Intricate mechanics.

Elaine Allison gave me a part of an old typewriter that had been left over after she had made artworks out of the rest of it, and of some other typewriters too. The idea of transforming a typewriter into art was obviously not new to Elaine, but maybe I could still do something unexpected with it. My idea was to untangle some of the very intricate and complicated mechanical relationships hidden in just this small part of a typewriter. After cleaning the parts we strung them up a bit after how they had previously hung together in causal chains.

It all hangs together.

The new composition is clear and open, but doesn’t really reveal the mechanics any more. We decided to paint some of the parts to further alienate them from their previous roles as useful cogs in a larger system.

Signed and dated, and hung on a wall.

Some claim that an object becomes an artwork when an artist signs it as one. Another theory is that an artwork is anything an artist manages to convince someone to pay a lot of money for. In the case of this sculpture the signature is there, but the sale is not, so I guess I will have to leave the question open.

Randomness and order.

The title is not there to explain an artwork, it is there to open up further possible readings. When I named this one I was thinking of how if an endless number of chimps typed away at typewriters for an infinite amount of time, one of them would inevitably produce Shakespeare’s Collected Works, an analogy most modern western youths are told as if this would help them understand the concept of infinity, but mostly made them think about what wonderful things some of the other chimps came up with.

Object no. 10