Rooseum-FRANZ WEST

»Does this spot

'fit' into the white surroundings? - But that is just how it would look if there had first been a hole in its place and it then fitted into the hole«.

- Ludwig Wittgenstein -

»My dentist is a masochist, too. I pay him with art. He fits my teeth and gets a fitting piece, a Paßstück«.

- Franz West -

An unusually clear memory of an artwork: I am dozing on a sofa in the courtyard behind a German museum. The fabric is warm from the sun, it is afternoon. Around me are a number of similar sofas, all covered with oriental rugs and furnished with comfy, cylindrical pillows. My friends are lying a few meters away. All around people are relaxing, exhausted from a long trip or from too much visual information. This is Kassel; the year is 1992. We are all in town to see Documenta IX. It took a few years before I understood that the sofas had been works of art and that the naps my friends and I took had been part of Austrian artist Franz West's plans. We were part of his artwork.
To tactilely relate to a sculpture - or to any artwork, really - breaks with an imposing tradition: the history of the eye. Visual images and metaphors dominate not just European art but our culture as a whole. It is vision - since antiquity the most important of the senses - that we rely on to attain the definitive truth: the idea, the nature of things, the inner essence of art. Lying half unconscious with one's chin on a pillow has not been the typical manner of drawing nearer to an aesthetic object. Yet, that is just what West invites us to do with his sofas and pillows. He encourages active participation, not just visually but with the body, especially with the hands. To thoroughly comprehend his works requires manipulation - grab it, lift it, move it around and feel its weight. Or sit down, settle down in the pillows, lean back, find a comfortable position and relax.
West returned to the idea behind his Documenta piece, Auditorium, two years later, in Los Angeles. In the square outside The Museum of Contemporary Art, West presented the installation Test. The work, consisting of 28 sofas, was accompanied by this note: "Test is a synthesis of three different influences: 1) an exhibition by Chris Burden where he spent the duration of the show in a recess over the entrance to the gallery; 2) Joseph Beuys's statement that every person is an artist; 3) my contribution to Documenta, called Auditorium. Have a seat and stay as long as you like. The ideal would be to stay throughout the entire exhibition. The covers were designed and created by Gilbert Bretterbauer. Together, the 28 sofas create a composition visible from an imaginary point over the square. If you want to lie down, please take off your shoes to spare the artwork."
West often has short comments handy for his works. Usually, they include directions for how the visitor can physically interact with the object presented: to move them or sit on them or put them on. This passion for involving the visitor and for creating a tactile connection between the works and the "viewer" (truly an unfitting word when referring to West's art, since it so clearly puts the stress on vision) is the most typical recurring characteristic in nearly all his projects of the past twenty-five years. At West's exhibitions, we are directed to "Come here, grab me, touch me and use me." Such instruction differs greatly from the normal: "Look at me, but do not come too close. Look closely, but for God's sake, don't touch me! I am a work of art."
"Bitte zurücktreten!" I distinctly remember the metallic voice that startled me when, as a teenager, I approached an artwork too closely at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, in Vienna. An invisible eye had watched me the entire time; the voice came from a speaker. All over the world, museum visitors are kept at a safe distance from the objects, but never had I encountered such a brusque method for ensuring compliance. It strikes me that West's art can be seen as a friendly yet a very resolute reaction against this Austrian museum practice. In his own playful way, West's artistry could be considered a continuation of a definite tradition: the Viennese artist's desire to react and protest against the prevailing order and the institutional pressure that exists in the state. This clearly applies to the so-called "Viennese Actionists," whose violent antics must be interpreted as a reaction (or overreaction) to society as well as the Catholic church. For the writer and dramatist Thomas Bernhard, a similar opposition aesthetic was at issue, directed not only at the Church but at the whole Austrian state. Certainly, humor finds its way into Bernhard's texts, but in the end his work emerged from an ability to extract artistic energy from hate - hatred for Austria. In his will, Bernhard stated that none of his work may "be acted, printed, or read in public in Austria. My express desire is that with this I indicate that I want nothing at all to do with Austria in the future." Opposition lives on in the grave.
Such hatred does not apply to West. The sort of opposition his art brings into the museum is playful and exhilarating. He does not counter intractable with intractable; instead, he conquers the institution's uncompromising rules with humor. If the stern Austrian museum guard stringently admonishes visitors to keep their distance (or, perhaps, even better, just leave), West's objects engage us in participation. In a short note accompanying his work 3 or 17 (1993), he bids the visitor to grasp the sculpture - an indefinable object with a handle - and place it on one of the empty pedestals in the exhibition room. One version of the work includes three pedestals, another has 17, thus the title: "So go ahead and grab. No stranger's eye is secretly spying on you. The fulfillment of Being is in your hands."
The gory activities common among the Actionists were based on a presentation of ritual violence and catharsis, something alien to West. When very young, he attended one of the Viennese Actionists' most publicized events: Kunst und Revolution (1968). Among the other participants were Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, and Oswald Wiener. The performance was extreme and shocking; the press described it as a scandal. When finished, Wiener asked if anyone in the audience wanted to say something, but embarrassing silence filled the air. West took the opportunity to speak a few words, taking the sting out of the Actionists supposed radicality: This evening has been very successful, he said. He thanked all the participants and suggested a round of applause. This anecdote tells a lot about how West deals with things. A mild manner can be more effective than all attempts to surpass avant-gardism's radical gestures with more extreme actions. In contrast to his contemporaries in Vienna's art world, West remained outside the Actionists' cliques and forged his own way.
In some ways, Franz West is an artist on his own. When he was young, there were two strong art currents in German-speaking Europe, two distinct camps to line up with: Joseph Beuys or the Actionists. West chose not to become a pupil but to remain independent. The choice he made then affects his relationships with young artists today, and with his own assistants. Nothing could be more foreign to him than the idea of creating his own school. Frequently, his work involves other artists, and his assistants are often included in his exhibitions; but it is never a question of a group adhering to the same premises. Instead, he is acutely interested in his assistants' artistic independence, which is made evident in the cases where they are invited to show their own work (as, for example, in this Rooseum show).

