In "Splendor and Secrets of the Evident," the erudite essay that accompanies The Artist Who Swallowed the World — Erwin Wurm's squishy, hot-pink monograph — Robert Pfaller states that "recognizing the jokes in Wurm's works and being able to find them funny requires no great preknowledge or interpretative effort." This is one of the keys to Wurm's success as an artist: although his sculptures, videos, photographs, and performative installations overflow with lofty references to philosophers, architects, and his artistic peers, one need not wield a press release to get his amusing and thought-provoking gist.

Unlike most artist monographs, in which half of the pages tend to be taken over by the musings of curators, critics, and anyone else who cares to weigh in on the artist's career and reputation, The Artist Who Swallowed the World is dominated by images whose power is intermittently punctuated by the artist's own doodles, quotes, and notes. Wurm's materials and subjects are the familiar objects, structures, and relationships of daily life. Like Robert Gober, he fixates on domestic settings and quotidian, functional objects, shifting their presentation to force his audience to confront them in a new way. Sweaters, dust, chairs, cars, tennis balls, pencils, and cleaning products become transformative objects that interact with the artist's subjects and audience to create unique, temporary sculptures. Participation is crucial to Wurm's work. Like his countryman Franz West, Wurm invites his viewers to interact with the raw materials of his art, welcoming the inevitable variations produced by human idiosyncrasies.

This engrossing book makes clear Wurm's desire to connect to the world and to understand and consume it through the production of art that ceaselessly tunnels through the detritus of media-fueled trends and passing fashion to reveal and question the pure, essential realities of human existence. By incorporating his own frailties, concerns, and narratives into his work, Wurm breaks down the barrier between artist and audience, turning his spectators into participants, and, hence, into artists themselves.

-Allison Kave