![]() In its Paris showing, Les Pommes d’Adam was installed in close proximity to the Vendôme Column, on top of which stands a statue of Napoléon Bonaparte in Roman garb. The 4 pink biomorphic totems, each standing at approximately 25 feet, are at once crude in shape, yet highly finished. Les Pommes d’Adam is rough-hewn and made of basic materials: metal, epoxy, paint, and concrete. Like the American Fluxus group, the Actionists sought to create art outside the usual gallery and market structure, often as free-form events or happenings that yielded abstract works of art and ritualistic, body-oriented performances. The sculpture’s evocation of the human body recalls the work of the Actionists, a group of artists prominent in Vienna while he was a student at the Academy of Applied Arts. It pokes, provokes, and makes us reconsider our physical and psychological relationship to art. Les Pommes d’Adam, like much of West’s work, is infused with humor and a particular delight in visual and linguistic puns. Some might be utilized as bookends or flower vases, while others may be displayed on sculptural plinths. Adaptives were made to be picked up and manipulated by the viewer, their meaning changing with use. ![]() Among his earliest works are the Paßstücke, or Adaptives, a series of small, portable plaster objects, a selection of which was exhibited at MASS MoCA in 2002. West would have reveled in the confusion, having once said, “It doesn’t matter what art looks like, but how it is used.” The use of art, and its interpretation by individuals, was always of interest to West. The public, however, interpreted the gathering of bubblegum-pink sculptures in a slightly more provocative way, locating the reference lower on the male torso. When Franz West’s Les Pommes d’Adam was first displayed in Paris’ Place Vendôme in 2007, the exhibition curators noted that the sculpture took its name and inspiration from the Adam’s apple, pointing to the distinctive anatomical profile of a man’s throat.
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