FOREWORD - FRANZ WEST
 
Franz West began his artistic career by making drawings. The story goes that he used to pay his cafŽ bills in Vienna with his sketches. The reason was not only the young artist's financial circumstances, but it was also a conscious artistic strategy. He realized that few cafŽs could resist hanging his drawings - and thereby gain him public exposure. Although stories of this kind usually turn out to be mythical, this seems borne out by West's extremely consistent position that art is forever interacting with the external circumstances of life. This leads to a blurring of what constitutes art and what constitutes life - which, in Franz West's case - are closely interconnected. It is a vision that he has never lost, even though his career is presently tied to art institutions with a more or less deliberate policy with regard to exhibitions, far from the primitive conditions for display offered by the cafŽ. West manages to transform the mausoleums of art to living art centers by entrusting the visitor with participating in the process where art and life meet.

In the course of his career, West has expanded his two-dimensional artistic repertoire to comprise painting, collage and poster art. What seems to interest him is the constitutional duality of these media - a contradictory interplay between elements from the print media joined by means of a painterly process that barely keeps the pictures together. Even though painting itself contains an expressive act, it is hard to think of the collages as tied to the artist's personality in the modernist tradition. They oscillate between personal expression and a return to their original context. In addition, the textual dimension of the posters has a very special function; they announce an event which in most cases consists of an exhibition by Franz West. The posters are not displayed externally in the social space, but in Rooseum's exhibition hall. West transformes the poster from a functional-communicative medium to something more purely aesthetic. This gives an indication of his interest in inverting the codes of visual communication to prevent anything from being taken for granted. The collages and posters are hung as in a salon, where the works interact as of a cluster or mosaic which makes it difficult to distinguish them individually. This might be seen as an attempt to avoid the strict hanging principles of modern art according to which each work is installed so as to retain as much independence as possible.

At the Rooseum, the sculptures constitute a central part of the exhibition. This, however, is not to say that West places a higher value on them than on any other work in the exhibition. I do not believe that West prioritizes as to the mediums' intrinsic value. There is an eclecticism about his sculptural art, with numerous references to the history of modernist sculpture. There are traces of Giacometti's surrealist plaster sculptures, Arp's anthropomorphic abstraction, and to the central importance of materiality in Dubuffet's painting. This multiplicity of references is an indication of West's interest in reducing his own artistic subject and its imprints on the creative process. The exalted nature of sculpture is also questioned through West's conscious use of "base" materials in which objets-trouvŽs from life's constant flow make for closer proximity between life and art. Papier m‰chŽ is another of West's favorite sculpture materials. The fact that it is extremely well suited to painting, expands the sculptural characteristics to include not only form but also paint. It also represents a conscious blurring of the media and their internal characteristics - one of the central concepts of modern art. In addition, papier m‰chŽ is a material that is easily changed or destroyed at the close of the exhibition - which is sometimes the case with West's works. Inherent in this is a suggestion of the fact that the sculptures are not for eternity, but are more ephemeral, as dictated by the individual. It is, in other words, a sculpture material as far removed from the "eternal materials" of bronze and marble as can be imagined.

In the early 1980's West began work on a group of sculptures which he called Pa§stŸcke. The word is originally a technical term which might be translated as "parts that fit into each other", much like a kind of cog wheel. The institutional exhibition world traditionally applies the explicit "look, but don't touch" to modern sculpture. The visitor is denied the tactile experience and has to be satisfied with admiring glances at the sculpture. It is this that inspired theories of a kind of voyeurism. In his Pa§stŸcke, Franz West turns this around by trying to make the visitor an active participant in the exhibition. Not only is he allowed to touch the sculptures, but he may also move them and carry them around. But visitors find it difficult to give up their voyeuristic habits. In his exhibitions, West employs videos that show visitors carrying his Pa§stŸcke around. These videos serve as a series of instructions for the viewers. The idea behind the Pa§stŸcke is not only to free us from our ingrained notions, however, but to relate the sculpture to the way we view our own physical constitution. Mirrors are often placed in conjunction with these Pa§stŸcke, so that the visitor can observe him or herself in relation to the sculptures. Handling them is no easy task. The fundamental principle of the classical sculptural tradition is that we try to find a balance with the help of our body. Franz West's Pa§stŸcke are not obviously adapted to the human body. Their center of gravity is out of balance, and they therefore seem awkward and difficult to handle. They have been described as prosthetic devices that make us physically aware of our lack of perfection or a kind of burden of our neurotic symptoms. Someone has referred to the struggles of the visitors with the Pa§stŸcke as theater of the absurd.

