International star Franz West graces BMA exhibit

By: Chloe Mark

Posted: 11/6/08

The newest exhibit at the BMA, featuring the work of Austrian artist Franz West, challenges the pristine, formal museum experience with a colorful, interactive experience.

The temporary exhibit marks the first comprehensive survey of Austrian artist Franz West's work in the United States. The exhibit organizes 117 works chronologically, demonstrating the evolution of West's work, tastes and styles over the past three decades.

West is well known for rejecting the typical museum-going experience. His work consciously tries to break the barrier between the artist and the viewer by creating work that is interactive and engaging, thereby making the viewer a part of the art. His work is also demonstratively colorful and playful, exploring a variety of sizes, color palates and media; the playfulness acts as an attempt to make sculpture a social experience. This exhibit is marked by the playground-like quality that permeates West's body of work.

The exhibit immediately creates an impression, beginning with one of West's more recent sculptures, "The Ego and the Id," which consists of two separate sculptures of enormous intertwining metal bands, standing 30 feet tall and painted in various bright colors. It is reminiscent of an enormous, surreal piece of playground equipment, an image enhanced by the group of children at the museum climbing along the swirling bands of layered metal. Initially these enormous and colorful structures are perplexing, as it is unclear whether they are meant to provoke laughter or a sort of mild disturbance and confusion. Standing in the center of the sculpture and looking up creates a sensation of standing in the middle of a Technicolor forest.

The next galleries are less dramatic in size but equally intriguing in content. Upon entering the room, viewers are immediately struck by a series of what looks like bars of metal with balls of white plaster attached to them, something that West describes as "adaptives." West invites the viewer to take these "adaptives" into a small cubicle elegantly lined with newspaper images. The viewer then sees himself in a mirrored wall holding a ridiculous cane of sorts while standing in a room covered in newspaper clippings, inspiring the creation of his own surrealist image. It feels sort of silly, a feeling akin to observing oneself in a funhouse mirror.

Next, viewers are invited to sit in a metallic chair and contemplate a suspended box. Although the act might seem mundane, there is something thrilling about breaking the invisible barrier between art and viewer that is so dominant throughout typical exhibits.

The following gallery provides a sampling of the various furniture designs that West has undertaken throughout his career. Cabinets, tables and chairs are quaintly arranged in model rooms, demonstrating how they might fuse a home, café or club with an artistic sensibility.

The exhibit then returns to more conventional modes of display with a series of free-standing papier-mache works that produce a sense of motion through their seemingly unstable stance. Each of these galleries is enhanced by the collages that line the walls, creating an atmosphere that holds true to West's attempt to make art an engaging experience.

A particularly notable part of the exhibit is the "inactivity center," which sits adjacent to the main exhibition. It is a room fashioned with an enormous wall of magnetic poetry, couches where viewers can lounge to rest, read or express impressions of the exhibit. Museum-goers are invited to "dial-a-curator" by picking up a phone and finding out the answers to a series of pre-recorded questions.

All in all, the exhibit offers a vibrant, colorful and interactive experience, which so starkly contrasts with the typical exhaustive one that comes from a day at the museum. Rather, viewers are likely to leave this exhibit feeling energized. It also provided a good sense of West's purpose and general body of work without being overwhelming.

However, like so much of modern art today, it seems that West's work relies largely upon novelty. While his work is charming, the pleasure gained from it is ephemeral. His work is cute, playful and innovative, but by no means is it great. This criticism applies to much of modern art today. While West's work might amuse us today, the determination of its greatness rests on whether it can succeed in amusing us tomorrow as well.

The nationally traveling exhibit Franz West, To Build a House You Start with the Roof: Work, 1972-2008 will be on display at the Baltimore Museum of Art through Jan. 4, 2009.