Artnet
July 28, 2008
London Dispatch
By Laura K. Jones
At Moscow's Central House of Artists, the Austrian art-comic Erwin Wurm -- "the grandson of the Surrealists," runs one quote -- has taken over. (This is an odd bazaar-type Soviet-style building opposite Gorky Park, with dusty small shops selling oil paintings clustered around enormous central exhibition spaces.) Anyway, for the sculpture Telekinetically Bent VW Van, Wurm has "bent" in the middle an old VW camper van. Stuck to its back window is a printout of an email exchange between Wurm's assistant and the assistant of Mahesh Abayahani, a "telekinesis" guru from India.
Clearly enjoying themselves, the Wurm camp requested that the guru come and bend the bus for them in Austria. The Abayahani camp, for its part, fell straight into the knowing Westerners' trap, which is somehow depressing. "For a flight Mr. Mahesh Abayahani wants business class and his price is 2,000 dollar." The guru also requested that the artist and his friends refrain from eating for 24 hours prior to the bending of the bus. They also had to turn all the electricity off and concentrate hard.
We have no way of knowing if any of this happened, of course, but it was an effective way on Wurm's part of deconstructing certain notions of enlightenment, or perhaps taking the piss out of reincarnation types.
Another Wurm work, Fat House, is a nearly life-sized fairytale house made of fiberglass with a roof that looks like cotton wool. It's a sculpture you can wander into. Inside is a film of the house talking to you, its front door opening and closing like a human mouth. It said, "I believe I should be outside," a few times, as if it knew it was inside a gallery.