Franz West
Born in Vienna, 1947
Lives and works in Vienna
These papier-maché works somehow hover between the mechanical and the organic. I see them not only as parts of a machine but also as human forms. Anyhow, the idea was to go beyond the subject-object divide and produce things that somehow exist in the ambiguous no-man's-land between those two positions. There are lots of artists who have produced creatures that inhabit a similarly ambivalent zone between the artificial and the organic. One thinks almost immediately of Hieronymus Bosch, who created some very strange creatures. In Bosch's case, of course, there's no irony involved.
There have been many theories of art that try to break down the border between art and the world, but I don't find such attempts to be particularly meaningful. Art remains art. I really see my works as quite compatible with a I'art pour I'art philosophy. One may think that I try to bring the art object out into the world since my works sometimes appear to have a practical function, but really it's the other way around: Things in the world can, under certain special circumstances, enter the realm of art. And, in fact, once they have entered this realm they are art. Joseph Beuys thought differently about this, and so he developed his theory of social sculpture, which I can't say I've ever really understood.
--Franz West
Born in Vienna, 1947
Lives and works in Vienna
These papier-maché works somehow hover between the mechanical and the organic. I see them not only as parts of a machine but also as human forms. Anyhow, the idea was to go beyond the subject-object divide and produce things that somehow exist in the ambiguous no-man's-land between those two positions. There are lots of artists who have produced creatures that inhabit a similarly ambivalent zone between the artificial and the organic. One thinks almost immediately of Hieronymus Bosch, who created some very strange creatures. In Bosch's case, of course, there's no irony involved.
There have been many theories of art that try to break down the border between art and the world, but I don't find such attempts to be particularly meaningful. Art remains art. I really see my works as quite compatible with a I'art pour I'art philosophy. One may think that I try to bring the art object out into the world since my works sometimes appear to have a practical function, but really it's the other way around: Things in the world can, under certain special circumstances, enter the realm of art. And, in fact, once they have entered this realm they are art. Joseph Beuys thought differently about this, and so he developed his theory of social sculpture, which I can't say I've ever really understood.
--Franz West
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