Bobbie Coles was unlucky with transporting fragile goods. She came in with two objects, both glass or ceramics that had broken even before she managed to get them home, and in both cases the accidents had been caused by someone else. The large blue vase was my choice for further development, mostly because of is simple and appealing look. The vase had been broken by the taxi driver Bobbie had used to get it home from the shop, despite her having asked him to be careful with it. Imagine how disappointing! Usually when we ask someone to be careful when they obviously should, they get slightly annoyed by this, but when someone then despite this still manages to break what we asked them to take special care with, one has to wonder…

I hope Ms Coles will see the accident in a brighter light now though, as without it I wouldn’t have had any reason for improving it into a lamp. The build is simple enough, as anyone can see, but the small details are the most important as always. The previously sharp edge has been carefully sanded down so that it is nice and soft to the touch. And I picked a bulb that reflects the light downwards, to make sure it all got coloured blue, and wouldn’t split in one yellow shaft upwards surrounded by a blue ring around it.

The silver Tiffany frame delivered by Ms Tien Claudio represented a cracked glass as well as a cracked marriage. I didn’t ask how either of them had broken, but I had a feeling the one was caused by the other. Keeping the cracks didn’t seem so nice, in my view, as my first impression of Ms Claudio was one of optimism and openness to life, but clearly, the portrait still held some significance to her, otherwise why would she have handed it in? Turning it back and forth and up and down in my mind for a bit, the focus of my interest landed more and more on the people in the image, and less so on the frame. Sure, it was a nice frame, but it would always be insignificant compared to the legacy the portrait itself held in Ms Claudio’s life. So the broken glass had to go, and after a bit of deliberation I decided to also get rid of her ex-husband. The new portrait, without glass but with a small mirror and a more open function, better represents where Tien is today I hope.

It is funny how artworks sometimes name themselves. In the case of this re-worked portrait, it happened as soon as I put it up for display in the shop window of Transformer. I do this with all finished artworks, as a way of showing people passing by what we are doing and how it works. In this case it really worked quickly: just as I placed the portrait, a man who was watching me from outside knocked on the window and called in to me. “Hey there, can I be the mystery man?” he asked with a huge grin, after having imagined himself on that beach. Of course I couldn’t answer that question for Tien, but I still had my title given to me.

Apart from kindly hosting The Temporary Art Repair Shop as one of three featured projects in a panel discussion on social practice in the arts, Goethe Institute Washington DC of course also wanted its own transformed object. Fittingly for an office environment, Ms Blume choose to drop by with a piece of broken office equipment. Apparently, they have several similar desk lamps at Goethe, but this one had lost its shade, and the bulb didn’t work any more either. It was still a nice piece of solid Italian design though, and I was happy to keep and incorporate the well built adjustable arm on its solid foot into a new function.

An artwork requires a symbolical function much more than a practical one, even if I agree it should be well designed and constructed. For the German cultural institute in the capital of the US, I felt a magical re-enactment of the crucial influence of America on modern German society was called for. Instead of light though, I wanted to focus on wind, and specifically in this case, on the wind of change. The text on the side of the wooden fan, which you can see that I added on the image above, reads “Please keep air-flow Eastwards”. I hand-made the wooden funnel from some nice pieces of hardwood donated to the Repair Shop, and fitted it with twin computer fans, capable of delivering a hardly perceptible but still steady draft of air. Specifically the weakness of the wind in combination with its persistence pleased me. That wind of change that has for better and worse been blowing at Germany from the US for the last 75 years or so, has clearly had a huge impact on German society and culture, although being of course just one of the factors that has helped totally transform Germany since then.

Wind of Change by the Scorpions remains a huge reference to me from my own youth following the collapse of the Soviet Union on TV, from not very far away in neighbouring Sweden. For anyone growing up in those days under the constant shadow of the threat of nuclear annihilation, the significance of such changes are hard to remember correctly. For all the talk of terrorism going on today, I can’t help thinking that the non violent resolution of those tensions in the late eighties and early nineties completely dwarf everything happening today in significance, which we tend to forget, maybe precisely because they never turned close to as ugly as they had the potential to. For me, to commemorate what I see as a weak but steady wind of reform blowing eastwards over Europe during my childhood, the Office-Fan of Change feels a fitting memorabilia. Which Ms Sylvia Blume from the Goethe Institute seems to agree with.

It is especially nice to receive a photograph of the artwork “in situ” so to speak, from the recipient of it. Thank you!

