A family of four was lurking in the entrance when I arrived at Franz West’s retrospective.

“Can they go in?” the father asked a LACMA guard, motioning to his two children.

“You’re the parents,” replied the guard (I found this pleasantly snarky).

They did go in, the father moving ahead, reporting back (loudly) to tell his children which rooms to avoid.

“Is this all about sex?” the mother asked no one in particular. “Look,” she said, directing her teenage daughter toward a hand-made poster for West’s 2003 Gagosian show. “Syphilis. It says Syphilis.”

“Si-sy-phos,” read the daughter, emphasizing each syllable. But it did look like “syphilis,” especially scrawled above two naked men handling sausages.

It has never occurred to me that West’s art is all about sex. Certainly, raunchy, phallic imagery is everywhere, but West’s sex is not especially sexy. Nor is his irreverence especially irreverent. His work doesn’t delve into subversive extremes because it doesn’t take itself too seriously, which is precisely what makes it effective.

West’s retrospective traveled to Los Angeles from Baltimore, where it first appeared at the Baltimore Museum of Art. The exhibition’s title, To Build a House You Start with the Roof, reflects the confident illogic of West’s oeuvre—his most consistent tool is imprecision. Yet 36 years worth of work is crammed into too small a space in LACMA’s Ahmanson building, a faux-pas that causes West’s projects to seem more chaotic than they actually are.

West began making Adaptives in the ‘70s and continued into the ‘80s. These interactive plaster art objects, were, and still are, terribly witty. At LACMA, they sit on a table and lean against a white cubicle. One looks like a barbell, another like a hobo sack, another like a horn. An instructional video shows previous museum visitors awkwardly handling these objects and, despite the diverse shapes of the Adaptives and the diverse characters in the video, the action doesn’t vary much. The objects seem destined to be swung over shoulders, lifted above heads, or used as Charlie-Chaplin style walking sticks. We art viewers aren’t that malleable. Not even art—especially not even art—can free us from inhibition.

Later, at the end of the ‘80s, West constructed his Legitimate Sculptures. He set the clumpy plaster shapes atop pedestals which he positioned across from unwieldy metal chairs in rooms with industrial walls. A series of these rooms, the Wegner Rooms (1988), occupy a tight space at LACMA (this is the one situation in which the exhibition’s compactness seems appropriate). Wandering around these drab spaces makes the relational strangeness of art objects unavoidable evident. Placing something on a pedestal glorifies it, but what is glorious about West’s globular contraptions?

West’s approach hasn’t changed much over the past three decades—he’s still using plaster, papier-mache and crude collage to question the way we relate to objects. But he makes redundancy fun.

In 2003, West reinterpreted the myth of Sisyphos, the saga of a man condemned to repeatedly roll a boulder up a mountain. Each time he reaches the top, the boulder rolls back down. West’s boulders were haphazardly shaped and splattered with paint. Rolling them up anything would be an impossible undertaking. But building a house by starting with the roof would be equally impossible.

Anyone who wants to spend time basking in life’s irrationality should head to LACMA.


-Catherine Wagley

(Images from top to bottom: Swimmer, 2005; Friedl Kubelka, Franz West with Picture Object (Guitar), 1974; Adaptive (Passstüch), 1975)