WEDNESDAY 13TH MARCH 2019
TATE MODERN
My tutor Steve Hemmingway had recommended me go see the Franz West exhibition at the Tate. I had visited the Tate the day prior to see the free exhibitions and felt that I did not have enough time on the Tuesday to fit in the West exhibition so I decided to revisit it on the Wednesday. I was not familiar with his work and I decided not to research West before attending the exhibition as I wanted to respond to the art as I saw it in real life rather than recognising it from a photograph I had seen.
All photography and videography in this blog entry have been produced by me. All documents have been produced by Tate Modern.
Walking in to the first room of the exhibition there was two videos on opposite sides of the room (demonstrated in the video below). As I was not familiar with West, I was also unfamiliar with what he looked like. I had guessed the first video was him but I was unsure who the man on the second video was featuring. Upon later research I realised that both videos were of him, as a young man and as an old man. It meant more, knowing they were both him. I liked the positioning of these videos as it felt like you'd walked in to the heart of a silent conversation, the men would be engaging with each other from the opposite sides of the room, with or without your presence, you'd just happened to see a little part of the interaction. He appears to be that looking at himself and smiling, from both sides, trying to keep his composure but finds himself giggling. I wanted to know if the second video was inspired by the first or if the curator had found this footage and it was unrelated and they'd aligned them. They seemed to fit together well, whichever way the process was.
The beginnings of the exhibition started with pieces like 'Frohsinn 1974' and 'Untitled 1976' (shown in the photographs below). This was my first introduction to West and I therefore assumed that the body of work in the exhibition was going to have a similar
Many of West's colleges began with adverts and pornographic magazines. West decontextualised the images and made them absurd. He said the collages had a 'hideous and nightmarish appearance'. He wanted to satirise the Freudian theory that sexuality is the basis of all human behaviour.
The images were strange and almost unsettling, he had used real peoples faces but because of how he had created a new context for them, they looked unnerving. He had not stuck to the actual structure of the faces he had used, painting over the lines, making the faces misshapen. The media he used was gouache on newspaper. You can see, when looking close, text and the original bodies of the figures before he had edited them. The bodies he had attached to the faces made for a juxtaposition, there was this realistic photographic quality to the artwork but then this vague obscure form substituting the real bodies. The bodies do make sense because he has edited the faces to be misshapen, therefore the bodies being misshapen don't seem out of place. The pieces are quite vulgar but because of their peculiarity, they sort of suck you in and you can't help but stare.
The works below, Untitled (Serie: Das Kritische Blatt) created by West in the year of 1975 were the next series of works I was exposed to. The works echoed satirical comics that appear in newspapers but all the text was written in German so I couldn't fully understand the messages he was putting across.
"West created several series of drawings on orange envelopes and paper. Like some cartoon strips, they caricature political movements including Marxism, and poke fun at artists like Duchamp. West used language for the first time in these works."
West used the medium of pen on coloured paper for these works. I liked the continuum of media, tying all the work together. I also liked the style in which he had drawn the figures. The simplified representations of people.
"From 1973, West began to work on a group of sculptures made of papier mâché and plaster in various shapes and sizes. Many incorporated everyday objects such as paint brushes or even a radio. Viewers could handle them in any way they chose. People's interactions with them was both playful and awkward.
For West, these works could function like extensions of the human body. He felt that the way people used them gave external form to their neuroses and desires. In 1980 when they were exhibited for the first time in Vienna, poet Reinhard Priessnitz called them Passstücke. West himself later found an English equivalent for this work, calling them Adaptives and suggesting that they adapt to viewers as viewers adapt to them.
West's Adaptives became a significant component of the history of sculpture and performance. Friends and other artists were photographed and filmed using them, sometimes to classical music or jazz compositions by Franz Kogelmann. West incorporated many of these images in his collages and posters.
Today most of these pieces are too fragile to be handled. But in the installation Passstücke mit Box und Video 1996 there are four pieces you can pick up and play with."
There was a whole series of drawings West had done (pen on paper) running parallel to a series of photographs (gelatin silver print) that presented either plans for his Paßstücke and then the finished product or alternatively, photography of his models interacting with the Paßstücke and then after, his artistic impression of people interacting with them - I do not know which way round the work was created.
I found these videos of people interacting with the work to be an artwork in themselves. The pairing of the footage with music definitely made the films come to life. I liked the idea of West handing over his art to others and watching them interpret it and making further art of them interacting with his art. He doesn't seem to tire of these Paßstücke and revisits them in video, in collage, etc. I also liked the performance element, that there were four of his Paßstücke there in the exhibition to interact with and people were interacting with them. There was a section of the exhibition that had four rooms created out of curtain dividers. You were invited to take West's Paßstücke in to these rooms and interact with them privately. I liked this idea because it is true that people might feel shy or awkward about playing around with the objects publicly. This option of privacy enabled even the bashful visitors to get a hands on engagement with West's work, the way he wanted us to.
The absurdity of this footage: people moving around what appears to be abandoned buildings, their heads stuck inside papier mâché, got me thinking about my own project. I definitely want to unnerve my viewers and bringing elements of the surreal and inexplainable in to the chat show, like the videos West put together, would be an interesting twist.