I wasn’t there when Sireen Jawdat came in with this sculpture, so one of the assistants booked it instead, and then later related to me what she had thought about her own creation. It was the result of some kind of art class, and to her benefit it has to be said, Sireen was well aware that the piece didn’t work. Now, with art it is kind of hard to say exactly why it doesn’t work, even when it is pretty obvious that it doesn’t work, so I won’t attempt too precise an analysis. Suffice it to say that the colour is wrong, the shape is undefined, the material is obvious but without any meaning or tension, it doesn’t break any taboos or challenge anything. It looks pretty much like someone stuck a bunch of pieces of plywood together and then painted them a random colour. This is not at all a criticism of Sireen. Quite the opposite, she gets 2 full points for bravery: first for making such a bold attempt (and in real life most bold attempts fail, even though we know from films that bold attempts are the only way to solve a problem), and secondly for handing it in to the workshop and allowing another artist to have a go at it.

The challenge I stood before was to turn this into a good artwork. Or rather, not a good one, but a passable one. Turning the thing over in my hands and in my mind, a memory from my very early days making art came back to me. In a conversation, I had asked a gallery and artist’s assistant in Stockholm what kind of art she liked, and she had quite honestly answered, “I like big and dark and drippy paintings.” To me at the time, that had sounded terribly superficial and cynical, but 15 years of making art I could now get her point. So I decided to try it out. But not just as a one-off piece. What would be really interesting is to device a kind of recipe or instruction that anyone could use. So, here follows,

Recipe for saving a failed artwork (not for making a great artwork)

1. Break the artwork to pieces (breakage and violence implies tension and conflict which is always exciting).
2. Assemble them on a flat surface and glue them together in a sort of squarish shape (flat is good because it can then go on the wall, and most art goes on the wall. Squarish is good because it implies the canvas which makes people happily see the object as art, but “sort of” also implies a challenge to the boring conventions of the canvas).
3. Paint it drippy black (black is just the best colour for most things and especially for failed things. It signals brooding, melancholic, sad, tragic and serious events, as well as the night, mystery and evil, and it helps to hide mistakes. Drippy is great because it reminds us of our bodies, of a brash and brave way of painting, of rebellion, of food, blood and of recognizing the actual paint as a material).
4. Hang it on the wall.

To really be able to test if my recipe worked, and not just if I as an experienced artist could fix her sculpture, I would now have to assign someone else to transform it, someone without my 15 years of experience in making objects. Luckily, my brother Joakim happened to be visiting for the weekend, and being a computer guy, he admittedly didn’t have any clue at all what he was doing as I set him the challenge. Still, with just a minimal amount of purely technical advice (I sternly refused any opinions on how he interpreted my instructions, or on his composition and choices) he managed to greatly improve the previously blue sculpture. At least that is my opinion, and remember, I said a passable artwork, not a great one! Why not try the recipe yourself on one of your own less successful creations? I promise to post them (as long as they are not just obvious spam, junk or irrelevant).

Unfortunately, I seem to have lost the photograph I took of the broken exercise equipment Tim Doud handed in for repair. I will therefore try to describe it in such a way that you will see it before your inner eye, for you to better imagine the transformation that then took place. Ok, here goes:

Unfortunately, I seem to have lost the photograph I took of the broken exercise equipment Tim Doud handed in for repair. I will therefore try to describe it in such a way that you will see it before your inner eye. Ok, here goes:

Two thick, round rubber tubes, one of them black and the other greyish pink. The greyish one in two parts, connected via a weird cheap plastic nut of sorts and some black nylon bands. Both the greyish and the black tube had a handle attached to one end, the one on the black tube being severely chewed up by a dog, and the handles being slightly different in style and construction, I had to assume that the two tubes had originally constituted two separate resistance bands which after having broken had been combined into one, until, alas, they broke again. They were presented in a jumble, and my first impression was that they had indeed been part of the same instrument of self discipline, a theory which, as I mention above, I abandoned after having untangled the tubes and bands and seen that they were of slightly different design. As a whole they were slight and insignificant, a bit useless looking, without a clear purpose, but at a same time, they held an air of nastiness. This is a bit hard to explain. Why would I see exercise rubber tubes as nasty? Maybe it was their heavily worn down state. Maybe it was the dog chewing them up. Maybe they reminded me, especially in their excessively worn down state, of the urge to punish and discipline ones body, while at the same time, they most of all looked like something you would use to tie someone up and gag them. Suffice it to say, had I glanced them lying around on the floor in the back of someone’s car, I would have definitely declined a ride.