The sculptural podium has been called an altar for the worship of an artful object that verges on the religious. But the elevation of the podium is effectively negated by the way it is used by West. In his work 3 or 17 (1992) which is part of the Rooseum exhibition, the podiums function as independent elements. A single sculpture among a large number of podiums seems an open invitation to the visitor to move the sculpture among the podiums. The way the visitor places the sculpture, with its many variables, indicates that West does not have a definitive place in mind but is open to a variety of solutions to the problem of how to place the sculpture. In this simple way, West emphasizes the arbitrariness of place and, in doing so, negates the notion of a given order based on an aesthetic notion, as is the usual case in art exhibitions.

West's exhibitions also contain furniture, such as chairs, sofas, beds or couches, as well as tables. These pieces bear no relationship to the furniture found in a home. They are not ready-mades but objects created by Franz West for an exhibition - part of the public context. The pieces are sculptures, but they also have a function. Although they are intended for use by the public, they do not readily conform to the body. Simply constructed from steel tubing and iron mesh they force the body to conform to the furniture. In this, they are related to the Pa§stŸcke. With its ambivalence towards the relationship between aesthetics and functionalism, West's furniture challenges one of the central notions of modern art - that of the immanent art object characterized by lack of function.

In West's art it is not possible to distinguish the individual work of art as an entity referring only to itself. His oeuvre produces a sense of fluidity, where the individual works latch on to each other, regardless of their internal chronology. They are part of one long chain of works, that tends neither toward the modern nor the utopian. West's exhibition at the Rooseum does not only consist of a complex interplay between various groups of works that interact in a highly intricate fashion. He often groups two- or three-dimensional works into constellations, which themselves form smaller spaces within the exhibition space. The exhibition interacts with the architecture of the Rooseum in a highly intelligent way. There is something awkward about the way Franz West installs his works which causes the relationship between his art and the space to harmonize rather poorly. Quite the contrary, in fact, their differences become accentuated and both become visible. It is this wealth of possible combinations that has become one of West's trademarks.

His work with the architecture and its extensions suggests a strong interest in the social space. Even so, West's interest is not focused on the area of public sculpture. In his public sculptures, he distances himself from the monumentality that is rooted in the development and history of society. Instead he chooses to stress the inherent aesthetic qualities of the work, something that allows the sculpture to return to the sphere of the exhibition space. In this respect, the sculpture on display in Rooseum's courtyard is no exception. Both its nature and placement suggest that it has ended up there by chance - it brings the sense of that indoors has become outdoors. Again this subtle feeling for playing with our ingrained notions of what suits or does not suit the work, which shows that regardless of how knowledgeable we are about art we are still the victims of a number of rules that are deeply rooted in our culture.

Today's exhibition space which is usually likened to a white cube has been compared to a holy space where the art work is to be worshipped in a pure and sacred setting. To the extent that the visitor is invited to enter, it is for the private contemplation of the work-like the private communion with a higher power. But modern art's pursuit of purity has gone even further. In certain instances, the visitor has become an impure element which may sometimes have to be excluded from the exhibition space. Duchamp railed against ungenerous view of the visitor and described the viewer as a peeping Tom with a voyeuristic relationship to modern art. Duchamp made this observation in some of his installations. His interest in viewer participation was primarily concerned with vesting the art with meaning. In Franz West's art a number of modernist concepts are exemplified, or rather, he takes the art institutions to task for the exaggerated awe for modernism as a historical era. He not only welcomes the visitor with open arms. He also invites for usage of the art. You may sit on his furniture, you may even carry his sculptures around. The visitor is thus more than welcome in his exhibition rooms. One might even say that his exhibitions might be perceived as absurd in the absence of an audience. But in this case, it is not primarily a question of the urge to make the viewer help establish the content of the work. Instead, West seems to seek to establish another relationship with the public. The act of attending an exhibition is in itself the affirmation of a collective intent. West's relationship to the collective is not as manifest as Beuys' insistence that art should be a social sculpture which may also be used as a social model. West's "social sculpture" contains a more deeply skeptical anarchist vein and also an anti-heroic attitude towards the notion that art is able to change society. His art has the ability to change our impression of art. It includes individual change but it also contains the embryo of collective change. The result of Franz West's exhibition creates a strange sense of community where, according to modernist philosophy, there should be none but only contemplation by the individual.

Bo Nilsson
Museum Director