One Minute Sculpture, The Speculative Realist (2015)

With his One Minute Sculptures (1996/1997-ongoing), Erwin Wurm invites visitors, through precise instructions, to adopt unusual and absurd body positions using everyday objects. For a brief moment, the viewer becomes part of the sculpture itself. The questioning of sculptural boundaries serves as a tool to raise deeper philosophical questions. The title, The Speculative Realist, refers to the 21st-century philosophical movement that posits the existence of a reality independent of the mind, beyond anthropocentric views. By instructing participants to adopt a physically unstable posture, Wurm highlights how fragile and constructed our notions of rationality and reality truly are: “The ordinary is so close and so familiar to us that we overlook it. Looking at the ordinary from the perspective of the absurd and the paradox gives us the opportunity to see something different, perhaps more interesting.”