White Elephant is the bilingual catalogue (Spanish/English) of the Franz West exhibition at the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City, and includes some works never presented before. The works show the relation of West's production with people, playing with the implications of museum display, whose power lies in the transformation of what museums contain into cult objects.
Needless to say, the exhibition includes some of his "adaptives"-created as a counterpart to the radical postures of Viennese Actionism-which offer spectators the possibility of a sort of slapstick interaction with small objects in order for the works to be considered complete.
The volume includes sculptures, collages, furniture, and "adaptives, " permitting a wide-ranging approach to this international figure who has played an important role in the contemporary art world since 1965, with his challenge to viewers' notions of objects, beauty and ugliness, art, and life.