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.