Independent, The (London), Aug 28, 2006 by Sue Hubbard

Arts: A big joke
Independent, The (London), Aug 28, 2006 by Sue Hubbard

At Baltic, Gateshead, there's a small show by Erwin Wurm, who, the gallery's blurb tells us, is one of Austria's premier contemporary artists. It promises two new works unseen before in this country. Wurm is most well known for his series One Minute Sculptures, a form of photographed and filmed performances that seem to have achieved something of a cult status. The rock band Red Hot Chili Peppers paid homage to them in their 2003 music video "Can't Stop", and Wurm has found himself copied both by a German punk rock band and a fashion magazine.

The original One Minute Sculptures video, made in 1997, shows the artist in his studio attempting to balance with a variety of objects. Through his manipulation of fixed and defined forms he seems to be asking: When does an object stop being an object and at what point does it become a performance?
And yet, do such questions really matter?
On the terrace that leads to the gallery overlooking a rather grey Tyne is a polyester house. It is white and bulbous with a red tiled roof. Those not particularly interested in art might be forgiven for thinking that it is, in fact, a doll's house or bouncy castle. It is called the Fat House because it is - well - rotund. When you squeeze through the doorway there is nothing inside except (what we are told is an entirely separate work) called Am I A House? Here an animated version of the house we are standing in has been shot on video. This house is a talking house' one might even suggest a deep-thinking, philosophical house, if the banalities that flowed in a pipsqueak voice from its malleable mouth/door were not quite so irritating. This sage of an edifice asks such existentially knotty questions as: "Am I an artwork or a house? Am I a house more than an artwork? No house can be fat: can an artwork be fat? And then: "An artwork can be good or bad but it's still an artwork." Well, that's all right then, isn't it?

This is hardly Wittgenstein' the deliberations and definitions as to what makes a contemporary artwork are, in reality, complex. Among the more thorny problems art theorists have to face are about art's meaning and purpose, and how that can be interpreted in a world where audiences who see the work of a modern artist don't necessarily do so though the shared set of beliefs, assumptions and values that historic audiences would have brought with them.
The danger is that art has come to mean so many things to so many people that it often no longer means anything at all, and has simply become a platform for exhibitionists, thereby ceasing to perform one of its most important functions, which is to expand our awareness of the world.
Wurm's work is supported by reams of essays, critical analyses and catalogues of mind-boggling pretension. But it is easy to write about bad art, fun even. I remember once with a group of students saying that you can make anything sound interesting, even an electrical plug. For you could describe it in terms of its masculine and feminine polarities, its positive and negative attributes, its potential for illuminating what is inert' and it still would remain just a plug, for words and theories do not make things into art.
Inside the gallery it doesn't get much better. If you turn too quickly you might miss the two Coke cans sitting on the floor by the wall. A couple of people were obviously not sure whether they were litter left by the environmentally unfriendly or formed part of the exhibition. In fact they are related to the writing scribbled on the wall in felt tip that exhorts the viewer to "step on the cans", beside two diagrams of a man levitating himself from this precarious position. On the opposite side of the space is a large truck, the back end of which is bent into a "U" so that the wheels go up the wall. Presumably these "Absurdist" works are the Austrian idea of a joke.
Standing in front of a rather nasty magenta wall are two larger- than-life sculptures of men. One wears jeans and trainers and sports a little goatee. He is dressed in an outsized, knitted, orange sweater that is stretched from beneath by a flat disc that surrounds his waist like a hula-hoop. The title is The Artist Who Swallowed the World When It Was Still a Disc. Beside him is the rotund figure of a middle-aged man in green shirt and grey flannel trousers, a little like one of those round, blobby men weighted at the bottom that my children had as babies, which, however hard you tried, you could never knock over. This is called The Artist Who Swallowed the World. In another corner is a stuffed and rather moth-eaten-looking dachshund with a rectangular brick in his side called - yes, you're probably nearly there already - The Dog Who Swallowed a Postbox. The potential for this line of sculptures is obviously endless.
There are not many modern sculptors who make such obviously figurative work. I can only think of the wonderful Double Blind, created by the late Juan Muoz as part of the Unilever series for London's Tate Modern Turbine Hall. But there the cast of sculptural figures set up metaphors about history and the present, freedom and entrapment, while, by contrast, Wurm seems happy to rely simply on heavy-handed humour.

We are told that he "invites us to consider different possibilities", that "he creates a distance between us and the everyday, asking for a re-examination of the world we inhabit and everyday things we take for granted". He himself says his work is about the mistrust that he has for how "reality" is constructed and perceived, which leads him to try to look at things from an alternative perspective. He is concerned with how he can "liberate" familiar objects from their context, and in the process, give them new vitality and meaning, although he still wants the original object to be recognisable.

Some have compared him to Samuel Beckett, but at my kindest I would say he is closer to the sort of slapstick you find in Woody Allen's earliest films such as Bananas.
This is the kind of work that understandably leaves those who know nothing about art bemused and sometimes angry. For it does not further the concept of sculpture, nor amuse beyond the level of humour that might appeal to a 14-year-old, nor does it challenge or increase understanding either of art, society, aesthetics, politics or nature. At its best it might raise a dim flicker of a smile in those who happen to pass by, on their way to somewhere else.
Art has come to mean so many things to so many people that it often no longer means anything at all
Erwin Wurm, New Sculpture, Baltic Centre, Gateshead

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