Franz West: generous sculptural jester

Austrian artist Franz West, who died yesterday, was a sculptural jester, a provocateur, a maker of benign and threatening objects. Encounters with West's art are often occasions for laughter, though it is a laugh tinged with horror and disbelief. He could deflate the pomposity of the city square or the elegance of a park with his giant pink phalluses and lime-green sausages . Sitting on dignified plinths, his skewed and lumpy sculptures, often garishly painted, had a kind of idiot elegance. As a sculptor, West had a great touch and an inimitable feel for shapes. He was a master of the lump : the knobbly and inert, the gross and the gangling. His art had character – it stuck out, got in the way, but it was also sociable. There were sculptures to play with, to lounge about on, sculptures to place on a cafe table (to frighten fellow drinkers, or provoke a conversation), to wear and to carry. There were sculptures containing bottles of whisky. Trying to get a drink from one of these humongous, unwieldy objects made you look blotto. West saw the business of looking at art, and making it, as a comedy of manners – though this disguised his absolute seriousness. "By nature I tend to be depressive, thus I always try to make something more euphoric, even if that fails," he once said. The buffoonery and boorishness of masculinity was a recurring theme. But the big question was what art was for and what its social purpose might be: "If I wanted to make a Readymade today," he said, thinking of Duchamp, "I would make a pissoir, but one you could really piss into, in a museum." West's work could do you a mischief. His " adaptive sculptures " were intended to be handled and worn, like useless prosthetics or daft appendages. Playing with these bulging, knobby, spiky plaster and papier mache objects was like wrestling with a tuba. Mischievousness was a big part of what he did, though it hid a fiercely intelligent, well-read and perceptive mind. He had an iconoclastic sort of learnedness. His art could be absurd and touching, weird and threatening – sometimes all at once. It was also welcoming. His sofas and chairs, with their lovely patterned fabric covers , are as practical as they are pleasing. He loved collaborating with other artists, and showing their works among his own. His influence – on artists as diverse as Rirkrit Tiravanija and Sarah Lucas – is more a matter of spirit than form. West's was an art of great generosity and openness . And he made me laugh.