Emerging in an early-1970s Viennese art scene dominated by the legacy of the Wiener Gruppe and the meteoric rise of the Actionists, Franz West, unsurprisingly, was a loner for much of his career. A great believer in the potency of pleasure, he approached artmaking with a playful, mind-drifting everydayness, fusing it with social functionality – hardly in line with the heroic expressivity of the Wiener artists’ post-Dadaism nor with the severe, messianic existentialism of Actionism.
The first largescale institutional retrospective of West’s work – coproduced by Centre Pompidou and Tate Modern, to where the show travels in February – serves most of all as an exhaustive archival mission, setting out to catalogue a vast body of work that defies any standardised categorisation. Of West’s identified corpus of nearly 6,000 works, a couple of hundred are present here. The scenography, devised by longtime friend Sarah Lucas and containing drawings, videos, outdoor sculpture, paintings, furniture, etc, is realised in a carefree, pleasantly cluttered manner, vaguely resembling an artist’s studio or home, with discrete environments located in corners, passages and plinths bringing the viewer into the artist’s hard-to-explain but instantly recognisable aesthetic universe.
Organised chronologically – with the exception of the installation "Auditorium" (1992), consisting of 72 rugged divans in the entrance hall on which visitors are encouraged to sit, first presented at Documenta 9 – the exhibition begins with West’s "Mutter Kunst" series (1970–73): unassuming little ballpoint drawings conceived to please his mother, who wanted to see him doing something productive with his life. While formally occupying the extreme poles of the artist’s oeuvre, the blatantly utilitarian purpose of both the installation and the drawings – to rest, to please – feels illustrative, and bleeds nicely into West’s most famous body of work, the "Passstucke", or "Adaptives", which he started in 1974; smallish, organically shaped sculptures devised as removable prostheses to be picked up, carried and walked around with in and outside the exhibition space. What perhaps seem like a redundant gesture in today’s post-relational aesthetics institution feels surprisingly effective still, audiences improvisatorially engaging the objects like toys or fashion accessories.
Emerging in an early-1970s Viennese art scene dominated by the legacy of the Wiener Gruppe and the meteoric rise of the Actionists, Franz West, unsurprisingly, was a loner for much of his career. A great believer in the potency of pleasure, he approached artmaking with a playful, mind-drifting everydayness, fusing it with social functionality – hardly in line with the heroic expressivity of the Wiener artists’ post-Dadaism nor with the severe, messianic existentialism of Actionism.