II

In conjunction with an exhibition at Galerie nächst St. Stephan, in Vienna, nearly twenty years ago, West formulated for the first time - along with friend Reinhard Priessnitz - his "theory" about Paßstücke. This concept has become important for all of West's production. What is a Paßstück? I quote the following text in its entirety:
"About the objects: These objects are to be used. They represent a possible attempt to give shape to neurotic symptoms. Their function as Paßstücke for the human body (the stance associated with them) allows us, among other things, to inverse Leonardo da Vinci's comprehension that facial muscles, as a projection of the rest of the body's musculature, express the psychic condition, if I have correctly understood Bruno Gironcoli's reading. Their relationship to the bearer gives these objects a further dimension. This, however, is independent of the user's creative ability. Praxis has shown that the actual use of the object is drastically determined and inhibited by the conventions that apply to the handling of art objects. These Paßstücke with human bodies, I call art."
What else is a Paßstück? The thing that fits, that is used by bodies, and that seems appropriate for certain attitudes and poses. The first exhibition featuring Paßstücke consisted of a row of objects that resist definition, hanging on a wall, plus a series of photographs showing various ways to use the objects. There was also a mirror in the room, so that those who wielded the pieces could see how they looked. They were made of papier mâché, wood, or plaster, and they varied in size and form. Sometimes these pieces are reminiscent of utensils, sometimes of bags. Not seldom, there is something organic about them - indeed, something fleshy. Sometimes they suggest primitive musical instruments, tools of ritual, or clubs and weapons. Occasionally they appear as very rugged jewelry or as unusual, heavy headdresses. In the photographs, people carry them in their hands, on their shoulders, on their heads. They dance, pose, and play with them, hide behind them, lean on them. At times the objects seem very foreign and extrinsic to the body, and sometimes they seem practically conjoined with the persons using them.
Do these objects manifest structure in the psyche? Are they neuroses made tangible? Whatever the case, they are not allowed to lead a covert existence; rather they share a room and are conspicuous to everyone, like bizarre decorations on the personality. If they are symptoms of some sort of affliction, those in question have learned not to be ashamed of their own peculiarities. Instead, they embrace Slavoj Zizek's challenge: "Love your symptoms!"
The Austrian architect Adolf Loos - who deemed all ornament a crime - dreamed about driving through Vienna in a truck so heavy that all exterior ornamentation would loosen from the façades and tumble to the ground. Many of West's Paßstücke are rather ornamental - not well-polished, perfectly balanced decorations on newly renovated buildings, but old broken fragments that fell from dilapidated buildings. Now they rest in piles in the street, without function or a clear home. Anyone can pick them up and incorporate them into his or her personal history.
Are these ancillary limbs, sorts of pseudo limbs that have a life of their own beyond the body's normal organization? Some Paßstücke feel like ungainly body parts; fleshy and strange but not completely foreign. Parts of a body, but not my specific body. A larger fleshiness more extensive than that which applies to my circumscribed life. In his description of a series of photos made for a book, West, borrowing from Jacques Lacan, embarks on the subject of a sort of "pre-subjective" desire, the body parts' horniness prior to the creation of a uniform human subject: "Lacan talks about Empedocles, a Greek pre-Socratic philosopher who had a story about the creation of the world. He says that before man was created there were dismembered bodily parts floating around in the world. I think that even before they completed themselves, they were already horny. This is what the pictures are about."
