VIENNA — A few years ago, I encountered a stunning installation by Austrian artist Erwin Wurm at Kunsthaus Graz, a pink wall of knitted wool stretched to 130 by 1300 feet, dotted with sparse details scaled to human size: limply hanging sleeves, random buttonholes, and openings for the head. In a world that is feeling colder and colder, Wurm’s mammoth sweater seemed like a proposal for keeping warm — the idea of the body politic, of some kind of commonality, had suddenly taken on visual form.
In Wurm’s current retrospective at the Albertina Modern, slapstick and absurdity emerge as potent strategies for socio-critical observation. His One Minute Sculptures, for instance, are performative pieces that undermine the very notion of sculpture as a permanent art form and invite the viewer to use the props provided — household items such as plungers or plastic bottles — to enact an ephemeral work according to the artist’s instructions. Wurm has often said that he’s not a humorist, and indeed, the silliness of the poses seems to camouflage a cultural and historical pessimism in which the actors’ contortions — a woman balancing a bucket on her head, for instance, or a man with pens, a stapler, and film canisters stuffed into his mouth, nostrils, ears, and eye sockets — call to mind the moral and intellectual acrobatics a society performs to keep up appearances. Uncomfortably for some participants who begin in jest and find themselves suddenly on display, the works invert the relationship between viewer and artwork; in their dynamic between seeing and being seen, they pose questions of personal accountability and visibility.
Wurm’s career also encompasses large-scale sculpture and architecture; “Narrow House,” a detailed replica of the artist’s childhood home, drastically shrinks the width of what is otherwise scaled 1:1. Initially built in 2010 and reconfigured in various iterations since, it offers a surreal image of the constricting norms of family, class, political belief, gender, and religion, and reminds us of the resilience required to escape them. Other major works, such as the puffy “Fat Convertible” (2005), conflate the sculptural and social to criticize political apathy and consumerist compulsions, while “School,” built to a smaller-than-human scale and requiring that we stoop to enter its narrow interior, invokes the violence of institutional indoctrination and normativity. On the other hand, works such as the Melting Houses sculpture series — among them Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim — collapse in a shapeless mass of liquefying matter, imagining the end of political and economic structures generally considered indestructible, including capitalism.
Wurm’s use of clothing as a sculptural material calls to mind the excesses of the fashion industry and the 92 million tons of clothing consumers throw out each year, while its mirror image, the landscapes of discarded garments left behind by refugees in flight, casts the privileged world’s fears, anxieties, apprehension, and dread into sharp relief. Large-scale works collectively titled Skins reiterate Wurm’s recurrent theme: The vulnerability of the human body and its interaction in social space. The sculptures, slices of clothed bodies folded over on themselves, consist of no more than an outer shell and speak of absence, a former presence, and the fragility and temporality of our existence.
Erwin Wurm: A 70th-Birthday Retrospective continues at Albertina Modern (Karlsplatz 5, Vienna, Austria) through March 9, 2025. The exhibition was curated by Antonia Hoerschelmann with Assistant Curator Lydia Eder.