These associations to self discipline and bodily rigour was only part of my inspiration for the sculpture though. Just the week before, Tim had showed me his studio and the series of paintings he was working on for the moment. Tim being a very accomplished figurative painter, it was quite exciting to see the direction his new series was taking. At first impression they looked like very formal, like colour field painting, with beautiful combinations of lines and shades that just captivated my eyes. They were, however, abstract rather than formalist, in that they took their starting point in real life. In this case the elaborately thought out and composed textile patterns of designer shirts. Using these patterns, but without making them clearly recognisable as such, means Tim could engage his audience in a discussion about fashion, status and recognition, without having to clearly state this. So, of course, my imagination was already primed with the idea of shirts when I started work on Tim’s sculpture.

An example of Tim’s work, PSK (Lt Blue), 68×56 inches, 2015.

I wanted my reinterpretation of Tim’s rubber tubes to retain not just a bit of the nastiness I myself couldn’t help but seeing in them, but I also wanted to anchor it firmly within the concerns of Tim’s own art practice. The very solid wooden hanger I made for the tubes is much too large for a coat or shirt, and also so sturdy that you could easily hang from it. The idea of tying someone up in the back of a car, I turned around into the self inflicted discipline of keeping ones body buff through tormenting it with machines and exercise equipment. Since I can’t help assuming a vaguely sexual motive behind wanting a strong body when one doesn’t get it from or need it for  the work one does every day, I also let that image silently slide along. The status anxiety and fashion awareness that Tim analyse in his own work got it’s home in the stylish design of the hanger itself, and last but not least in the title. My assistant that day, postgrad student Yar Koporulin, rendered it beautifully in a style that revealed it’s obvious kinship with that famous London department store which I had added accidentally and unconsciously. Famous for it’s selection of designer brands by the way.

Between myself and Philip Barlow and Lisa Gilotty, we had a bit of a funny incident as they first came in to give me something broken to repair. It turned out that the laptop they had brought in to get transformed wasn’t the broken one they had intended to bring at all, but another one that was functioning fine. Of course we just laughed about it and agreed that they should return with something really useless, but this posed a bit of a conundrum for them: they really weren’t sure they had anything broken at home at all. They just don’t keep broken things, they said. Well, after some thinking and looking they managed to fish something out that needed repair, because two weeks later they made another attempt. This time I had to admit that they had a good catch. The golf driver that Philip had been using for a while was turning dangerous, as the leather grip was coming loose and tended to slip off when you swung it. This could of course have all sorts of dangerous implications, if one lost grip of the club in mid swing and sent it scampering away instead of the ball.

I happen to have my own less than fond memories of how golf clubs can do damage from my own childhood, and for a long time I used to also have a small scar right between my eyes to testify to it. The lesson learned was that minigolf is never played swinging the clubs widely like in normal golf, especially when you are getting frustrated for not managing your putt, and that if the person you are playing with are starting to display such a behaviour, it is advisable to stand back a bit even if this might mean you don’t get a good look at his next miss. But so much about my own early experiences of golf, just mentioned to hint at why a firm grip seems like one of the more essential points of golf.

In the process of trying to shape the club itself into a much safer and sturdier grip, I learned that metal with a very good and firm spring snaps before it bends. This is a lesson to be remembered by up-cyclists around the world: if a piece of metal can be used for smashing something repeatedly and hard without loosing its original shape, it will probably react badly to being forced into a new shape. And if the metal is pliable enough, even if it is thick and sturdy, to be bent and adjusted, it will do just that when it is used to repeatedly smash something with a lot of force. Anyway, the shortened rod just ended up providing a much more secure swing, at least after I had added a very safe and firm grip that I cast directly onto the club with 2-component plastic. Probably the driver wasn’t very useful for golf any more, but I do think it emphasizes the dangerous aspects of that sport much more clearly now.

“Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” is the battle call of resource management. The idea is that we should try to 1) use less materials, 2) keep using the things we already have longer, and for more functions than originally intended, and 3) as a last resort, recycle the materials we didn’t reduce to start with and couldn’t reuse once we already had them. The broken recycling bin that Elena Goukassian brought in to the repair shop was a perfect if yet a bit sad illustration of some of the problems around this important question. This blue, plastic recycling bin, itself a tool for helping us be kinder to our environment, had itself started deteriorating far too early (I think) for being helpful to this important task. The bin itself didn’t look very old or used, but the plastic itself had just stared ripping apart. Elena showed me how a large part of the plastic had simply come off in her hand, and when I applied just a little bit of stress to it, huge pieces just flaked off and came apart in my hands. It was as if the plastic had gone all brittle, aged prematurely so to speak. I am just guessing now, but I assume it has something to do with unevenness in the material, with faulty production processes and with low quality raw materials. I have often had similar experiences with objects made out of recycled plastics, even though seldom as pronounced as in this case. Also, plastics go brittle with age even when made from high quality “first generation” plastics, it just takes a bit longer.

