I Love My Time, I Don’t Like My Time: Recent Work by Erwin Wurm

Austrian artist Erwin Wurm has gained an international reputation for challenging traditional notions of sculpture, photography, performance art, and drawing. Wurm investigates the ideas of sculpture—especially temporality and mass—and is less concerned with the material byproducts of sculptural ideas. His classic One Minute Sculptures (1997–present) engage audiences in the creation of temporary sculpture by combining their bodies with a variety of common objects according to the artist’s blueprints. Wurm deftly choreographs bodies, objects, and time while finding innovative uses for the established conventions of conceptual art, minimalism, and performance art to lift his temporary sculptures above the status of mere incident, form, and behavior.

A conspicuous attribute of Wurm’s art is its insistent unsettling of aesthetic conventions and definitions. Twisting forms and norms, his performative sculptures regularly undermine categorical boundaries. Distinctions between body and object, sculpture and performance, animate and inanimate, are blurred. Countering our belief that art must mean something, this work is distinguished by its refusal to produce permanent forms and final positions, to fix meaning in any kind of normative manner.

I Love My Time, I Don’t Like My Time highlights ten years of production and includes a range of explorations into the ways sculpture can be made, understood, and communicated through performance, photography, installation, drawing, video, and text. Museum visitors may construct sculptures through instructions and a variety of objects supplied by the artist. Key works include staged situations for the creation of One Minute Sculptures; the photo series Instructions for Idleness (2001); Instructions on How to Be Politically Incorrect (2002–03), a series that addresses the disorientation and paranoia of a post–9/11 world; and Thinking about Philosophy (2003), drawings of several figures, each contemplating a different philosopher. Also featured is the Fat House/I Love My Time, I Don’t Like My Time (2003), in which a bloated and anthropomorphized house meditates on the meaning of life, art, and architecture.

Wurm’s artwork has been the subject of solo exhibitions at museums and galleries throughout the world, including the Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney), the Peggy Guggenheim Collection (Venice, Italy), and the Centre National de la Photographie (Paris). He graduated from the Academy of Applied Arts and Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in 1982, and the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria, in 1979.