Franz West (1947−2012)

Franz West’s installation Galerie features a lightly constructed whitewashed space, open at the top, that contains a plaster ‘adaptive’ placed on a low, table-like plinth made from welded bars and tubing. Outside this space, a TV monitor stands on a similar steel stand opposite a steel sofa covered with a cheap Oriental rug partly painted over by Gilbert Bretterbauer. The video seen on the monitor shows a possible use of the ‘adaptive’. [...] The installation evokes a typical exhibition situation, with a sculpture presented on a plinth in a ‘white cube’ space. West subverts this convention, however, by demonstrating that the ‘adaptive’ is intended for use. In addition, he links art to media entertainment consumed in a domestic context.

Galerie unites several features developed by West in his previous work. In the early 1970s, he began producing pieces that in 1980 the poet and art critic Reinhard Priessnitz termed ‘adaptives’ (Passstücke). Made initially in papier maché, then later in plaster and polyester, these organic sculptures combine plastic materials with wire and such found objects as broomsticks and bottles of spirits. They belong to the category of ‘formless’ sculpture and oppose modern notions of autonomous sculpture in that they are meant to be held or worn. At an early stage, West took photographs of them being used in this way. Robert Fleck identifies three sources for the adaptives: Viennese Actionism of the 1960s, the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan. Crucially, West sees the adaptive as a reversed prosthesis: ‘It was actually meant to depict neuroses. I claim that that’s what neuroses would look like if they could be seen. It also has a certain similarity to cult objects worn in Africa. I made it from polyester, a material typical of here, and it isn’t a cult implement, but a neurosis worn here, which has the same origins. People are prosthetic gods (S. Freud).’ [...]

Source: Masterpieces Kunstmuseum Bern, Ed. Matthias Frehner / Valentina Locatelli, München: Hirmer Publishers, 2016, Cat. No 159, p. 362 (author: Ulrich Loock)