So how does one apply the 3R’s to a plastic object like Elena’s recycling bucket? Obviously, if she wants to help the environment, she needs a recycling bucket. It is hard to see how she could find a double use for it, reducing either the need for the recycling bucket itself or else for another container she also needs. What else could she possibly use it for if she was at the same time collecting recycling materials in it? The recycling is also a bit hard, proven by the low quality of the plastic in question, which it is my guess originates from the object already having been recycled too many times at it is. If this wonder-material plastic really becomes so useless when recycled a couple of times, can it then really be said to be recyclable? Shouldn’t we rather look for other materials that can really be recycled into something useful? Plastic waste reminds me of another wonder material, that was once the staple of much older civilizations than ours, and that still form distinct geological layers in sites of old settlements. I am talking about pottery shards. In pre-industrial societies, ceramic vessels was very much the same kind of all purpose useful material for storage, food industry and cooking that plastic is for us. It also had some similar qualities and problems. It was cheap enough to produce, very good at holding liquids and keeping food fresh, but often broke and once broken almost impossible to repair again. Pottery also wasn’t suitable for recycling. One couldn’t just grind down the broken ceramics and remould it into new clay vessels. Once fired, the clay is irretrievably changed into a strong, if yet brittle, mineral material. A pot breaks easily, but pottery shards last for thousands of years.

The broken pots of Sumerians, Babylonians and Romans were simply discarded and thrown away, and make no mistake, those ancient civilizations also created such a huge amount of waste that their cities slowly rose several meters on the piles rubbish they themselves created. The difference to our own waste creation, is that the organic and ceramic waste produced in the old was non-toxic to the land, so that the thousands upon thousands of pottery shards building up under an ancient city, simply formed part of the soil, fulfilling the same function as gravel or pebbles would. Our plastic shards, however, which also breaks easily and just like the pottery of Rome, also refuses to break down in nature, is toxic and really not the kind of stuff we want our grandchildren to grow their potatoes on. What to do then, with this endlessly accumulating, in reality un-recyclable, toxic layer of broken plastic building up around us? Reducing seems a hard sell, recycling in the long run not viable, so that leaves re-using. In my imaginary future projection, we will have more and more plastic shards around us, and given their toxicity, less and less natural materials that we could use instead. So we would have to find new uses for the shards of our own broken civilization. Melting them together just produces new plastic of inferior quality, fusing them together likewise, apart from also being toxic for the craftperson doing so, but maybe they could be woven or stitched together?

Elena’s west is an all plastic garment, and as opposed to the many industrial products created from both crude oil and plastic waste, it was hand made using no chemical processes. It is not very warm, not very elegant, and not even very comfortable, but it does fulfil the increasingly important function of reminding us in which direction we are all heading.

The small mirror-clad trinket box had been found at a thrift store, but Justina Buckles had missed that one corner was already cracked. It was sort of attractive in its own way, and for me as a maker, it was immediately obvious that I would have to do something with the mirrors. I was especially attracted to the engraved patterns in the mirrors, acting like a layer of obfuscation, actually getting in the way of seeing a single, clear image in them. The patterns suggested that a feeling of mirroring and reflection was more important than the actual use of them to say, check your make-up. That layering and self-obstruction of functions was very attractive to me. If I wanted to do something new with the mirrors though, the first task would have to be getting them off of the box, if possible without breaking them. Needless to say, they didn’t all survive, but enough did for me to be able to continue with the next stage.

One big square and four narrow slivers had survived intact. That was just enough for me to start experimenting. My idea was to enhance the contradiction between actually showing a mirror image, and just confusing and hiding what was being shown. I placed the large mirror as a backing in a narrow box I quickly put together from scrap wood. The four stand-ups which hold narrow mirror pieces, are hinged on pegs in their top and bottom, so that they can revolve around their own axis and reveal and reflect different patterns and mirror images.

