Artist Erwin Wurm on taking the seriousness out of sculpture

In the early 1990s, Austrian artist Erwin Wurm forged a name for himself off the back of his One-Minute Sculptures. Here, the artist would provide written and pictorial instructions to participants who would then perform a series of awkward poses, involving everyday objects such as knitted sweaters, fruit, chairs, brooms, bottles, buckets, whatever, in the exhibition space. The result—subsequently documented in photographs—were investigations into what a sculpture could be: not something fixed but ephemeral, participatory, and wildly playful.

Many of the ideas that Wurm addressed in this series continue to reverberate in his latest exhibition, Yes, Biological currently on view at Lehmann Maupin in New York through to 22 February. Among the works on display, are a continuation of the One-Minute Sculptures: the series One-Minute Forever makes permanent in acrylic the movements and absurd poses of the earlier series. Using the tropes of classical Greek sculpture—plinths, busts and chalky white casts—Wurm reinvents the mode as unexpected and bizarre. For the artist, the sculptures also represent—as he tells SLEEK— a desire to “slow something so much down that it becomes sculptural.”

A focal point of Yes, Biological is the Dissolution Series—a new corpus based on the abstraction of body parts. Here, the body is deconstructed into isolated pieces—the lips, the nose, the fingers—which are then drizzled in lilacs and pink glazes resembling dreamy birthday cakes. “In this series, I tried making up bodies and then started to demolish them, or deconstruct them, or change forms—I tried to create something else and to bring something else out of it,” says Wurm. According to the artist, this notion of deconstruction and fragmentation has the possibility to produce something altogether new, but in a positive sense. “When you figure out everything is going to be damaged or destroyed, it creates something. It not only creates energy, it creates allure, even if at the very beginning it looks different in its destroyed form. But this keeps growing and it can turn in a positive way,” he explains.

Wurm’s notion of sculpture is rooted in this idea of growth and transformation. “The changing volume is a very big part, what if I make it clear that if I add volume, or I take volume away from this thing, what meaning would occur—that’s the definition of my sculptural work,” he says. Out of this flux and change, unexpected meanings or feelings, even, can radiate from his forms. “Can it be possible to translate the notion of desperation, or of ridiculousness to sculpture? How can it happen?” Wurm asks.

This pursuit for new meanings and creation of possibilities has rightly lent Wurm’s practice an absurdist overtone. It is a quality that can be seen from his One-Minute Sculptures through to his One-Minute Forever series and the Dissolution series. When asked how did this came to be an interest, Wurm relates it to his autobiography. “Maybe it’s because I am Austrian… who knows… I grew up in the ‘50s and ‘60s,  and it was still a post-war society. And I was educated very different than how people are educated nowadays …” he notes. “When I look back at that time it was very strict and very different than today. This makes me also think of aspects of Austrian society—the novelist, Thomas Bernhard, for example. There is a certain approach, maybe also because Austria was a big country, a big powerful country and then it was cut down. You had to totally change the motion and content, or consciousness.”

Out of this bloomed a desire to rethink the seriousness that he was familiar with. “The art that I grew up with in the ‘60s and ‘70s spoke about the big issues and it was all very heavy and important…there was nothing nice about it. I believe questions need a cynical, critical and absurd underlying… like how the Theatre of the Absurd asked questions which sounded like nonsense, but, of course, behind the nonsense is a deeper sense and earnestness about these things.”

It is a sensibility that can be observed in the works on display at Yes, Biological. The seriousness of classical sculpture is dissolved leaving behind pieces that beam with fresh possibility. The grandiosity has been displaced, making way for humour and verve.  “I strongly believe in the positive development of an artwork,” says Wurm. “To make work is fun and great, it’s actually very fun.”

Yes, Biological is currently on view at Lehmann Maupin in New York through to 22 February.

All images by Erwin Wurm. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul.