Erwin Wurm
One Minute Sculpture, 2005/2014
Wurm will be showing two artworks from his series of One Minute Sculptures as part of Precarious Balance. Each of them playfully ties in with the overarching theme of balance and precariousness and invites the audience to become an active part of the artwork. Organisation of Love presents the viewer with a small assortment of plastic bottles filled with liquid, a low platform/plinth and an illustrated instruction. The audience is invited to pair up and attempt to hold the objects in place in the space between their bodies. The objects - all sourced locally - reference banal domesticity, chores, consumption and detritus. The changing distribution of the liquid in each objects adds to the challenge of maintaining a level, balanced equilibrium. The sculpture is all too easily disrupted by a breath drawn in too sharply or a giggle at the absurdity and imminent failure of it all. Astronomical Enterprise is comprised of a plinth, two tennis balls and an illustrated instruction for the viewer-cum-performer to balance the balls in a small stack, held in place on the plinth by their forehead. The challenge in this seemingly simple action makes it an ‘enterprise’ while the spherical tennis balls are transformed in such close proximity. This One Minute Sculpture invites the audience to enact a prone contemplation of perspective and balance that is both an exercise and object.
Erwin Wurm