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).