![]() At first glance, the furniture that he began to produce in the 1980s can seem sharp and uncomfortable, although it is broadly in accord with his informal, "grunge" aesthetic. It inspired his rich textures, inviting physical contact as well as determining the contexts in which the works were shown. This principle dominated his career, from the intimacy of his early Adaptives to the grandeur of his final outdoor sculptures. West once declared that "it doesn't matter what the art looks like but how it is used". You make unplanned actions and gestures with the audience looking at you … the gestures become a little bit like art." As West himself put it: "In picking up one of the Adaptives, there is a moment of not knowing what to do next, a moment of not knowing what to do with the audience. ![]() West's signature works, the Adaptives, are strangely shaped pieces of plaster, small enough to be handled or even worn, like props in a play that has yet to be written. As a student at the city's Academy of Fine Arts, he was taught from 1977 by Bruno Gironcoli, whose overblown sculptures of domestic objects influenced West in the development of his own distinctive idiom. ![]() He took plenty of drugs and wandered across Europe and the Middle East before returning to Vienna in his mid-20s. The nihilism was infectious, and, after briefly studying civil engineering in 1966, West went through a period of profound disillusionment. Above all, he felt an appalled fascination for the work of the Actionists, the group of artists who from the early 60s attacked bourgeois sensibilities by smashing furniture or even, in one performance which West attended, a dead lamb. He himself spoke vividly about the bombed streets and menacing atmosphere, in which his father dealt in coal and his mother ran a dental surgery across the hall from the family apartment.Ī sense of cultural extremes dominated West's artistic experiences as early as his teens, when his older contemporaries were seeking to break free from Vienna's illustrious heritage. Lovers of the film noir The Third Man can easily picture the decadent, post-second world war Vienna that was West's birthplace. ![]()
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