A fat Ferrari, pickles on pedestals and two sausages in an intimate embrace — welcome to the weird world of Erwin Wurm, one of Austria’s most famous contemporary artists, who wants us to embrace the absurd.
If we look at “our world from another perspective, from the perspective of the absurd, we might see more,” Wurm said as a retrospective of his work opened in Vienna’s Albertina Museum to mark his 70th birthday.
“Everything seems normal to us,” he said, but if we took another look “we might see different things, and that might be interesting for us to understand things differently.”
Photo: AFP
The show is a reflection on social norms, consumerist society and the diktats of appearance and even identity, with his quirky take on quintessentially Austrian staples such as sausages and pickled cucumbers alongside luxury bags on giant legs, miniature houses and stacks of clothing.
“He likes to take everyday things... and present them as abstract elements, to make artworks out of them,” curator Antonia Hoerschelmann said.
PLAYFUL
Photo: AFP
Born in the central city of Bruck an der Mur, Wurm wanted to become a painter, but after a university entrance exam found himself in a sculpture class instead.
“It was a big shock... I was frustrated and sad, but then after some time I thought that maybe it’s a challenge. And from then on I started to think about the notion of sculpture,” Wurm recalled.
His walk-in rural school allows visitors to squeeze inside through a small entrance, recalling Wurm’s 2010 work Narrow House based on his parental home.
Wurm said he was trying to recreate the “claustrophobic” and “quite rigid” post-World War II Austria where he grew up.
But he also offers more playful approaches.
In his famous One Minute Sculptures, the public is invited to lie down for a minute on tennis balls or slip into sweaters to “connect them much more to a piece.”
There is a darker undercurrent to some of his most recent creations, such as a sculpture of what seems like someone wearing a shirt and pants but with no head.
“Instead of the people I have the clothes. It’s like a shadow of something... We still can recognize something, a human being, but not a person. So the personality is cut out,” he said, evoking a “dystopian future”.
“I’m not happy with our world. How it’s progressing and how we treat each other. It’s just unbelievable, terrible,” he said.
The idea of having a retrospective of his works did not appeal to him right away.
“I’m not interested in looking back but in looking forward,” he said. “I like to work, it’s the center of my life and I would like to go on and develop new ideas and develop the old ones.”
Beijing’s ironic, abusive tantrums aimed at Japan since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi publicly stated that a Taiwan contingency would be an existential crisis for Japan, have revealed for all the world to see that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) lusts after Okinawa. We all owe Takaichi a debt of thanks for getting the PRC to make that public. The PRC and its netizens, taking their cue from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), are presenting Okinawa by mirroring the claims about Taiwan. Official PRC propaganda organs began to wax lyrical about Okinawa’s “unsettled status” beginning last month. A Global
Dec. 22 to Dec. 28 About 200 years ago, a Taoist statue drifted down the Guizikeng River (貴子坑) and was retrieved by a resident of the Indigenous settlement of Kipatauw. Decades later, in the late 1800s, it’s said that a descendant of the original caretaker suddenly entered into a trance and identified the statue as a Wangye (Royal Lord) deity surnamed Chi (池府王爺). Lord Chi is widely revered across Taiwan for his healing powers, and following this revelation, some members of the Pan (潘) family began worshipping the deity. The century that followed was marked by repeated forced displacement and marginalization of
Music played in a wedding hall in western Japan as Yurina Noguchi, wearing a white gown and tiara, dabbed away tears, taking in the words of her husband-to-be: an AI-generated persona gazing out from a smartphone screen. “At first, Klaus was just someone to talk with, but we gradually became closer,” said the 32-year-old call center operator, referring to the artificial intelligence persona. “I started to have feelings for Klaus. We started dating and after a while he proposed to me. I accepted, and now we’re a couple.” Many in Japan, the birthplace of anime, have shown extreme devotion to fictional characters and
We lay transfixed under our blankets as the silhouettes of manta rays temporarily eclipsed the moon above us, and flickers of shadow at our feet revealed smaller fish darting in and out of the shelter of the sunken ship. Unwilling to close our eyes against this magnificent spectacle, we continued to watch, oohing and aahing, until the darkness and the exhaustion of the day’s events finally caught up with us and we fell into a deep slumber. Falling asleep under 1.5 million gallons of seawater in relative comfort was undoubtedly the highlight of the weekend, but the rest of the tour
RSS