In necessitating human interaction and performative activation, West’s sculptures raise the question of reciprocity between work and viewer that disturbs the status quo of pristine gallery spaces and throws up a derisive middle-finger to the bourgeois elite – the kind of gesture West never shied from making.

Nowhere is this anti-aesthetic ethos more clearly embodied than with his Passtücke (Adaptives), a term first coined by critic and poet Reinhard Pressnitz in 1980, who referred to these primitive, hand-held constructions of papier-mâche and re-bar as ‘formalisations of neurotic states’. Directly influenced by Freud’s writings on the connection between the subconscious and the human body, there is a sensorial pleasure that for West bordered on the voyeuristic. This became especially apparent in Sieben Säulen, shown in 1990 at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, where the knobbly and unwieldy sculptures were carried and ‘adapted’ by naked performers. Fitting for British prudishness, viewers at Tate Modern are politely invited to interact with the Passtücke in specially created changing rooms. Not only did his Passtücke provide an invitation to collaborate – many were painted by the likes of Eugenia Rochas, Erwin Wurm and Hubert Schmalix – but these humble sculptures question the relationship between sculpture and the body, the collective and individual, the sacred and profane.

By extension, his large-scale outdoor sculptures – brightly coloured intestinal, phallic, turd-like forms – invite us to sit, lie or play, once more demonstrating West’s preference for the soporific, functional and everyday. Five of these sculptures, including Rrose/Drama (2001), are installed on Tate Modern’s South Landscape for the duration of the show.

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