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It’s a gray, dreary day at 1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge, on Furman Street, and Austrian sculptor Erwin Wurm is going somewhat off topic while discussing his new installation for the Public Art Fund. “In my country, it’s an insult to call someone a virsli,” he says, referring to a local variety of sausage. “If you call someone a virsli, it means you’re calling him, um, how would you say?” A dick? “A dick, yes.”
Sometimes a virsli is just a virsli, though for the purposes of Wurm’s project, Hot Dog Bus, this delicacy, or rather its American cousin, is being elevated to art. The piece comprises a mustard-colored VW bus that is handing out free hot dogs this summer at Brooklyn Bridge Park. The vehicle itself looks like it has consumed too many tube steaks, bulging across its grill, trunk and fenders as if it were wearing the automotive equivalent of a fat suit. “I work quite often with sausages,” says Wurm, “because it’s such an iconic Middle-European food.”
The bus is actually another version of one created for a museum in Wolfsburg, Germany, home to Volkswagen, whose employee cafeteria menu inspired the artist. “VW bought a sausage company to make this currywurst for its workers,” says Wurm, “and they printed I’M AN ORIGINAL PART OF VW on it. I thought, Wow, this is interesting.” The Wolfsburg edition actually sold the currywurst instead of giving it away, which is odd since Germany is known more for social democracy than free-market zealotry.
The ironic tone of Wurm’s latest endeavor is one he’s taken throughout a 20-year career that’s included major exhibitions around the world. His sculptures often resemble familiar things—houses, cars—after they’ve packed on too many pounds. But his oeuvre also contains objects that appear to be melting (a model of the Guggenheim Museum, for instance) as well as interactive performance pieces that instruct viewers to assume certain poses or commit certain actions for exactly one minute.
“The point of my work is to ask, what is sculpture?” says Wurm. “It’s mass, form, volume and surface, but basically it’s about adding something or taking something away.” Explaining the connection to body image, he adds, “We do the same, changing form when we gain or lose weight. And if you make a form fat, it destroys the form.”
There isn’t a diet guru anywhere who would disagree with that assessment, though Wurm himself is elegantly thin in a way that immediately identifies him as European. Gray and angularly featured, he looks like a guy in an ad for a luxury-brand watch. Inadvertently, this plays into Wurm’s larger point about weight’s role in society. “The elite used to display their status by being heavy,” he says. “Now, it’s vice versa: The elites are thin, while the poor are fat.” Such critiques are typical of Wurm, who says, “I ask questions about sculpture and combine that with social issues.” He cites one piece in which he asked an acquaintance to don all of the clothes he owned because “it’s what homeless people do. They keep everything they have with them.”
Born in 1954, Wurm comes from an unassuming background: His mother was a housewife, and his father was a police detective. Wurm describes his family as “blank.” “They didn’t care about art or literature,” he says, adding that art was his escape from the straitjacket conformity of postwar Austria. “It was a very closed society,” he says, “and there were still many Nazis running around.” This claustrophobic milieu informs an installation Wurm mounted for the 2017 Venice Biennale. Called Narrow House, it’s a life-size re-creation of his childhood home, with all its furnishings inside, squeezed down to a one-meter width.
Wurm allows that there is a farcical element to his sculptures but says he’s not trying to be funny, just focused on the absurdity of contemporary life. “I’m not a joke teller,” he says. “I use humor to seduce people and make them aware of certain points.” But does he mind if they simply laugh? “No,” he says. “It’s part of my work.”
“Erwin Wurm: Hot Dog Bus” is at Brooklyn Bridge Park through Aug 26 (publicartfund.org).