November 2023 | Eyesore

Commentary on architectural blunders in monthly serial.

But, of course ! Everybody and his uncle sent me this humdinger as we bid auf wiedersehen to Halloween and turn the corner into the season of perpetual twilight. This is the new WirWasser (WeWater) fountain in Vienna, Austria, supposedly celebrating the 150th anniversary  of the city’s water system. The city’s own website (English version) puts it this way:

WirWasser is a fountain sculpture – fountain and sculpture in one. The fountain basin is formed by a circle of figures, in the center of which a fountain – illuminated daily with a different color – shoots up into the air.”

So simple, a five-year-old can understand it. The water, you see, shoots up in the air. But, exactly !

The design and execution of the €1.9 million extravaganza was done by the artist’s collective known as gelitin (formerly Gelatin) including Ali Janka, Florian Reither, Tobias Urban, and Wolfgang Gantner. The quartet has a long list of installations of the Stunt-and-Clutter school of ironic art — that is, works intended to shame and humiliate the institutions that pay for them, thus proving that Western Civ utterly lacks conviction.

For a 2018 show at Rotterdam’s Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, the artists filled a sprawling gallery with giant artificial turds. The catalog for the show included the following artists’ credo:

                           THIS IS ALSO A SHOW FOR ALL WHO THINK THAT 
                                                CONTEMPORARY ART IS SHIT. 
                        THEY SHOULD COME AND SEE THIS SHIT SHOW.
                                                    THEY WILL BE SATISFIED.