Franz West

Franz West (*1947 Vienna, †2012) is known above all for an open-minded way of dealing with the medium of sculpture and its installations. He pursued an approach aimed at participation, which understood the context of the works and above all the reaction of the viewers as central parts of its reception. West had a philosophical, playful, and humorous approach to sculpture that also influenced other artistic fields.

West’s open approach to the requirements of sculpture seems almost to foists itself on anyone looking at the work Epiphanie an Stühlen (Epiphany on Chairs) (2011). Visitors find themselves facing a grotesque-looking object that does not have a pedestal and that mocks any classic description of a sculpture. It is a spherical being in pink floating above the floor of the exhibition space and extends its volume by means of feeler-like strands. In its original version, visitors were encouraged to sit down on two chairs in front of the object, which for others, viewing it from outside, resulted in a bizarre image.

Franz West’s title takes up the concept of the epiphany. That term describes the moment of revelation when the divine appears materially in the perceivable world in a certain form. Conversely, since Greek antiquity and the ideas of Plato the concept has evolved that the idea of the good is expressed in the formal beauty of things. In this view, the beautiful educates us moral behavior. This notion was taken up by German idealism and the Enlightenment and was transferred as a challenge to the creation of form in sculpture.

West connects to such ideas and creates an absurd situation in which the claim to divine greatness, beauty, and moral leadership meets with a bizarre entity. This entity recalls a microbiological particle, that is to say, something very small to which is attributed unnatural size and significance. It is not beautiful in the classical sense yet has something ​“elevating” about it and not just because it is hanging. West opens up for us a humorous approach to the pathos of the epiphany and the level of the banal. The epiphany thus places with the ancient desire of the gods to become visible, whereby West, who was interested in Ludwig Wittgenstein, works playfully and outlandishly with a sculptural language game. In the end, he causes a pink divinity to go viral. The work’s original title, Sputnik, lends this perspective additional topicality that makes us think more of a celestial body and its communicative abilities and plastic form.