As you turn the corner of David Chipperfield’s elegant series of dove grey concrete cuboids, The Hepworth Wakefield, to climb the stairs to the gallery’s entrance, an enormous white plaster nose stands ahead of you. It is outrageous in its eyelessness. It thrusts into the air, without logic or elegance; with just an appalled ‘O’ for a mouth. It seems all at odds with the classical serenity of Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture. This cartoon head is "Lemurenheim" (‘Lemur Head’, 2002), a work in plaster made by the Austrian artist Franz West in collaboration with the artist Rudolf Stingel in response to an invitation by the architect Hermann Czech to create a series of sculptures for a bridge in Vienna. At the time of the commission, West was drinking heavily (it was alcoholism that would ultimately precipitate his early death in 2013, aged just 66), and a common Viennese phrase to capture the sensation of waking up with a hangover is ‘seeing lemuren’ or ‘zombies’. West played with the idea of these zombies rising out of the river. In addition, the word ‘lemur’ is sometimes used to designate the ancient middle-class ladies who haunt Viennese coffee shops. This assertively sculptural, hand-made object is thus the progeny of a multiple play on words. It is also an emblem of the human condition, as well as a joke on our human habit of projection, whereby every large circular object with a hole in it becomes a head, capable of tragedy. Thus those two Viennese titans of modern thought, Freud and Wittgenstein, through the ideas of psychoanalysis and language games, can be seen both to have their share in this comic monster.
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