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

The fatalism implicit in this attitude was evident in the 10 medium-sized "Sisyphos" sculptures clustered in the back room of the Gagosian space in Chelsea, where they seemed like gawky extras waiting to do their walk-on alongside the show's towering stars. These smaller pieces were not, in fact, filler, since each one displayed West's perfect pitch for off-handed inelegance. Sisyphos X (2002) teeters on steel-pipe supports, as its "belly" swells outward, and pink and white enamel oozes down the side. The "drip" is back and, to misquote Frank Stella (who could learn a good deal about polychrome sloppiness from West), the paint is just as beautiful on these sculptures as it was dripping down the side of the can. Sisyphos VI (2002) bubbles up from a firm footing on the ground like a massive thunderhead. All 10 of these pieces boast subtleties of texture and color--for example, deep crevices that operate like chromatic echo chambers, or clots of gray pulp spread over an already painted area as if the papier-mache were itself a kind of hue dropped over the work in the last moments of its creation like an impasto highlight on a bravura picture. In short, each "Sisyphos" is a tour de force in West's hyper-refined, mock-clumsy idiom. And yet, so far as their title is concerned, it is impossible to imagine these irregularly configured boulders being rolled uphill, though one can almost imagine an avalanche of them bouncing erratically downhill, like props in a low-budget science fiction movie.

The comedy in West's art is generally of this order, associative rather than literal, phenomenological and implicitly corporeal rather than graphic or cartoonish. And just as Oldenburg's exaggerated objects once had what one critic called an "elephantine sadness," West's sculpture catches people off guard by amplifying their vulnerabilities and imperfections with a bittersweet whimsy. Thus one anticipates slumping citizen/viewer figures naturally taking their position on the triangular knot of Laube wherever it is eventually sited, just as others will undoubtedly weave in and out of Corona, matching their gaits to the tilting dips and arcs of the metal tubing. What's more, all of this will take place against a background of trees or buildings that, whatever their type, will make West's work and those who congregate around it seem gently eccentric and, by extension, slightly dislocated.

It will be interesting to see where these antimonumental monuments turn up over the next several years. Interesting also will be their later permutations, and how West will contrive to avoid the formulaic approach that so often cheats the public out of the disorienting effect that public sculpture should have, especially sculpture intended to make one smile before one registers its pathos. Perhaps the best solution would be a kind of perpetual sculptural redeployment whereby none are permanently sited, and instead they are moved from place to place, with each work supplanting the next in rotation--in other words, transient sculptures for transient populations. However improbable this fantasy may be, the maladroit, wistful animation of West's work stirs up such thoughts. While these may not be visions of sugarplums, exactly--the artist's forms are altogether too lethargic and visceral, too erotic or scatological, for that--they are intimations of a weird, unmistakably human choreography for which they serve as decor, prop and body-aggrandizing, ego-deflating doppelgangers.