Franz West is often described as the arch joker in a pack of late 20th-century sculptors known for their irreverent cornucopias of materials. Yet while the coal-and-sackcloth statements of Jannis Kounellis, for example, declared that art was a serious business, West’s profferings – zany, bulbous sculptures, kinky collages and funky furniture that he encouraged spectators to sit on – labelled him a cheeky Lord of Misrule. He would bring art to the masses yet make them chuckle too.
I never found him that funny. His squidgy, effervescent, papier-mâché efflorations sent shivers up my spine, as did his collages of fashion, porn and newspaper images. His invitations to perch on the sofas and chairs felt like commandments: thou shalt giggle; thou shalt chill out.
West never denied that his humour sprang from dark sources. Born in Vienna in 1947, he grew up in a city lacerated by its war record. He remembered playing in filthy, debris-littered streets where virtually all the residents had been Nazis. His own parents were communists, Jewish on his mother’s side. Even without the political backstory, his memories of seeing his mother, who was a dentist, in a blood-spattered apron, and hearing the screams of her patients, are the stuff of Freudian case history.
An obsession with neurotic gore was thoroughly explored by West’s predecessors, the Viennese Actionists, who masturbated and mutilated themselves throughout the 1960s. Their mission was to force their fathers to confront the violence of their past while simultaneously reclaiming art from the taint of commodification
West snubbed the melodrama but shared the sentiment. His kinky proto-genitalia and faecal gestures – for that is the primordial stuffing within his anti-Platonic forms – might poke fun at our psychosexual neuroses yet they bring them up close and personal too. He wanted to make “art you could get in touch with”.
His predilection for furniture had another genesis too, partly inspired by a juvenile visit to Rome where he experienced the Spanish Steps as the equivalent of a village square; somewhere that allowed people to be “sitting in the art consuming life.”
That democratic spirit saw collaboration become a cornerstone of West’s practice. From his earliest days, he made work in tandem with other artists, ranging from barely known Viennese graduates to such Arte Povera colossi as Michelangelo Pistoletto, the conceptualists Douglas Gordon and Sarah Lucas, to the contemporary abstractionist and sculptor Anselm Reyle and the Georgian-born painter Tamuna Sirbiladze, West’s wife.