Video, 8 hours
For 14 hours, from sunrise to sunset, a male figure stands alone in a wide plain of Lower Austria and is put under hypnosis by two therapists. From time to time, the therapists leave the figure only to return to it and prolong the hypnosis. Erwin Wurm creates a performative sculpture, as he calls it, with his film.
The film Stand West shows 8 hours film material of the young man, completely relaxed, in a sense emptied of everything spiritual. Only the outside world is occupied with projection and attribution work. When in 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick the stela, which rises out of the landscape like a minimalist sculpture, begins to shimmer, to send, as it were, a situation full of tension arises. It remains to be seen who is the source of the tension. Is it the stele that emits an invisible energy, or is it the bystanders who concentrate all energy on this moment?
Stand West is about achieving a state of emptiness and maintaining it for a “working day,” which normally lasts eight hours – also the time frame a museum or a gallery is open. The audience can spend eight hours watching the film Stand West. Only the “work” of the viewer fills the “emptied” sculpture with meaning. In his *One Minute Sculptures* Erwin Wurm is also concerned with giving sculpture a dimension of the temporal. For the short period of one minute, the audience can transform itself into a sculpture.
[Eva Maria Stadler, 5/2008]
