UK Edition
Is the art world afraid of Erwin Wurm’s ‘fat cars’?
With his oozing convertibles and monstrous gherkins, the Austrian sculptor celebrates the absurd – are galleries scared of showing his art?
Erwin Wurm is fascinated by cars. The Austrian artist, whose playful take on sculpture has made him a global draw, is struck by the way they visually represent us: how we “define” ourselves by the cars we drive. He loves, too, the way that comic-book artists take images of cars and bend and stretch them to create an idea of speed. In 2008, he did just this to an actual Renault 25. “Oh my God, I think it was the most difficult project I ever did,” he recalls over a video call from Vienna. “We had to demount the entire car and make some of the parts totally new, like the windows and the mirrors. It was an unbelievable, crazy amount of work.”
The result, a car that looks like it is cornering at speed, tilted in a way that makes one’s sense of reality subtly tilt, too, is one of Wurm’s madcap works in a major new retrospective at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. The exhibition, Trap of the Truth, will also include a 13ft-high bronze gherkin (Der Gurk, 2016), a briefcase on legs (Dance, 2021) and a bright red truck bending backwards up a wall (Truck II, 2011).
Wurm’s crowd-pleasing touch makes it almost guaranteed to be a joy to visit. What the exhibition won’t include, however, are some of the artist’s best-known works – his Fat Car series. These eye-catching sculptures – saloons, sports cars and convertibles oozing out of their traditional body shapes – are created by coating a real car in plastic and inserting an additional layer of polyester, before giving it a perfect paint job. (He continued the trick with 2003’s Fat House, in which a life-size suburban house’s white walls turned flabby.) But in an era in which “fat” is considered a shaming word, such works have apparently fallen foul of the art world’s anxiety about causing offence. “I’m not allowed to show Fat Car or Fat House in Yorkshire Sculpture Park. They do not want to show them,” Wurm tells me. He believes it is because of the word “fat”.
The title, Wurm explains, is similar to how “fat cats” works in English. “It comes from the German ‘fettes Auto’ ” – a slang expression for the cars that rich people drive. “It means you have a f---ing big kind of a car. It was an insult from us working-class boys to the rich guys who had these fat cars. On one side, we admired them, on the other side, we hated them.” Ironically, luxury cars are becoming ever “fatter”. British and US roads are filled with bulked-up, top-of-the-range SUVs: conspicuous displays of status that make Wurm’s humorous take on modern consumer society seem prescient.
Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s director Clare Lilley tells me that “very often the narrative around these works alludes to greed and gluttony” and that “there was real disquiet from members of staff about how they could interpret those works in a positive way to our audience. I think that it is right that we’re sensitive to the hurt that people would inevitably feel.”
Wurm has had trouble showing the Fat Cars and Fat House in America, too (he’s even thinking of changing the title of the Fat Car series, so that he can continue to show the works). And, he says, “The same happened to me in Italy, they didn’t want to show the big pickles because they felt it was making fun of manhood.”
Thankfully, Yorkshire Sculpture Park has not taken fright at Wurm’s works based on traditional Austrian foodstuffs, including those gherkins and Wiener sausages. He is, of course, aware of their double meanings. “Yes, it’s a symbol for male stupidity, in a way. And I like that.” But they are also relevant to his own experience. “I grew up with [pickled] cucumbers and sausages. They’re middle-European, lower-class food. It’s the typical winter food, because in winter, nothing grew. We had no vegetables.”
Wurm grew up in the town of Bruck an der Mur, central Austria, in the decade after the Second World War – he was born in 1954. He was a childhood rebel: “I was a bad boy, I’m sorry.” He laughs. “I was the leader of a gang of boys. I was not strong, but I had a big mouth.” His father was a policeman. Had he ever thought of being one himself? “Never. One of our biggest games was gangsters and gendarmes. And I was always a gangster and my friends were the gendarmes. My father would come home with these stories. I mean, he was really physically attacked, physically hurt, and he had real fights with people. Funnily enough, people liked him very much. He put many guys in jail, but he had this friendly way of talking to them.”
