Something amazing is happening in downtown Vienna these days. Art roadies Reza Akhavan, Philipp Konzett, Heinz Neumann and Gernot Schauer have pooled their respectable collections to make one thing clear once and for all: Franz West is alive and kicking! The pop-up exhibition “Franz West Privat: Gebrauchsanleitung im Aktionismusgeschmack(Franz West Private: A User Guide for Actionism) spans forty hallowed years and takes the city by storm.
Franz West left for the unknown on July 26, 2012, shortly after the Venice Biennale awarded him a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement. Disputes over the artist’s estate have dominated the scene ever since, while opportunities to actually see one of his works in a museum have been few and far between.
Many pieces brought together for the exhibition have never been exhibited to the public, and most will probably never be seen again in this constellation: more than four hundred canonical works by one of the truly great names in his profession, from the first provocative drawings and collages. which the artist whipped onto tavern tables for the revolutionary “Adaptives”, sculptures that only become art when experienced or used. Here is also Room, 1992, the rows of armchairs, meridians and sofas covered with Persian rugs for the Documenta 9 open-air cinema; outdoor sculptures in candy pink, light blue and shitty brown welded sheet aluminum; a pair of Lemur heads, who make evil sprites in the urban fabric of Vienna; and informal sculptures made of unobtrusive materials like plaster, papier-mâché, decorative laminate and all sorts of bric-a-brac. It is supplemented by valuable documents that tell of the history of the reception of West’s work, such as drawings from an early catalog that was never printed.
An exhibition designed by passionate collectors-curators not only for the public who dreamed of a shot of West, it is also (and above all) a tribute to an artist who has always made fun of academic-didactic art and relentlessly swept away his brilliant sagacity, generosity and gift for underhand jokes under the table.
Translated from German by Gerrit Jackson.
