And when I saw a broken basketball two years ago, I suddenly realised that this would be the simplest transformation imaginable. Americans say: “Ah, that’s an American football!”, then they go up and say: “Oh no, it’s a basketball.” And I say: “It’s a bag.” Actually, I prefer to call it a reservoir. For me, it’s much more of a reservoir than a bag, but to integrate the whole thing further, in the end I make a bag out of it. And once again we come full circle. In addition, a quarter has been cut out of the ball, representing a violation of its perfect form. The combination of the colourful positive section and the black threatening element is a very clear means I use to produce mixed feelings. It’s largely part of my equipment – ambivalence as a propellant.
PW:Earlier artists like Jeff Koons would
have accepted these balls as ready-mades and
placed them inside a tank and allowed them
to float. But you turn utensils – after all, balls
are utensils – into mirrors. They aren’t just
abstract objects but are also utensils. Theirutility character is emphasised by a bag being made out of them, causing them to adopt
another form. The bag looks like a coconut or anything at all, but it’s a usable handbag,
so to speak. The sculptor is hence enabled to change both the material state and in addition the function in the realm of objects. Here we have a wedge that can be used to hold
a front door open.
MW:This thing is also called reinventing the obvious.PW:It has been ‘reinvented’, which is obvious
as it is. There are such devices made out
of wood or rubber which you slide under the
front door to prevent it from closing. Hence,the shape effectively depends on the function. This object, as abstract as it looks, has an
incredible wealth of functions. The basic idea was to produce a solid version. Did that work?
MW:It did partly. I come from a commercial
family. And for me it has always beenimportant to maintain something like a cycle in my work by first producing something and
then selling it. That’ll earn you money which you can use to employ someone else to carry
on production. Ideally, we would have sold enough to be able to take on two people in order
to produce so much that the pavilion over there still kept filling up – and that would have been our shop. The problem was that the summer was very hot and no one could really
spend much time in the pavilion.
PW:This pavilion hence emerged from the
function and the action. The further development
of the three-dimensional element,
which doesn’t exclude the commercial aspect,
because it could be sold, resulted in this form.
