Erwin Wurm is an Austrian artist and sculptor. Born in 1954, he has been prolific, creating artwork for over forty-five years. He has also published a large number of monographs, from 1978 to and including 2024.

Of particular interest to me is the concept of a one minute sculpture. Wurm's renowned series of one minute sculptures are wacky performance art pieces where Wurm allows just one minute to create a sculptural piece using commonly found items. Most of these pieces include human input, from either himself or as interactive pieces where Wurm provides the items and some written instructions and encourages members of the public to create the sculpture.

Ship of Fools (just about virtues) – Erwin Wurm (2017)

Wurm also used purely inanimate objects. In 2017 he created a series of pieces that only utilised clothing. He layered clothing by fitting one inside the other until the outer layer took on a human shape aligned to the part of the body that the clothing would normally cover. In 18 Socks / 18 Sweatpants / 18 T-shirts / 18 Pullovers Wurm layered 18 similar pieces of each item of clothing

18 Socks / 18 Sweatpants / 18 T-shirts / 18 Pullovers – Ewin Wurm (2017)

I used cutlery to create triangles and pyramids to create my One Minute Sculptures. It was just a fun little experiment, but it made me consider how the cutlery could interact to create shapes. Balancing the forks reminded me of balancing stones on the beach when I was younger, the slightest wrong movement would cause the entire construction to fall. My one minute sculptures also required a deft hand and patience to balance the cutlery long enough to make a photograph.

I think that fun is an important factor in Wurm’s work. Sarah Ward in her paper The Gallery Visitor: Initiating Participation through Play, which explores the relationship between play and pedagogy in the context of the gallery, cites Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures as an example of playful interaction that places the gallery visitor within the work. She further states “The visitor’s free-choice aids understanding and interpretation which is constructed from their own embodied experience (Ward, 2022)