TALLIS PHOTOGRAPHY
TALLIS PHOTOGRAPHY
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  • Home
  • Blog
  • Courses
    • Promo Videos
    • Ethos
    • Learning & Teaching
    • GCSE Photography
    • A-Level Photography
    • Documentation
    • Photo Literacy
    • Assessment
    • Home Learning
    • Exhibitions
    • Multimedia
  • Resources
    • What is photography?
    • Threshold Concepts
    • Bloom's Taxonomy
    • Evaluating your work
    • Writing about photography >
      • Walter Benjamin
      • Susan Sontag
      • John Szarkowski
      • Roland Barthes
      • John Tagg
      • Michael Bracewell
      • Graham Clarke
    • In Focus >
      • Berenice Abbott
      • Eugene Atget
      • Anna Atkins
      • Lewis Baltz
      • Brassai
      • Harry Callahan
      • Susan Derges
      • Louis Faurer
      • David Goldblatt
      • Nan Goldin
      • David Hockney
      • Seydou Keita
      • Dolores Marat
      • László Moholy-Nagy
      • Abelardo Morell
      • John Stezaker
      • Jindrich Styrsky
      • Hiroshi Sugimoto
      • Garry Winogrand
      • Erwin Wurm
    • Themes
    • Visual Analysis
    • Presentations
  • Links
  • Contact

Erwin Wurm

Erwin Wurm's one minute sculptures can happen anywhere, anytime: on the street, at home, in a hotel room. The artist explores and expands the concept and principle of sculpture, through the prism of photography and performance. He works to invigorate the static, unchanging art object by introducing ideas of process, action and the living body into sculpture, as did before him many others, from Richard Serra to Bruce Nauman, Gilbert and George to Charles Ray, ever since Marcel Duchamp selected his first "readymade" and speeded up the process of making sculpture.

Wurm moves one step further in that he redefines the relationship between time and sculptural form: Spontaneity and brevity are key to his artistic vision, as is the idea of endless permutation and proliferation at the expense of a final, fixed form. Many works exist in the form of written or drawm instructions. Anyone can follwo the instructions and is able to recreate an Erwin Wurm sculpture. Press-ups on cups, lean against cleaning things, asparagus noses, orange-loungers, magic broomstick-flights, everything is possible ... for a minute. Wurm works in his photographs and videos the ground-zero into sculpture, he plunges the depth of the impossible with wit and obvious enjoyment. Contrary to Duchamp, Wurm designs not readymades, sculptures fixed into an unchanging form, but works that are constantly ready-to-be-made.
Described as "sculptural variant of situation comedy" the effects seem to be similar: sometimes funny, often ridiculous on the surface but with a traumatically frightening background. He documents the difficulties of life, that remain the same, whether one deals with them philosophically or via dietetics. On a metaphorical level, they can be read in terms of the momentary successes and inevitable failures that tend to define all of human life. Wurm also points to the awkwardness and limits of the human body and psyche, in relation to the things which surround it.

(text by Kate Bush, Erwin Wurm, Photographers' Gallery, december 7 to january 21, 2001, London, (p.03))

Click here to read an article about an Erwin Wurm show in Paris (2002) from The Guardian


Erwin Wurm - Pretty Cool People Interviews from SubmarineChannel on Vimeo.

Thomas Tallis School, Kidbrooke Park Road, London SE3 9PX