A Birkin bag takes a stroll through the park
This week: Erwin Wurm's imagination runs riot in Yorkshire Sculpture Park, seal-people swim into Physical Fest, a free event created with 2,000 school children and the return of Drop the Dead Donkey
IN ERWIN WURM’S wild imagination, a Hermès Birkin bag takes a purposeful stroll on spindly legs not far from a trio of sausages cavorting on the grass. A red, chubby hot-water bottle in lace-up shoes stands statue-still like a toddler playing hide-and-seek very badly. ‘Nothing to see here,’ it seems to be thinking. ‘I’m just a perfectly normal metres-tall hot-water bottle hanging out in a Yorkshire park.’
This being Wurm’s imagination, these creations also exist in real life - on this occasion, in the exhibition of 40 years of the Austrian-born artist’s work at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Nineteen giant sculptures transform the landscape into a playground of everyday objects brought to life, while indoors in the Underground Gallery there are another 55, as well as paintings, photographs, videos and drawings.
Wurm, 69, has had hundreds of exhibitions over the decades but he is boyishly excited about this one. The team at YSP has gone to great lengths to show his work in the best way possible, he says, including digging up the ground to pour concrete bases and then re-laying the turf so that his works don’t have to be conspicuously displayed on plinths.
‘There’s this 5m-long bag with legs and she’s standing in the grass and it looks like wow, she’s walking around here,’ he says. ‘I think it’s the first time in my life that I’ve had the chance to show so many outdoor sculptures. I’ve had big shows in big museums but it was mostly inside.’
It was in the 1990s that Wurm came to prominence, catching the attention of everyone from curators to fashion magazine editors with his One Minute Sculptures, which involved people posing with an object for a defined period of time. Such was his popularity that Red Hot Chili Peppers used the format as inspiration for their 2003 music video Can’t Stop, directed by Mark Romanek.
‘All of a sudden it became a much wider audience and I started to make One Minute Sculptures for fashion magazines like Vogue, Interview magazine and New York Times Magazine, really many magazines all around the world',’ says Wurm. ‘I was still working in the art world but also outside it and this was great.’
‘Sculpture at that time did not exist much for me outside black pieces full of pigeon s**t’
Wurm’s exploration of sculptural form had begun many years earlier, when instead of being accepted to study painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Salzburg, he was offered a place in the sculpture department. At first shocked and unimpressed - because ‘sculpture at that time did not exist much for me outside black pieces full of pigeon s**t’ - he soon felt intrigued by the medium’s physical properties and how it is defined by the ‘skin’ that contains it.
‘I asked myself if somebody is standing quietly or let’s say kneeling - it’s an action yes - but can I also transfer this into a sculpture?’ Wurm explains. ‘What do I have to do to transfer this into a sculptural thing. Do I have to repeat it? Do I have to slow down the movement? Do I have to freeze it?
‘When I’m standing with a broom in my ass or a finger in my nose it’s a very banal gesture from everyday life. I thought “what would happen if tried to perform this and ask people to follow my instructions and realise the pieces for me?”.’
Written instructions meant the One Minute Sculptures were no longer ephemeral and could be recreated in exhibitions all around the globe, even ones Wurm himself was unable to attend, usually due to financial constraints: ‘I had an idea that a great show should fit in a suitcase and either you go with the suitcase or you can even send it by fax.’
Before fame struck, as a student Wurm was so broke he had to resort to stealing food, smuggling it out of supermarkets under his armpits. Without money for materials he began creating works out of old clothes, which eventually led to the game-changing realisation that anything at all had the potential to be material for a sculpture. He started playing with the idea that what defines a sculpture is its surface - the usually very thin layer of bronze or other substance - and linked this to clothing being a sort of second skin.
‘What was intriguing for me was they were speaking about the absence of the human presence, which I liked very much, and also the absence of personality,’ he says. ‘And then after a while I realised oh my god I shouldn’t only use clothes I can use anything and everything that surrounds me. Everything is the possible start of an art piece. It was like opening a door to a paradise. All of the world became my material.’
He does not aim to tackle life’s big questions, he insists, but the small ones such as ‘what do I eat and what do I wear and what car do I drive?’ The humour and sense of the absurd in his works make them accessible, yet there is a deeper meaning for those who take the time to look. At YSP, Wurm’s Attacks and Concrete Sculptures series reference mid-19th to mid-20th century thinkers, including Nietzsche, Marx and Wittgenstein. They include the vibrant red Truck II (2011), which looks as though it has reversed right up the gallery wall before coming to a stop.
‘I am still very careful with how my sculptures are displayed,’ says Wurm. ‘I only allow them to show in a museum context because sometimes if you show them in the wrong context they get cheap and they get worthless and not cool.’
‘I think everyone has the possibility to train the imagination’
While the power of the artist’s extraordinary imagination is one of the things that makes his work stand out, he insists he is not unusual. He says: ‘Imagination you can train. Creativity you can train. I’m not looking for ideas, the ideas are there, I just have to take them as a plan. I think this can happen to everybody, it’s just a way of opening yourself to certain things. I think everyone has the possibility to train the imagination.’
Erwin Wurm: Trap of the Truth is at Yorkshire Sculpture Park until April 28, 2024. Standard entry is £9 , concessions are available and under-18s go free.
This week we’re also buzzing about…
SealSkin: I’ve long been enticed by folktales of the silkie - people who live half of their lives as seals swimming in the ocean - so I love the sound of Tmesis’ SealSkin, which opens Physical Fest in Liverpool later this month. A global ensemble performs the piece alongside AV design from digital artist Noel Jones and live music from North West acoustic folk duo Me and Deboe. Physical Fest is one of only two dedicated physical theatre festivals in the UK and is always full of surprises. It’s running from June 29 to July 7. Book tickets for SealSkin (June 29-Jul 1) here and read the full Physical Fest programme here.
Children’s Day: Reimagined: This free, family-friendly event will celebrate the children of Leeds, with nearly 2,000 school pupils coming together to build and design the event site at the city’s Roundhay Park. Thousands of banners expressing their hopes, dreams, and demands will decorate the park, where their family, friends, and the public are invited to join them for food, performances and films. Co-created by Fevered Sleep and the Young Creatives, it takes place on Friday, July 14 from 7.30pm. More details here.
Drop the Dead Donkey. The reawakening!: Call it schadenfreude, but as a journalist who has lived through the digital transformation of newspapers, I am particularly looking excited about seeing the Globelink news team tackle the 24-hour news cycle, social media and the age of citizen journalism in this new stage show. By original writers Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin and starring seven members of the TV show’s cast, the tour will take in Sheffield’s Lyceum Theatre, The Lowry in Salford, Leeds Grand, Liverpool Playhouse and Newcastle Theatre Royal.
Thank you to everyone who has shared Stored Honey on social media or recommended it to a friend. It’s a real pleasure to write about the Northern arts scene, even more so when I hear how much you are enjoying my words.
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Laura