The late Austrian artist Franz West (1947–2012) was one of the most influential artists of the past 50 years. His retrospective at Tate Modern explores his irreverent sensibility and irreverent approach to art and materials, bringing together almost 200 works including abstract sculptures, furniture, collages and large outdoor works
Austria’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, like the Burgtheater and Vienna State Opera, occupies a special place within the country’s high culture. More than an ordinary exhibition venue, it is a flagship. In his novel "Old Masters" (1985), Thomas Bernhard pushed this quality to the extreme, equating the institution with the country as a whole before launching into one of his infamous tirades: ‘the whole of this Austria, when all is said and done, is nothing but a Kunsthistorisches Museum, a Catholic-National-Socialist one, an appalling one ... A chaotic rubbish-heap, that is what today’s Austria is, this ridiculous pygmy state which drips with self-overestimation and which, 40 years after the so-called "Second World War", has reached its absolute low only as a totally amputated state’. Museums have great merits, but Bernhard managed to give his comparison between state and museum a vitriolic quality.
In the winter of 1989, four years after "Old Masters" was published and three years after the beginning of the ‘Waldheim affair’ (in which Austria’s president, Kurt Waldheim, was implicated in Nazi war crimes), which made headlines around the world, the Kunsthistorisches Museum hosted a well-received exhibition of works by the painter and sculptor Franz West, the first living artist ever to be shown there. In the museum’s Gemäldegalerie, West positioned 15 stripped-down metal couches, chairs and daybeds in front of the paintings by Velázquez and others, and invited museumgoers to sit or lie on them, thus becoming part of an artwork themselves. With his furniture pieces and later aluminium sculptures, writes curator Veit Loers, West’s focus from the outset ‘was not on autonomous artistic products, but rather on gentle interventions, surreal mises-en-scène within Austria’s then still authoritarian cultural landscape where art was assigned a specific role, kept in check wherever possible.’ The anti-image of a society in search of peace and quiet, sometimes to the point of dozing off, became visible. West often staged himself as part of this, having himself photographed as a reclining, resting or daydreaming artist – contemplation as part of artistic production.
The artist, who the following year was invited by Hans Hollein to represent Austria at the Venice Biennale, was manifestly unfazed by his entry into the holiest of holies of national culture. ‘My works,’ West wrote in a text dated 1989, ‘correspond to the reusable coffins introduced by Josef II to save money (the appearance of an orderly burial was preserved while the corpse, having escaped the ambiguity of meaning, fell through a trapdoor into the grave). The items of furniture are skeletons – just as items of upholstered furniture have skeletons.’ The morbid quality of these remarks is reminiscent of ‘Wiener Schmäh’, a form of snarky humour cultivated in Vienna that is hard to define. For outsiders and the uninitiated, it often oversteps the line to blithe insult. Laughing at oneself and not taking oneself too seriously are certainly part of it. This sense of anarchy and the aesthetic associated with it is something West shared with peers like the German Martin Kippenberger and younger artists alike, including the Viennese Gelitin collective. There is also his obvious love of wordplay, as explored in the language experiments of the Vienna Group who circulated around the poet H.C. Artmann. In this light, the sculpture "Deutscher Humor" (German Humour) 1987 can be understood as exemplary, since the Germans are often said to have no sense of humour at all.