(If there is a Latin name for the phobia of being crushed by, for example, an enormous falling house, I cannot find it: one might venture to suggest that outside Latin, the official term is “being sane.”) It is one of art’s most tedious paradoxes that work not adequately alienating for the viewer is too often seen as alienating for the critic. That was a great compliment.” The work, a full-sized house appearing to have been delivered from the sky, precarious and drunk, has Wurmian and Westian qualities by dint of not being especially hard to understand, but being particularly hard to see in person without feeling something primitive, amygdalan. At the time, Franz West wrote me a note saying how angry he was about this work because it was not his idea. “In 2006,” Wurm once recalled, “I installed the work House Attack on the roof of Mumok. As Robert Storr observed, West operated through ‘seduction’ rather than ‘shock.’” “Every forty minutes,” he recalled, “a new patient was screaming.” “The sounds of whirling drills,” Frieze magazine suggested, “and the image of his mother creating white and pink moulds of teeth from plaster and resin” impacted the visual language of his work: “ garish pastel pinks and greens…recall the materials his mother used in her dental practice.” “By the mid-1970s,” critic Fiona Hirsch wrote, not long after his untimely death at 65, “West and his irreverent colleagues had begun to dispel the heavy atmosphere left behind by the Vienna Actionists, and he continued over four decades to fold the daunting intellectualism of his native culture into a largely hospitable practice…Though just as deeply imbued as the Actionists with Viennese psychoanalytic thought, West took a less violent route, through his objects. By the time he reached his late teens, blood and suffering a la Brus fatigued him. For me, yellow was a symbol of saying yes to life.”īorn in 1947, and raised in a “filthy” housing block teeming with former-Nazi tenants, West was the son of a coal-dealing father and a Jewish dentist mother, meaning that he was no stranger to dirt, threat, perversity or the realities of the imperfect human body from the outset. If you looked under their skirts, you saw pink. When I was a child, ladies generally had pink. “I used to associate pink with intimate things. It’s absurd that we consider baby pink to be the territory of millennials, and sunshine yellow the preserve of Gen Z, when in fact both colours practically belong to West. The fact that West claimed that he had no memory of the incident seems borderline irrelevant its “tone of devastating benevolence,” argues Schjedahl, “essentialises the funny, redemptive pivot that his art made in the mood and mode of Vienna’s avant-garde.” Treat it like a superhero’s on-the-nose origin story, and the work succeeding it makes perfect sense: consider sculptures shaded like cartoon-pink dicks and shaped like turds, resembling nothing else exactly, and yet biological and Freudian enough to scare the horses. After integrating the interdisciplinary lessons of Vienna and the Weimar Bauhaus into her life's work, she shared these lessons with children at Terezín.Proximate to masturbation and scatology, hilarious and at ease with the avant-garde, sardonic and - impossibly and simultaneously - polite: Franz West, c’est toi. Such engagement with both political strains of twentieth-century modernism is rare. Always politically engaged, her interdisciplinary and multimedia approach to art bridged the conceptual divide between the utopian and critical responses to war during the interwar years. She used the idioms of twentieth-century art movements in unusual contexts, some of these very brave: in interwar Vienna, where she created Dadaistic posters to warn of fascism, she was imprisoned and interrogated. While she has been the subject of renewed attention, particularly in the design world, much of her fine art has yet to be assessed. She translates the language of photograms into painting, ecclesiastical subject matter into a machine aesthetic, adds found objects to abstract paintings, and paints allegories and scenes of distortion in the idiom of New Objectivity, all the while designing stage sets, costumes, modular furniture, toys, and interiors. Using a network metaphor to read her work, she is understood here as specialist of the ars combinatoria, in which she recombines genre and media in unexpected ways. This article positions multidisciplinary artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis at the center of a web that spans Vienna 1900, the Weimar Bauhaus, and interwar Vienna.
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