By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy. We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. At the close of the evening, sponsored by the Socialist Austrian Student Organization, Wiener asked whether anyone in the crowd would like to comment on the proceedings, a question that was met with a deafening silence. I enjoyed your performance enormously. Although this story is by now a well-known originary myth in West circles, its full import has hardly been grasped and extends beyond the general reaction of a young artist-to-be against the imposing specter of Viennese Actionism.
When the union of art and revolution had run its course, West was at the forefront of a generation of artists who proposed more modest modes of social engagement. The whole thing results in a gruesome effect, even for an old, dumb dame [ altes, blades Weiberl ]. But basically this is her world, with sweet pictures, with birdies and a pretty color. One could say with spiteful exaggeration that the pictures represent the soul of many people, of the nation.
Perhaps West regretted that he had not mediated and transcended what he saw more forcefully; perhaps a kinder, one-on-one dialogue could bring about change more effectively than a condescending, sweeping critique. One senses the difference pretty clearly. West did not mind, but for subsequent exhibitions he nevertheless built taller plinths and small chambers that permitted only one visitor at a time. Yet the artist, in equally direct proportion, has over the years redoubled his efforts to ensure that visitors knew to take part.
In other words, we ought not condemn but credit West for recognizing that his vision of participation was so radical as to require metastructures to overcome the psychological and creative inhibitions that most visitors bring to participatory work. West happily mines this indeterminate middle ground between recognizability and abstraction, exploring the contextual meaning of forms.
Does one feel the way one looks? And so, that night in at the University of Vienna, West stood up not against change, not against the desire to overcome the conservative and bourgeois mind-sets that the actors onstage and most Austrian artists agreed were poisonously pervading their country.
