A major exhibition at the Edinburgh Festival features the collaborative ventures of the late Austrian artist Franz West. Visitors are encouraged to interact with the works and Adrian Hamilton joins in the fun
Franz West, who died a year ago, was the most loved and lovable of Austrian artists. Variously described as a prankster, a mischief-maker and a joker, he was above all engaging – engaging in his personality, engaging in the way that he sought in his art to make light of the consumerist society his country had become and, most urgently, engaging in the way that he worked to attract the viewer to interact with the sculptures and installations he created.
It’s only right therefore for Edinburgh’s ever adventurous Inverleith House to pay homage to him not with a survey of his works or a retrospective but with an exhibition of the collaborative ventures he involved himself and others in through much of his career.
Good for Inverleith, a once gracious mansion set in the midst of the cultivated vistas of the Royal Botanic Garden. If conceptual art is to have any meaning, and Franz West was a leading light, it need not be stamped with the hand of a single author. Commercial galleries of course would have us believe otherwise but then their promotion of their own “artists” demands they do so.
West would have none of that. Although he was an artist of supreme individuality – even in his installations he kept firm control as primary instigator of the works – he didn’t see them as expressions of himself so much as living objects to fill the mind and the physical embrace of the public. The artist was the enabler not the owner. Collaboration with other artists was not simply acceptable but creative. Honoured with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale in 2011, the year before his death, he produced an installation, Extroversion, in which he turned his Viennese kitchen inside out and showed the works of his artistic friends on the outside that was inside. It was playful but also supremely generous.