kind of freewheeling post-modern Establishment by the later 1980s, certainly by the 1990s.

So that, in West’s final years, all his themes and tendencies came together in a series of large, brightly coloured and absurdist sculptures designed to adorn galleries and public spaces. In the right environment, some of these look strangely apt and appropriate. As so often, big bright modern art looks great in American cities.

Mostly West, an exhibition of Franz West’s sculpture outside the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts, New York, 2004 © Estate Franz West © Archiv Franz West. Photo by Reinhard Bernsteiner / Atelier Franz West

But in other contexts – like the horrible rear entrance to the Tate Modern extension – they look a bit more spooky, like the incomprehensible relics of a ruined civilisation, or like the baubles of demented giants or – more precisely – like the grimly desperate attempts of modern architects and planners to persuade us poor victims of their heartless designs that we don’t live in a barren, loveless, windswept world of brutalist car parks and soulless shopping centres.

Some Franz West sculptures round the back of the Tate Modern extension on a grim, grey London day (photo by the author)

Do West’s big sculptural statements enliven and brighten up civic life? Or make it all too obvious that we live in a world of brightly coloured tat?

Promotional video

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