It was quite clear to me that the natural wood of the box stole way too much attention from the mirrors, and would have to be painted black. Unfortunately, I was finishing this piece on the very last day of the repair shop and just couldn’t find the time to paint the box myself. Luckily enough, Justina turned out to be gifted with practical skills, and didn’t mind finishing the piece for me. Thanks Justina! I actually find the exchange happening even more interesting in the cases where the recipient of the sculpture has taken active part themselves, even if this only happens by an accident or necessity so to speak. I was also very happy to receive a few nice photos of Everview in situ, one of them here below, showing how it works as a kind of painting, kind of sculpture, kind of decorative mirror, but above all I hope, as a reflection on reflectiveness and its deceptive qualities. Looking at the box from a bit of a distance, one can’t really get a clear idea of what one is seeing, the reflected image sent back being all cut up and also obscured by the engraved patterns in the mirrors themselves. The blackness of the frame itself being an absolutely necessary quality, since black is a very modest colour that always steps back for anything else next to it to take the centre stage.

Becca Kallem came in with a perfectly fine ring, just a bit worn maybe, but which represented a broken relationship. It was a simple silver ring that her x had bought her as they were on holidays together. With a pre-fabricated statement rather than a personal message, I found the ring not really holding the same seriousness as a wedding band, but still I guess in some way expressing a wish for a more serious relationship to come. Anyway, it hadn’t worked out, so now Becca wanted something creative done to her ring. My response was to think of the ring or band in different contexts, and imagine another kind of band altogether, but that could stand in for a failed relationship. My solution was to incorporate the ring into a small figurative sculpture.

The material is a kind of two-component liquid plastic. You mix the two transparent liquids together, and quickly pour it in a mould, and within 15 minutes the mix has hardened into a white plastic, feeling very much the material of toys. I built up the dog from plasticine, and to make sure the ring ended up fused around the dog’s neck, without having to remove and glue back his head, I had to make the plasticine model with the ring already there. I then made a three part plaster mould around the figure, carefully removed the plasticine (but left the ring there) and cast it with the liquid plastic.

After painting the dog was perfect, really looking like a cheap plastic toy you could have bought in a dollar store, or why not when on holiday? This one though, not holding any empty promises. A dog will always be faithful until their death, as we all know, no matter who we are, what we do and who else they meet later on. Isn’t that why we humans just love dogs?

Ananda Roopa brought me an old book he had found at home while cleaning out. He wasn’t exactly sure where it had come from, but thought it had belonged to his mother-in-law who had taught English lit at high-school level. He said there were many books being cleared out from his home right now, but this had somehow appealed to him, and because of this, he had taken it to The Temporary Art Repair Shop. I could clearly understand why. In a way, an anthology of poetry and prose like this was a kind of physical embodiment of an English lit teacher. Not enough time to really go deeply into any specific poet or writer, and most of the little brats don’t care that much anyway, but instead a comprehensive and organized rush headlong through literary history, starting with Beowulf and finishing with, well someone at least 50 years dead by now, God protect us from contemporary literature. This first band dutifully started with Beowulf, but since it was only the first of several bands, it reached no further than Blake.

So, to create an even denser condensation of the old anthology, I decided to focus on Blake. After all, he was the last in the band, the most contemporary of them, the one handing the batten over to the future so to speak. But what was I going to do with him? Leafing through the ten or so pages with a selection of his poems, I was struck by how consistently he was writing. Not just that he of course followed the traditional anatomy of a poem, with most of them divided into between 3 and 5 stanzas of between 4 and 6 lines each. Furthermore, the content of the stanzas was such, that I felt they followed a certain pattern, not all together clear to me. To explore it, I decided to turn the Blake part of the anthology into just one concentrated poem, relying on the structural similarity between all his poems but encompassing the entire selection. However, I didn’t want to pick and choose, which would have been far to easy and would surely have produced a lovely kitschy poem, but wouldn’t have tested my hypothesis that Blake was following an internal logic of his own not just formally but also with his content. So, I made a Blake cut-up.

To produce the text I obeyed the following rule: Take the first half of the first line in the first stanza in the first poem. Then the second half of the first line of the first stanza of the second poem. Then continue with the first half of the second line in the first stanza in the third poem. Complete it with the second half of the second line in the first stanza of the fourth poem. And so on. Meaning, I cut out half a line at a time, and between every cut I moved on to the next poem, but to the position in that poem following correspondingly after what I had just pasted on the paper. When I got to the end of the list of poems, I went back to the first again. That way I slowly worked myself through poems and stanzas until I had produced a poem as long as the longest of Blake’s. With this I mean it had 6 stanzas, which his longest had, but only 4 lines each stanza since that was his most common type. The text that produced itself in this way, I called Blake-Out, and pasted on a black card which I framed.