As the 10th edition oft ArtBaselMiamiBeach just ended, another exhibition remains in Miami, dealing with the two essential themes oft he art-fair. Bluntly enough, the solo-show of Austrian artist Erwin Wurm carries the quintessential ingrediences of Art Basel Miami in its title: Beauty Business.
Not only since his „One Minute Sculptures“ has Wurm perfected the art of merging sculpture, momentum-framing photography and performance into one, adding an ironic edge to his razor-sharp installation works. But when taking a closer look, one discovers that his reflections of our hidden habits and daily guilt-pleasures and not always funny.
Especially the „Drinking Sculptures“ glimpse behind the façade of the bourgeois order. Erwin Wurm created furniture in which he hid little secret alcohol-storages. A perfect design-camouflage for the publicly disdained consumption. These sculptures only come to full life with an interactive viewer. Hereby the display how our interior carries our marks and bears our traces, but at the same time forces the user into a certain behaviour. As the human conforms to the requirements implicitly demanded by the rooms in which he moves, he adapts to the morphology of the space he is surrounded by in order to realize his longings. This interaction enfolds a mutual process of influence. It means shaping one another so as to live up to those expectations, that form the conditions of enjoying any imaginable craving.
It is not only the drinking that reveals the discord between inner need and public desideratum. The normative requirements of the outside world quarrel and push into our inwardly adjustments. Every wall that surrounds us exercises pressure as it carries the insignia of aesthetic dictations. Erwin Wurm covered some walls if the Bass Museum in knitwear. From the ceiling to the floor, loop by loop, single crochet, double crochet! As if the museum needed the wrapping for some extra soothing warmth. The fact that our closest things are not only encircling us, but are perceived as if they were singular personalities deserving a personal handling in their own right is shown by another urban movement: “Urban Knitting” or “Knit Graffiti” is what this street-art is called. Anonymous guerilleros have pulled out across European cities to swathe bridges, trees, lanterns, public statues or telephone masts. They have wrapped so many junctions points now, that Klaus Erich Dietl points out accurately: “As if a crazy granny would run around town and crochet through everything.”
However Wurms special concepts are more profound pointers at society. When he mounts his sweaters and jumpers, he deliberately ignores the physical possibilities of a body to comply with these fabrics. Let alone wear them – at the mere thought of slipping in to them, dull pain numbs your limbs. Distort for fashionable or well-established styles would obviously not be a first for mankind to. Yet this fascination for the impossible, impermissible or inaccessible is what draws the attention to the surreal reality of Erwin Wurms sculptures: By bloating or deflating real dimensions he points our how absurd the deformed but mainstream ideals are. This exhibition at the Bass Museum does not only tackle prescriptions made by general opinions, but given its title also tickles the rules of the art-world – especially in Miami.
Installation Views: Bass Museum Miami FL, Courtesy Lehmann Maupin, 2011, All rights reserved
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