Austrian artist Erwin Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures have influenced a generation of U.S. sculptors, though this body of work has never been shown at a major institution in Los Angeles. In production since 1997, these inclusive and interactive works act simultaneously as off-the-cuff quips and radical reconsiderations of the major questions key to both sculpture and art viewing: how figures relate to their ground, how one inhabits space, and how simple acts of re-framing can alter perceptions.
For his exhibition at the Schindler House, Wurm will source props from around Los Angeles ranging from banal to blatantly comedic, and then produce a set of instructions for visitors to perform the various sculptures for sixty seconds at a time, consisting of balancing acts, mild contortions, and altered uses of everyday physical objects. Documents from previous iterations around the world show a woman laying on the floor propped up by strategically placed oranges, or a man standing on his head with legs folded to support a chair as if sitting upside down, or man laying down with a bike parked on top him, or a woman holding herself stiff horizontally as she lays across the back of two Mies van der Rohe-designed chairs, or two woman standing face-to-face with half dozen glass water bottles pinched between their foreheads, torsos, and knees, but not hands.
By soliciting visitors to complete the artworks themselves, Wurm invites them to ask questions about the differences between artwork and art work, the activity of art alongside the display object. Generally first encountered as a written description of a suggestive drawing, the sculpture instructions at the Schindler House will leave the completion of the idea up to the willingness of visitors. The transitory and ephemeral nature of the project cannot be overstated–at core the works are an exercise in the effects of context and perception–and visitors are activated as artists themselves to point out how those exercises resonate within the Schindler House.
A key advancement of the One Minute Sculptures project offered with presentation in an historic modern house is the prioritizing of architectural experience, and the rethinking thereof. Executed in artist studios, galleries, and both traditional and contemporary museum environments for years, Wurm’s project has always involved some elements of spatial reorientation–however, a space like R.M. Schindler’s own project of experimental re-visioning from 1922 creates an opportunity for visitors to experience the Schindler House in new ways.