GRAZ.- Erwin Wurm has a number of connections with the city of Graz. It is where he grew up, it was formative in his artistic socialisation, and it was here also that he experienced his first successes at the beginning of the 1980s. He participated in various exhibitions at the Neue Galerie—run at that time by Wilfried Skreiner—under the label of ‘New Sculpture’, an offshoot of ‘New Painting’. These were essential early steps towards an international career that has made Erwin Wurm one of the leading contemporary artists of our time. The most recent comprehensive show of the artist’s work in Graz took place in 2002, also at the Neue Galerie. Peter Weibel curated this landmark exhibition as a positioning of his artistic oeuvre. Alongside many solo shows—from Sao Paolo to Vienna, Bangkok and New York—Wurm has been nominated for the Austrian pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale by former director of the Neue Galerie Christa Steinle, a further highlight in the course of his extraordinary career as an artist.

So it is all the more welcome that Erwin Wurm has accepted the invitation to provide an insight into his current artistic deliberations at the Kunsthaus. Rather than a retrospective, this is an experimental investigation of this special place and the organic design of the building, as well as developments from his One Minute Sculptures, a concept that is now twenty years old. Part of the tradition of ‘sculpture as action’, the One Minute Sculptures actively integrate the public and were the main reason for Erwin Wurm’s definitive breakthrough at an international level. These sculptural actions exist for just a short moment, afterwards remaining solely in the imagination of the active viewer.

It is thus logical for the artist now to completely leave out the actual world of objects, omitting all props and confronting the audience purely with the idea of the sculptural. As a result, at the Kunsthaus we encounter actors who address the public directly from pedestals: ‘Football-sized lump of clay on light blue car roof’. To imagine this scenario, to follow this image, to accept it as a sculpture, producing the sculpture yourself, as it were, is the radical progression of the One Minute Sculptures. No level of documentation, photographic or otherwise, no objects, no materialisation in the conventional sense. The imaginary becomes the only location of the images.

The imaginary is also the starting-point for the mimetic and performative energies that are generally inherent in images. Like language, the imagination is a Conditio Humana—a human condition whose essential characteristics lie within the constitution of the human body. The imagination ultimately controls the theatrical character of human action. We use it, for instance, to weave together the past, present and future. Thus Erwin Wurm’s ‘Imaginaries’ or ‘Word Sculptures’ are symbols of a world generated by humans. The control of image generation is ultimately also a form of power in the real world. The artist pre-sets the framework of the imagination, retains control to a certain degree and so prevents arbitrariness.

Erwin Wurm’s works are generally deceptive and ambiguous, which makes them particularly successful. Picking up on the familiar, they point out to us the strangeness of the ordinary. As a result, they cause a great deal of uncertainty in the minds of the public. Absurdity, which according to Freud also plays a fundamental role in humour, is one of the reasons why many of Wurm’s pieces work. Their humorous, at times satirical undertone is essentially derived from this. His combinations of objects and instructions lead to absurd scenarios, arising from a post- modern lightness, a certain unselfconsciousness. These are corrected, as it were, by the regularities of modernity and the avant-garde. It is in this interplay between strict guidelines and a coexisting liberation that the potential of Wurm’s oeuvre lies.

When Markus Gabriel states that ‘the composition of an artwork is the fabric of the fields of sense, the order of its layers, which makes it is this particular work but not that one, this particular object but not that one,’ this can also be read in terms of sculpture. Fields of sense, layers, dimensions, volumes, these are all terms that are crucial in conceptualisation within the sculptural and which Wurm uses proportionately in his considerations.

This becomes especially noticeable in Wurm’s examination of works by other artists. Only in part does he deal with their connotations, their cultural significance and their actual content. He seems far more interested in expanding their framework of possibilities and does not accept their one-dimensionality, instead looking beyond. Hence while Wotruba’s ‘Liegende Figur’ still appears as a reclining figure, it is also temporarily given the entirely opposite purpose of providing a shelf, a pedestal, when suddenly a roll filled with sausage is placed on it. It is the audacity with which this gesture is carried out by the artist, and the strict regularity required in order to understand this action, that are effective here. Both objects have clear, almost unquestionable definitions of content—they are, as it were, ‘icons’. The decisive moment is when they coincide—‘the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table’ (Lautréamont). At any point, the otherwise invisible everyday thing can produce something like accidental poetry.

In this way, the encounter between Erwin Wurm’s works and the Kunsthaus also becomes a scenario of the sculptural. Wurm’s bloating and shrinking houses, which follow the sculptural logic of gaining and reducing, form an immediate mental link to the architecture of the Kunsthaus. The features that look so sculptural from the outside, its swollen, amorphous shape, now become discernible as a sculpture inside, too. The presence of the location, a postulate of Minimal Art, is suggested here. A huge pink pullover becomes an imaginary piece of clothing for a building. Monstrously distorted, the everyday object mutates into the Weltraumschwitzer, a ‘space sweater’, into an object between function and autonomy, which takes the architecture into an unknown galaxy, so to speak.

Erwin Wurm’s deliberations never remain in the formal or in the narrow sphere of experience defined by what is visible at that moment. They are also extensions of immaterial conditions such as psychoses or social conditionalities—ultimately external deformations of inner processes. Shrinking and growing are dynamics that are not limited to the sculptural. Investment volumes, value appreciations, purchasing power, all of these can grow and shrink— and so become sculptural reality. Wurm’s philosophy that ‘anything can be a sculpture’ should be understood within this expanded context.

And so the exhibition at the Kunsthaus Graz is not a show of the artist’s performance in the conventional sense, at which a distinguished selection is presented. Instead, it is an experiment that the artist, thankfully, was willing to take on. Until now not substantially present in Erwin Wurm’s work, the investigation of architecture, the logical progression of the ‘One Minute Sculptures’ with a further escalation of the imaginary aspect, as well as the direct confrontation of his own concepts with works by other artists—all of this can be described as innovative, so giving this exhibition a particular value. The original impetus for this show was the ‘Honorary Prize for Fine Art of the Region of Styria’ awarded to Erwin Wurm in 2015. The timing of this exhibition could scarcely have been better chosen, with the artist currently at the preliminary peak of his artistic development.