With his furniture pieces and later aluminium sculptures, writes curator Veit Loers, West’s focus from the outset ‘was not on autonomous artistic products, but rather on gentle interventions, surreal mises-en-scène within Austria’s then still authoritarian cultural landscape where art was assigned a specific role, kept in check wherever possible.’ The anti-image of a society in search of peace and quiet, sometimes to the point of dozing off, became visible. In the museum’s Gemäldegalerie, West positioned 15 stripped-down metal couches, chairs and daybeds in front of the paintings by Velázquez and others, and invited museumgoers to sit or lie on them, thus becoming part of an artwork themselves.
In the winter of 1989, four years after Old Masters was published and three years after the beginning of the ‘Waldheim affair’ (in which Austria’s president, Kurt Waldheim, was implicated in Nazi war crimes), which made headlines around the world, the Kunsthistorisches Museum hosted a well-received exhibition of works by the painter and sculptor Franz West, the first living artist ever to be shown there. Museums have great merits, but Bernhard managed to give his comparison between state and museum a vitriolic quality. A chaotic rubbish-heap, that is what today’s Austria is, this ridiculous pygmy state which drips with self-overestimation and which, 40 years after the so-called Second World War, has reached its absolute low only as a totally amputated state’. In his novel Old Masters (1985), Thomas Bernhard pushed this quality to the extreme, equating the institution with the country as a whole before launching into one of his infamous tirades: ‘the whole of this Austria, when all is said and done, is nothing but a Kunsthistorisches Museum, a Catholic-National-Socialist one, an appalling one. More than an ordinary exhibition venue, it is a flagship. Austria’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, like the Burgtheater and Vienna State Opera, occupies a special place within the country’s high culture.
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