Artistic Transformations
ln the course of the 20th Century, everyday Ob
jects have increasingly crept into art, where
they have gone through their own process of
development as artistic counterparts of ordinary
Commodities. As a frequently chosen starting
point or vanishing point of artistic work, furniture
in particular has in this way gained completely
new aesthetic and symbolic qualities. 1 Again
and again, very special or very simple and wide-
ly used bentwood furniture has become a focus
of artistic attention. In 2008, for example, the
artist Rolf Sachs used model No. 3-Thonet’s
most successful desk chair, which was pro-
duced and offered in various designs from the
end of the 19th century-for a casting called
“spitting image” made of semi-transparent am-
ber-colored urethane resin in Order to free the
furniture forms of their functionality and to rene-
gotiate them aesthetically. With similar inten-
tions, in 2007 Markus Wilfling transformed two
chairs from the MAK restaurant, which was fur-
nished by Hermann Czech in 1993, into one
of his “shadow objects,” which made reference
to the capitalist double existence of objects
between economic exchange value and prac-
tical value: “This double existence of every ob-
ject creates a shadow world, a world of phan-
toms and spectres, which do nonetheless exist:
The real phantoms of the capitalist product
world, the fetishes, stand alongside or opposite
each other in Wilfling’s sculptures." 2
1 CF. Udo Kultermann, Neue Dimensionen der Plastik, Tübingen
1967, 80 ff. as well as Exhib. Cat. Wuppertal 1985: Die sich ver
selbstständigenden Möbel, and Exhib. Cat. Munich 1987: Möbel
als Kunstobjekte.
2 Peter Weibel, “Das Double der Objekte im Reich der Schatten,"
in: Exhib. Cat. Vienna 2002: Markus Wilfling - andersartiges
gleichartiges, no page number.
Schattenobjekt Shadow Object „Hermann Czech“
Entwurf und Ausführung Design and execution: Markus Wilfling, Österreich Austria, 2007;
Buche, massiv und gebogen, Lack Beech, solid and bent, paint; MAK GK 564/2007
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