Austria at the time was still dealing with what had happened in the war, when the country became part of Nazi Germany after the Anschluss of 1938 and was a full participant in its atrocities. “It was rarely talked about,” he says. “It wasn’t even hidden – just nobody spoke about the Second World War and the Nazis. When you grow up and know nothing else, you think everything is normal. It wasn’t until later on I realised, wait a moment, something strange is going on here. There were many Nazis hidden in the government. They were SS first and then all of a sudden they’re politicians, and everybody knew it, and nobody spoke about it.”
The denial extended into his own family. On his mother’s side there was artistic talent, but on his father’s side, he says, “My grandfather was working on the railway, and absolutely a non-political person: he hated Nazis, he hated communists. My father was a Nazi. He was born in 1926, so he was at the height of the Hitlerjugend [Hitler Youth] and educated there. Later on, he was in the war as a soldier and got wounded. He always said it was this great time of his life, being in a war and being in the fighting as a boy. I don’t believe that he ever regretted it. I think it was the romanticism of fighting.”
What of the tens of thousands of murdered Austrian Jews? “Many people denied it, and still nowadays some people deny it, but definitely I think my father denied this. He never wanted to talk about it.” Given how his father grew up, Wurm says, he can “imagine how this could happen”, but “not understand it, not accept it”. They still spoke, but Wurm says: “He hated that I became an artist. He never liked my work.”
Wurm has two adult sons from his first marriage: one of them runs his studio; the other studied industrial design but now trades in cryptocurrencies and NFTs. Wurm also has a 12-year-old daughter, Estée, from his second marriage, to the French graphic designer Élise Mougin. During Covid, Estée joined him on Instagram to suggest the sort of objects people could use to perform one of his One Minute Sculptures. This endlessly evolving piece, which Wurm began more than 35 years ago, is his most famous work. It springs from an idea he had in the late 1980s, that a person can be a sculpture, and that a pose need only be held for a brief period of time for it to exist as an artwork.
Wurm’s take on the idea is provocative and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny; he uses everyday objects to contort the body in unusual ways: broom handles threaded through clothing, buckets on heads, people draped with office chairs, marker pens shoved up noses. He photographs these ephemeral sculptures and encourages others to do the same from his instructions. The work has self-evident populist appeal, and the concept was immortalised in a video by the band Red Hot Chili Peppers for their song Can’t Stop, in 2003.
Wurm has photographed people performing the One Minute Sculptures, from New York and Moscow to Bangkok and Beijing, incorporating everything from fruit to even a camper van into their poses. His skits continued in the instructions he wrote for a work called How to Be Politically Incorrect (including the directions to “spit in someone’s soup”). “I wouldn’t do this again,” he says. He is a politically minded person, he stresses, “but I don’t want to be a political artist, because I have the feeling it makes my work bad, or even dirty”.
How does he feel about showing in China and Russia? “You cannot show in Russia now,” he says. But China is where he has his sculptures made, because, he explains: “They’re quick; they’re very good; technically, they’re very well done, and even after paying shipping tax, they’re cheaper than having them done in Europe. It’s a bit depressing that they’re so much better than our foundries here, but it’s a fact.”
Contemporary art is now a multibillion-dollar industry. “It has definitely had a negative effect, because everybody’s only speaking about money, and how much a painting is worth,” Wurm says. “Artistic quality is something else.” He talks about how people gamble on artists to push their prices up, potentially destroying their careers if the prices collapse. “I know several artists who had it happen to them. It became a stock market.”
This obsession with money is “a bit vulgar”, he notes, but on the other hand, it has worked out well for him. “Everybody wants to live a good life, and I’m happy that I can sell my pieces, and we have a great life altogether. But my biggest luxury was always, and I really stand by this, that I can make a living out of my crazy ideas.”
Erwin Wurm: Trap of the Truth is at Yorkshire Sculpture Park (ysp.org.uk) from June 10