Active sky next vs opus
ACTIVE SKY NEXT VS OPUS PORTABLE
“Relational” ahead of his time, West in the mid-’70s conceived his earliest sculptures, the portable Adaptives, as interactive works. Shown with a number of individual pieces from the span of West’s career, the Kombi-werke project a thematic consistency in his own practice over disparate periods, as well as the generous sense of community he maintained with other artists throughout his life.
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Settling on 153 works from the thousands the artist produced, Badura-Triska has focused on West’s Kombi-werke (Combining Works), installations that pastiche his own and/or other artists’ works in wall displays and roomlike environments. West was instrumental in the initial planning stages of the exhibition, working with Eva Badura-Triska, the curator who had also organized his first retrospective at MUMOK in 1996 (“Proforma,” at the museum’s previous location in the city’s Schweizergarten). The plaintive query “Where is my eight?”-a translation, approved by West, of the offbeat German-refers to the lost kilos: “acht,” which in English (“eight”) rhymes with “weight.” In devising the title of his show, was West, already suffering from his final illness, also making a mordant comment on his impending mortality, as nearly the entirety of his “weight” was about to disappear from the earth? This one refers to a 2003 collage, Lost Eight, in which a woman cut from an advertisement brandishes an oversize pair of pants, demonstrating a dieting triumph. Replete with puns and neologisms, they are frequently untranslatable. “Wo is mein Achter?” is typical of the absurdist nature of many of West’s titles.