Courtesy the Baltimore Museum of Art

Franz West, "Sisyphos IX" (2002). Papier-mâché, Styrofoam, cardboard, lacquer, and paint, 68½ x 59¾ x 44 in.

October 2008 Field Guide

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Cildo Meireles's Dark Materials

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Lois and Franziska Weinberger

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Le Futurisme a Paris

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Franz West Less Is More at This Year’s Frieze Gagosian Goes Retail Summer in the City: Public Art Rosette in Bloom L.A. Steps Out Go Ask Adam John Miller in Los Angeles

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Turds, not Twinkies, are usually what come to our minds when Franz West’s work is mentioned. The vaunted Austrian artist’s biomorphic sculptures, architectural installations, and coy collages (often rendered in a fleshy-pink palette) are consistently scatological: Madley, an installation from 1996/2003, includes a chair that reads SHIT DOWN, with slots where the artist delicately suggests that one could defecate, while any number of works on paper reveal sausages (or their genital counterpart) emerging from skylines and mouths. Yet in an essay in the catalogue accompanying the artist’s first US retrospective, opening this month in Baltimore, the artist/writer couple Rachel Harrison and Eric Banks take the Twinkie as a trope for the bad-for-you-in-a-good-way freshness of West’s work. As they say, “Who doesn’t like art that stays fresh forever?” Indeed. One need simply look at West’s early ’70s-era “Adaptives” (or Passstücke) series of dirty-white abstract sculptures in clearly corporeal turd- and orifice-like forms, which the artist explicitly made to be manipulated. Or at a series of photographs of West’s friends in various stages of activity with the sculptures—a witty, telling portrait of the artist’s interest in materiality, social experience, and physical engagement unto themselves. West’s first major US survey—agreeably titled To Build a House You Start with the Roof: Work, 1972–2008 —features more than 120 objects, encompassing the artist’s “Adaptives” (which visitors are invited to handle under lavender lights), papier-mâché pieces, and his more recent large-scale aluminum and epoxy sculptures in paintbox hues. Our opinion? No Twinkie defense necessary to justify the urge to see this thought-provoking show.

"Franz West" originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' October 2008 Table of Contents.