I experience the Paßstück, but it also seems as though it experiences me. In the photographs, images of people locked in embrace with their Paßstücke make it impossible to tell what has been attracted to what: the body craves the Paßstück, but the object also yearns for the human body. It brings to mind a condition Maurice Merleau-Ponty returned to in all of his writings about the phenomenology of the body: The ambivalence of flesh. When the one hand experiences the other hand, the object becomes the subject and the subject the object. In "the Intertwining - kismen" it is called: "[quote] This circular path between object and subject is made further tangible in the dance before the mirror that West's Paßstücke lure us in to.

III

From eye to hand. Early on, West understood that what he wanted to do could not easily be translated into visual terms, and that it necessarily involved more of the senses than just sight. Within philosophy, such an exploration had already been skillfully tackled by a thinker from West's native Vienna: Ludwig Wittgenstein. He transformed philosophy from a theoretical discipline to one defined by praxis - not fully decipherable in theoretical terms. It involves the direct handling of objects, everyday dallying, what the hand experiences rather than the eye. Occasionally, affinities between Wittgenstein and West's works are noted; quotes crop up here and there. But, obviously, no systematic link exists. A more important "philosophical" motto for West comes from Aristotle: "Art loves chance and chance loves art." Nonetheless, the parallels found in Wittgenstein are worth considering with respect to the visual, in general. One of the central strategies in Wittgenstein's later texts, for example, On Certainty, is that, in different ways, it is possible to reveal the inaccuracies in the Cartesian perception of certainty as fixed evidence. Certain truths are never questioned, they can not be disputed in the language games we play; not because these truths are given in a theory but, rather, because of their central position in patterns of behavior that are at the base of our language games - our way of speaking about and seeing the world: "Giving grounds, however, justifying the evidence, comes to an end; - but the end is not certain propositions' striking us immediately as true, i.e., it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language-game." We do not contest that we have a certain degree of control over our bodies, that we know our names, or that everyday things that surround us do not constantly change shape.
Wittgenstein calls these fundamental truths "hinge propositions." Some have jumped to interpret them as a sort of theoretical axiom. But according to the view of language and knowledge that Wittgenstein developed, the neutral examination (the philosopher's eye) is not the most fundamental but, rather, the mass of events that are the base of all communications, our patterns of behavior and our deep-rooted habits to not question certain things but to quite simply act in a certain way. He quotes Goethe's Faust: "Im Anfang war die Tat."
And what is the basis of this conduct? Nothing at all. One can always refer to a rule, but every rule demands another rule to explain how it should be applied. In the end, following rules is without foundation: "When I follow rules, I do not choose, I blindly follow the rules." Here, Wittgenstein refers to the animal in all of us. When we stop demanding further reasons for our behavior, we can only refer to the animalistic: the automatic, the unreflecting deed, that which is without foundation. Why bring up this philosophy of behavior, here? Because West's artistry deals with an expansion of the artwork from the visual realm to a broader field that includes feeling, bodily movement, and practical action. From eye to hand, from pupil to thumb and forefinger.
Standing in front of a mirror with one of West's Paßstücke, such as a heavy object that looks like an enormous meat mallet, it is difficult to know what will happen. Then suddenly, for no reason, the mallet starts to move in different patterns, with no real logic - animalistic, neurotic, symptomatic, poetic?

