Review: Yes, stick the bucket on your head: You’re part of the art in Erwin Wurm’s ‘One Minute Sculptures’

If you’re weary of art that takes itself too seriously and of feeling that the only proper response to such work is to mirror its cool superiority, head to the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House, which is hosting a show of Erwin Wurm’s refreshingly ludicrous “One Minute Sculptures.”

It is less a display than an opportunity — to invert the conventional dynamics between maker, object and viewer and to assume for yourself risks normally assigned to the artist, such as failure or embarrassment. It’s an opportunity to enact art, to become it. Or at least something like it.

There is nothing here for the passive viewer but ordinary objects unceremoniously displayed on modest white pedestals: a single sneaker, a dried-out kitchen sponge, a stuffed animal, a simple gray knit sweater. With each object comes a little drawing and brief written instructions from the wry Austrian provocateur (who started this series in the late ‘90s) on how to engage with it, to activate it.

Move the sponge from one shelf to another. Prop a drumstick behind your bent leg to form a triangle among buttock, knee and ankle. Cover your head with a fluffy pink stuffed dog, pulling the legs down over your ears. Place a plastic bucket over your head so, for the duration of your patience and interest and curiosity, you match the bucket-lampshade standing nearby.

Wurm sets the stage for us to perform these works and thereby to complete them. Second-generation conceptual body art, the sculptures loosen, with a laugh, our rigid expectations. They put into active play the truth that art requires something of its audience. It is not a one-way delivery system; you must extend yourself toward it.

That notion is made literal in Wurm’s sculptures. It’s also humbly clownish, sometimes requiring you not just to extend but to contort yourself (for instance, jamming both of your legs into one arm of the sweater, a piece aptly named “Psycho”).

The notion of art as an ephemeral occasion, an event brought into being by the participation of the viewer, is a powerful one, even if the sculptural situations here don’t always animate it vividly. The gestures feel slight, the demands upon us too flimsy.

“The North-South Question,” a two-person balancing act, rises above the rest. The participant-performers stand on a low platform facing each other, supporting a length of wood molding between their two bellies. They hold the plank in place by leaning in, by careful exertion of equal pressure. To realize the piece, I teamed with a stranger, an Austrian visitor whose eyes locked with mine, the collaboration generating a mild charge between us. She agreed, however, when we relaxed our poses, that this was the only piece with such potential, the others being “a little bit too nothing.”

MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House, 835 N. Kings Road, West Hollywood, (323) 651-1510, through March 27. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays. www.makcenter.org

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