In my practice, I am often trying to achieve similar complexities where categories blur. It’s amazing to be able to create work on that scale, connecting to inherently macho, brutalist or minimalist traditions, while at the same time maintaining such fragility and humanity. Those works are abstract in a sense, but at the same time they couldn’t possibly be any more bodily or raw. I love the use of color in his more monumental pieces. It seems to me that West’s work was dealing with that tension of figuration and the relationship between humans and objects throughout his career and in very diverse ways. Figuration can serve as a point of entry for humans to understand and empathize with abstract or invisible forces and functions, perhaps allowing the viewer/user to also get closer to the logic of how something was produced-under what kind of economy and by the means of what type of labor. I believe and hope that this has to do with an attempt to think in humanist terms again. I think there’s a direct relationship between the political and social atmosphere around the world right now and the return to figuration. He died while I was in school, which I think meant that a lot of us were reintroduced to his work during a time when our ideas surrounding art were really forming. His work is an influence on so many artists of my generation. In what ways is West’s art relevant to your own? There is some tension in that the performer is constricted in a certain way-their body is under a tremendous amount of weight and pressure-but the resulting gestures are comedic in how floppy bodily actions appear when magnified by these materials. I’ve also made works that are meant to be worn or performed in: latex and silicone costumes that act as a kind of floppy straitjacket. There is a proposal/potential for performance that is often left unfulfilled. Although the viewer is generally not encouraged to touch the work, there’s an implication of interaction. I think there is some space for performance, or interaction, in most of my sculptures. I strive for my work to be all of those things: painting, dance, and sometimes dinner. To make a chair that is also a performance that is also a meal and poem is a beautiful endeavor. I think this blurry line is what attracted me. They both had this irreverent joy and play in their work, which was both performance and painting and sculpture. It was at this same time that I had met Oliver Herring and fell in love with his performances as well. I recall the Comic Abstraction show at MoMA and falling in love with his work. What role does performance-as a concept and as a category of postwar art-have in your own practice? West proposed a new mode of playful interaction that took the viewer very seriously. The first time I remember seeing his work in person was a few months later on the roof of the ICA in London. I checked his Phaidon monograph out from the library and kept renewing it for the following two semesters. I think I first learned about West when a friend suggested I look at his work my sophomore year in college. I remember thinking it was beautifully absurd to have so many chairs in a small house and that one day I would like to have that many chairs too. In my mind, there were at least thirty chairs in a very small room, all different colors and fabrics. She had several of his chairs and many chairs of her own. I remember first seeing Franz West’s work when I visited Mary Heilmann’s studio in East Hampton in the early 2000s. How were you first introduced to Franz West’s work? We asked three of the artists featured in the show- Alex Da Corte, Hannah Levy, and Oren Pinhassi-to share their thoughts on the ways in which West’s work and legacy directly engages with or diverges from conversations about art making today. Intended to be interacted with, West’s works redefine art as a social experience and ask how objects can function both as physical extensions of the body and as representations of the human experience. The exhibition takes as its point of departure Franz West’s (1947–2012) furniture and Passstücke (Adaptives). This Is Not a Prop at david Zwirner in New York brought together a multigenerational group of artists whose work explores the liminal space between body and object.
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