IV

The thing that fits. Sit on a chair. It fits well. Sit on a sofa, lay your head on a pillow - it, too, fits well. A chair is a Paßstück for the everyday, says West, and he diagrams a short history:
"The chair's problem in art (for Kosuth, Beuys, or Artschwager) is the ready-made's problem, it can be homemade or found. The ready-made is experienced with the bottom, the person who sits down, sits down and it is art." A homemade ready-made - what can that be? Is it not inherent in the definition of a ready-made that someone else makes it, preferably anonymously, like a bicycle wheel? Not for West: his furnishings are homemade ready-mades. Things that have a function - that are used - but that are artworks. The utilization itself is art: the head that fits against the pillow, the elbow that rests on the arm of a chair, the bottom that settles into the sofa. A catalogue is also a Paßstück, a cog that fits into a larger whole and that becomes art through its function when its rests in the hands and is read. Hopefully, the catalogue you currently hold is such a Paßstück that falls into place.
Some of these homemade ready-mades seem stricter than others do. For example, take the group of chairs crowded together and placed so that all who sit in them face the same direction, often looking out toward nothing. Such a work shares an affinity with a minimal tradition and with the most extremely reduced artistic expressions that usually avoid all practical or earthly contacts. Other works - for example, the very comfortable sofas in a mesh weave - beckon to repose. The truth is that these pieces of furniture are among the most comfortable ever made.
"A good chair is a good chair," wrote Donald Judd. West would agree, but, unlike Judd, he would not attempt to draw a line between artworks and everyday objects. On the contrary, everything West does is part of the same open project: sculpture or sofa, chair or Paßstück. All these things function in a mutual exchange of signs and movements, linguistic fragments, and events that make up our culture. Lately, there has been a lot of talk about art where there is an active relationship between the artwork and the viewer and between those involved in the artistic process. There is also talk of projects that succeed in tearing down the walls between art and everyday objects. West has consistently created such an environment of exchange for several decades.
Many voices, many hands, many eyes: When West adds color to his objects and furniture, he frequently delegates the decision to others. When he creates titles, he regularly turns to linguistically gifted people (in the past, often his brother). And for the fulfillment of the artworks he is dependent on other people - friends, visitors, and even sometimes people who are ignorant of the context. All of this is possible because the artworks have an open, inviting, and a thoroughly generous character. They let in the viewer because they also need him or her to be completed.
Franz West's art is some of the most inventive and inviting that I know. His works sit and wait, they need you. So dig in: "The fulfillment of Being is in your hands!"

Daniel Birnbaum

Franz West: Proforma ,Vienna, 1996, p 120
Thomas Bernhard, Helt enkelt komplicerat , Stockholm, 1991, p 216
Parkett 37, 1993, p 96
Franz West: Proforma , Vienna, 1996, p 110
Parkett 37, 1993, p 82
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l'invisible , Paris, 1964, p 198
Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty , Oxford, 1969, ¶ 342
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations , Oxford, 1953, ¶ 212
Franz West: Proforma, p 103

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