"Outdoor Sculpture"

C-print on aluminium

labeled, signed and dated on the bottom right on verso: "1/III, Erwin Wurm, 1999/2000" (signed only in 2000)

Can the concept of originality be obsolete? East coast artist Ridge Forester set to find out just this and here is how the story goes: Viennese artist Erwin Wurm is notorious for his one-minute-sculptures, which use people and everyday products intertwined in absurd positions. These one-minute-sculptures are entropical attempts at dilating the meaning of sculpture. And: they are not only conceptually challenging but at the same time hilariously funny. Ridge, who is interested in the travelling potential of images, repeated for Self Service no. 9 Wurms sculptural suggestions with high fashion. Why? Because he loves Wurms work, so he declared. However. Erwin was not pleased. Art critic and curator Michelle Nicol, who was also the model for Ridges copy-cat action in Seif Service, discussed in Parkett the validity of the  obsolescence of originality. Title: Wurm versus Forester. For an issue of the magazin Self Service Erwin in turn took some pictures.
(see Self Service)

Since 1997, Erwin Wurm has been developing his "one minute sculptures" in which he is concerned with the connection between sculpture and the everyday, with the borders between sculpture and action, with time and space of action, with the reproducibility of sculptures and the involvement of the audience.
[…] these inclusive and interactive works act simultaneously as off-the-cuff quips and radical reconsiderations of the major questions key to both sculpture and art viewing: how figures relate to their ground, how one inhabits space, and how simple acts of re-framing can alter perceptions.
(www.kunsthaus-bregenz.at/ www.mak.at)