Franz West

"The idea was more to create an environment, and that the Adaptive could be handled and used rather than be looked at. For the romantics like Schlegel and the German philosophers, what makes art and painting special is that neither should be touched. With the Adaptives, the opposite is true....I liked the idea that in picking up one of the Adaptives there is a moment of not knowing what to do next, a moment of not knowing what to do with the audience. You make unplanned actions and gestures with the audience looking at you, and you wonder what you are doing with this. So the gestures become a little like art. Beuys during this period was making big pronouncements that ‘every man is an artist’ or at least that, in its modified form, ‘every man has the potential to be an artist’. So unlike, say, a white sculpture by Hans Arp that you look at, with the Adaptives, you could pick it up and walk around the museum." —Franz West in conversation with Tom Eccles in Art Review, 2012