Have the pants of an artist soaked up anything artistic?

Ric Warren was doing a micro residency at the ESW at the same time as the art repair shop was running. The pants he handed in had been a disappointment, because they had ripped in the crotch not long after he bought them. As a young up-and-coming artist, I am sure he had plenty of similar experiences with people and opportunities he encountered in the art world, as well as good ones of course. But learning the ropes in this strange business, and picking up the scraps of secret and always uncertain knowledge about how things are done, takes time and is sometimes frustrating. At times of trials and tribulations it is always good to have someone to blame, and therefor I decided to turn Ric’s pants into a Muppet curator, to take out his aggressions on when something doesn’t work out, and also to celebrate with when life is great.

Grown-ups prefer to hang their dolls on the wall.

We tried to keep as much as possible of the details and character when transforming the pants, not really adding more than the stuffing (and the thread of course). The similarity between the pants we started out with and the doll we wanted to create allowed us to retain a lot of its feel and look.Within this framework we tried to add some typical styles of a hypothetical curator, making him tall, skinny and bald, and dressed in a relaxed jacket and shirt all in monochrome, all ready to take the stage in some symposium or round table.

It’s crucial that the ripped fabric is still visible.

The Muppet curator was a very nice example of working closely with one of my assistants. What I try to do is delegate as much as possible of the tasks to the person who will actually perform the manual work, but make sure that we share the same creative vision before starting. In this case we talked quite a lot about how the details from the pants could be used in the Muppet, and also about the visual language, the image of the Muppet curator, and finally about the practical solutions for making the doll. During the work itself we talked a bit about problem solving and particular aesthetic choices, but I try to keep a hands-off approach, which I believe brings the best out of people. Delegating a task should really be more like teaching than organizing work, where the best results are achieved as communication around a collaborative task.

Object no. 53