Erwin Wurm put a cluster of giant cucumber sculptures in a baroque garden and called it art. Gurken (2011) in Furtwanglerpark is exactly as absurd as it sounds and considerably more thought-provoking. Wurm is Austria's most internationally recognised living sculptor, and Salzburg is where he first studied.
The Story
Wurm grew up in Bruck an der Mur in Styria and arrived at the Mozarteum in Salzburg as a student in the late 1970s, studying sculpture under Ruedi Arnold before moving to Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts. The Mozarteum years are part of his formation. The city eventually got one of his most characteristic works in return.
Gurken (2011) sits in Furtwanglerpark, a formal public garden close to the Salzach. Oversized cucumber sculptures, some in acrylic, occupy a space that expects fountains and symmetry. They are funny and they are not, simultaneously. Wurm has always used food as a way into questions about identity, gender, class, and the absurdity of making large permanent objects. The cucumbers do several things at once: they mock monumental sculpture, reference Austrian snack culture (the pickled cucumber as a working-class staple), and exploit the German grammatical anomaly that assigns the masculine article "der" to "Gurk" in some dialects, turning a vegetable into a gendered specimen.
The international context is One Minute Sculptures, the series Wurm began in 1997 in which ordinary people follow brief written instructions to hold an odd pose with an everyday object for sixty seconds. A bucket balanced on a head. A person leaning against a wall in an improbable position. The pose is photographed. The photograph is the sculpture. It is one of the most original contributions to postwar European art, and it is what most audiences outside Austria know him for.
Gurken is part of the Walk of Modern Art and is free to encounter. The Walk of Modern Art runs through the city and requires no ticket.