"Examples of the Labstücke series, a variation of Paßstücke 'adaptives' incorporating alcohol bottles. The German Laben, often translated as 'refreshment', also introduces an element of delight. West wrote: 'I was drinking quite heavily at the time, but didn't want to throw away the empty bottles because their form reminded me of their contents. Their only value comes from their contents. I had poured it into myself and it was now my own. I had become the shell of the contents, and in order to emancipate the original container, the bottle was sublimated into art.' "
Demagog 1984
Gouache, graphite, collage, gauze, metal, plasteter, cardboard and newspaper on Masoni
Alles (tutti) 1984
Oil and gouache on glued cardboard
Franz West glued cut-out objects, photographs and photocopies onto unfolded cardboard boxes. The motifs are diverse, from ancient architecture to artist and architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser and African art. West was familiar with this art history thanks to his uncle, the owner of a gallery in London specialising in antiques and African art. For Demagog, he appropriated the art of his time by using a reproduction of a drawing by Austrian artist Arnulf Rainer next to a photograph showing his friend Lisa de Cohen handling a Paßstück.
I like the almost self advertising that West uses in his work, always seeming to return to these Paßstücke. In this new series of collage works that he began producing, the Paßstücke still feature, by using imagery of them discreetly incorporated in to the collage.
The work above I felt was relevant to my project in the sense of how I want to arrange my chat show in an installation, living room space. I want to create a room and West, demonstrated by the video above, made 4 intersecting rooms, quite simply but effectively. It was an interesting piece because each quarter had the same objects in it - a chair, a picture hanging on the wall and a plynth with a sculpture on it. Little changes gave very different overall feels to the intersection. For example: what picture was hung in that particular frame; the positioning of the frame on the wall; the positioning of the stool in relation to the plynth; the shape of the sculpture; the media of the sculpture; the colouring of the sculpture.
Causeuse 1988-9
Steel
Eo Ipso 1987
Painted iron
Eo Ipso 1987 in the artist's studio
Bernhard Riff born 1952
Franz West 1947-2012
4 Gellert Lieder 1992-6
Video, colour, sound
West shot this video with Bernhard Riff between 1992 and 1996. They recorded several meetings with artists and curators at openings and dinners, often giving artists absurd instructions to talk to camera. They then set the images to the music of Beethoven's 6 Lieder which used poems by Christian Fürchgetott Gellert. When editing, they cut up and repeated clips of dialogue, slowed and speeded up the footage, and distorted colours. the video is a surreal portrait of the art world as a clique of weirdos and obsessives, rather than a place for the refined creation evoked by Beethoven.
This piece really captured me and the video I shot of it (above) doesn't do it justice. There was a lot of repeated imagery. As an example: in the video above there is a close up of a mans ear, with a blue hue on the footage, this was then replaced with an image with a green hue of a man driving and there was now his ear, centre shot. Throughout the film there was moments like this of repeated imagery. I want to take influence from this film for my chat show filming. The strange angles, the glitching image and the vivid colouring of the footage. It was all very intriguing for me and I felt sucked in by the absurdity of it, wanting to find some explanation in the film. That is a similar effect to what I would want to leave my audience with after they have seen my chat show.
Rosa (Farbstudie) 2008 recreation
Blown-out egg, acrylic paint
In 2008, West filled 100 blown-out eggs with pink acrylic paint as an edition for the Kunstraum Innsbruck. The shells were painted too. The buyer could throw the egg against the wall. Above is a homage to this performance piece, thrown by Sarah Lucas.
I liked this piece because it was easy to miss it. I only realised it was there because I saw another girl walk away from the wall and hold the camera up to photograph. I had assumed it was a blank wall, because the room was full of sculptures, I wasn't expecting there to be anything on the walls, the focus of the room was more central. Right up high there was what looked like a splatter of paint. I liked that subtlety of it, that if I hadn't of seen that girl, I would have left the exhibition, not being aware of the piece. That really left an impression on me. I also liked the fact that it was actually a fluke that it had landed there, the egg was chucked at the wall, and really it could have been thrown at any point of the wall and been a part of the exhibition. Everything else had been ordered, placed and thought about but when it comes to a random act of hurling something at a wall, there's not a great deal of planning that one can do there, where it lands, it lands.
Franz West 1947-2012
Rudolf Polanszky born 1951
Ecke 2009
2 tables, 14 vitrines containing models:steel, wood, epoxy resin, synthetic glass
The last section of the exhibition was an installation of a living room in which all the decor (sofas, lamps, bookcases, pictures on the wall, ornaments, video on the projector) was created by West. I was amazed by this because in my final major I want to create a living room space installation to put my chat show in (a context if you like), which is exactly what West had done. I spent a while in this room just observing the layout, how it had been constructed in this scenario and also observing how an audience interacted with the space. People came in and sat down on the sofas, I think primarily because of the projection on the wall, it gave them something to sit down for. If the projection hadn't have been there i think people would have spent more time mooching around the room, looking at the bookshelves etc.
