Franz West's corporeal comedy: long known for his highly refined, mock-clumsy objects and furniture, West has been scaling up his sculpture over the last decade. The result, as seen in a recent gallery show, is would-be public sculpture, consummately forlorn, that monumentalizes the maladroit - Critical Essay

Art in America, Oct, 2003 by Robert Storr

There are a few great clowns in modern art, and, being clowns, they are usually attracted to crowds. For a variety of reasons public sculpture has seemed to offer them their best platform, which explains why Alexander Calder, Claes Oldenburg and, more recently, Keith Haring and Tom Otterness have become such visible presences on the urban landscape. To a sociologically undetermined extent, the public has embraced the giant caprices in which these artists specialize, or at least municipal art committees have done so on the public's behalf. And thus a new monumental genre has been born: the go-for-broke "plop art" joke.

The problem, of course, is that not all the visual witticisms these artists have conceived in drawings or handmade maquettes survive scaling up. Nor has the formal rigor, ingenuity and nuance of these prototypes always been adequately translated by fabricators' clean, industrial-strength reproduction of contour or image. Which just goes to show that it's not easy to retell a funny story, even if you know the punch line, and not every comic who is good in cabaret fares as well on the main stage in Vegas.

In jumping from small and medium-large objects crafted--if that's the word for things so apparently casual--in scavenged or nonart materials to very large, even colossal tack-welded aluminum sculptures, the Austrian artist Franz West seems to have anticipated some of the pitfalls--and possible pratfalls--of moving to the most public of art venues. At 56, with countless exhibitions behind him, West is hardly a newcomer to the scene. He made his mark with artfully awkward ensembles of furniture; sculptures comprising winsomely misshapen, occasionally polychromed lumps of papier-mache and plaster--think Arp as basement bricoleur--and sometimes sly but more often slapstick or even gleefully pornographic collages.

For much of the last decade, though, West has been probing beyond the ironic intimacy of his usual studio work, accepting commissions for biennials and other big exhibitions that have provided him the opportunity to explore the possibilities of that vast and ill-defined category called public art. The results have ranged from the monumental heads that, along with a kind of parking lot of carpet-covered divans, appeared on the "midway" of Documenta 9 (1992) near the Fredericianum, to a number of anomalous balls and sausagelike forms that were scattered through a municipal park for the second installment of Kasper Konig's decennial Muster sculpture extravaganza in 1997.

Where else but at such "festivals" does a clown belong? By their very nature, though, festivals are temporary. The larger challenge is in the longer-term, if not permanent, sitings, where the formal rigor--and essential ludic absurdity--of such an artist's work is tested. On the evidence of West's recent show at Gagosian Gallery in New York, it is a challenge that West is eager and ready to meet.

The three major enamel-on-aluminum pieces presented there were essentially auditioning for plazas or, as a pair of photomontages in the exhibition catalogue suggested, for positions as architectural "hood ornaments." The first of these works was the vertical flesh-pink totem Dorit (2002), consisting of a central rod on which are spindled four unevenly spaced balls, creating the effect of a huge baby rattle or endocrine specimen. The second, Corona (2002), was a gray ring of patched-together aluminum-sheet tubing that has been shaped so as to create arches and notches that frame pedestrians while carving out a gazebolike interior space wherever it is plunked down. In fact, the work resembles nothing so much as chic, forged-silver bracelet fallen from a gargantuan wrist. The third of these pieces, Laube (Bower), 2002, was a seemingly floppy loop of aluminum-sheet tubing painted chartreuse, peaking in two parallel triangles above one's head while also extending across the floor to provide comfortable seating. As bids in the bustling and often contentious arena of public sculpture, all three pieces have the intelligent charm of the work of the late and no less playful George Sugarman rather than the confrontational stance typical, say, of Richard Serra's productions, but all also project the awkward demeanor of things intrinsically out of place in their environment. At home neither in the white-cube gallery spaces of West 24th Street nor in the urban spaces where they have sometimes been sited, West's large-format noodlings constitute deliberately anomalous marginal commentaries on monumental-art-as-usual.

Yet, as self-sustaining sculptures they manage to retain a quality basic to all of West's best work to date: forlornness. While West's fantasies of crowning the skyline with whimsical crests bespeaks a characteristic slacker disdain for all things established and self-important--and remember that the artist grew up in Vienna surrounded by artifacts of both the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the heroic avant-gardes that succeeded it--the ungainly and disheveled aspects of his art are also projections of the asymmetrical and otherwise haphazardly "tailored" bodies of the viewers that West's work presupposes. His signature passtucken (adaptables)--plaster, metal and mixed-medium objects that operate as deforming prosthetics which extend the scope, garble the gesture and imbalance the posture of his viewer-turned-performer--are site-specific sculptures whose site is anyone hefting, holding, leaning on or somehow juggling them. In the semiotic economy of West's rococo Arte Povera, it is people's ridiculous attempts at accommodating themselves to a world of uncanny things that force them to acknowledge their psychological as well as physical alienation from given reality. Even the most graceful viewers become Buster Keatonesque once they pick up one of these objects, since rather than accenting the pluckier side of human nature, these "adaptables" emphasize the inherent and, one quickly begins to suspect, insurmountable disconnection and unease their irregularities simultaneously embody and impose.