Letters from Vienna #30
I was always surprised how much time and effort Franz West, whose birthday, the 16th of February was last week, would spend distinguishing between authentic works and fakes. “That, I remember making,” he would say “that not.” Sometimes, in an effort to reduce his market share and to up the price a little he lied, which led to at least one court case I know of. A friend who accused him of mendacity still can’t abide hearing his name spoken in public while there are an awful lot of people, especially those who helped him financially when he lived in penury and was close to starvation, who speak ill of him. Franz West might have been a great artist but he was hardly a saint.
He once said: “I’ve had more or more or less a fight with everyone I’ve worked with. There’s a point when you have to give up your own sovereignty of production. It may be that it harmonises, but then comes the point where you have to subordinate yourself to the other, and then there’s a fight.”[1]
One of those he collaborated with in the 1980s was Herbert Brandl (who deserves a letter in his own right) and the pieces pictured below are consequences of that collaboration.
How they came about isn’t difficult to track: “I was quite shy of colours and couldn’t handle them” Franz once said in an interview. “In the tradition of art, not everything was merely rough stone or bare wood. Sculptures were painted. I didn’t trust myself. Then, at the beginning of the 1980s, there was this vehement use of colour, colours, colours, colours everywhere, and I asked other artists about that.”[2]
The collages pictured below are the consequences of his awareness of his weakness as a draughtsman. Because he thought he couldn’t draw (which wasn’t true) he preferred to use borrowed images in his art.
Franz West was an eminently social artist. He drew from his environment and from the impulses of others for the inspiration of his art. Yet if he took the ideas from others he invariably made them his own, which is why they are inimitable.
There are rumours that there are hosts of fake works produced in Asia after his death ten years ago but that they are all fundamentally flawed and easy for someone familiar with his works to discover. Again, and again the idea that one can reproduce art in a sterile fashion has been shown to be flawed.
Of course, the important question is: how much can we cooperate with others without losing our integrity, our own identities or our capacity to create or even think for ourselves? At what point do we sacrifice ourselves to be “popular” or merely social animals? Where are the limits between ourselves and society or even the other?
When I collaborated with Franz West I didn’t mind him phoning at 3 o’clock in the morning with another bright idea but I did object to his stalling and refusing to take decisions and I positively rebelled when he invited a particularly mediocre artist to participate in a project, a video we were creating together, which proved a disaster.
When the Gagosian Gallery saw the finished product, they were delighted with the part of the video I’d made but disappointed with the weakness of the latter half, which they found insipid and boring. The video wasn’t, to the best of my knowledge, ever exhibited in Rome.
Most annoying of all were the pains Franz took trying to woo me to get back on board when I’d already bailed out. Had he taken the same time and trouble before, I couldn’t help but think then, the end result would have been very different indeed.
Nevertheless, for all my enduring bitterness and rancour, there is nobody I learned more about the creation of art from than Franz West and for that I am eternally grateful.
Perhaps we should all take more time to distinguish between fake and true and should all be willing to endure conflict and social isolation if that is what is necessary at a given point in time. Even the greatest artists seldom, if ever, get away with lies.
[1] pp.46-47 Franz West Gesammelte Gespräche und Interviews
[2] p.39 Ibid