Potty Art No.2

There comes a time in the development of every artist that he or she has to come to terms with certain aspects of their heritage. This point came to me when collaborating with the French artist/Gallerist and all round poof Thomas Charveriat. We were pondering over a juried show that we were thinking of submitting a piece to where the theme was Water. Water somehow had to be addressed in the works for this show. So we sat and thought and after much discussion decided that we were both ready to try and add our names to the pantheon of great artists that had dared to go against convention and create some potty art. Potty art is by definition a work of art that somehow addresses the human functions of urinating and or defecating, that's peeing and pooping to all you phillistines. Thomas had suggested we do a crucifix with blood pouring out of the scars, which would've addressed the water criteria, but then we both decided no, now was the time to become apart of that illustrious movement, Potty art.


First we needed an assistant, or co-conspirator rather, well ok a victim and it came in the form of the beautiful Danish national who also has the misfortune of being my girlfriend, Jona Borrut. I remember it like it was yesterday, a beautiful sunday morning and I role over and say to Jona, "Honey... I have an idea.". She should've ran then, but she didn't and hence she has become the muse of all muses in Potty art. We went up to the studio and I explained in a calm soothing voice eeerrrrmmm..... uuuughhh... exactly what was necessary. Which was basically for her to pose as if she was taking a leak on the sidewalk in some urban environment, she took it like a champ and we had our source material for the next great step in Potty art.

This photo was censored for all the sad perves that kept googling it for kicks, use your imagination.

The next step was to take that material and transform it into a two dimensional drawing in steel where every place that skin was exposed you had a plate of PVC cut to the exact dimensions of said exposed skin and mounted on to the scaffolding that is formed by the drawing in steel.



We then mounted two servi motors and a speaker on to the back of the head. The speaker carries the uncertain voice of Ms. Borrut who beseeches the viewer to inform her the moment anyone comes into view. The motors control the eyes, which dart furtively back and forth and the mouth or lower jaw rather which is synchronized to move in tandem with the recording to give the impression that the statue is actually speaking. Downstairs, the supposed genitalia, we hooked up the windshield wiper pump from my 1982 Volkswagen Golf which on command releases a very realistic stream of water with a touch of yellow dye added.


The base is a large wooden box that is covered by asphalt to give the impression of being on the street, in the middle of the box we have installed a drain, a proper drain that one might find on any street corner. When the statue urinates the water falls into the drain and goes into a reservoir that we have parked in the base and then the water is pumped back up a small transparent tube which is wired to the backside of the leg of the statue.

When a button on the front right corner of the box is pushed it sets into motion a sequence that lasts about 45 seconds which involves the lovely Ms. Borrut's beseeching voice, darting eyes, wagging jaw and and the windshield wiper pumping yellow water all working in unison to give the impression of a lovely young woman caught in the somewhat vulnerable act of having through desperation to urinate on the street. In the Background we have created a lightbox one meter eighty high and one meter thirty five across with a duratrans image of a street scene illuminated from behind to further the idea. A very entertaining video of this project can be seen here.

Awkward Moment No.2

It was filmed by Fabrice Amzel who did a lot of work with Thomas and I and we will forever be indebted to him.


Or you can view it on youtube.



A lovely little box created by young doctor Thomas "Frankenstein" Charveriat that orchestrates and controls the movements and sound of "Awkward Moment No.2"


Professed rabid supporters, the wife of former president of the Generalitat Jordi Pujol and the former Minister of Culture of Catalunya



A technical rider of the piece.

Fingerprints! Who are we?? What's going on here?

I couldn't have put it better myself...
"His most recent work, "Fingerprints", is a series of large intricate steel reproductions of individual's fingerprints. This series invites the viewer to appreciate the wonderfully complex nature of the fingerprint's organic form which is all too easily lost in its everyday meaning as the quintessential representation of individuality."
Zack Booth Simpson writing about the fingerprints in steel of Frank Plant, Austin, Texas, 2001







I kinda remember when it hit me, vaguely... I had already been working with the drawings in steel for a couple of years and was mostly concerned with the replication of everyday objects, coffe cups, corkscrews and the like. I was definitely in Barcelona in the studio. I went downstairs and began to look up fingerprints on google. In some dark alley of the internet I stumbled across a reasonably good image of a scan of an arrest record of Malcolm X with his fingerprints, I downloaded it and I still rue the day.





Back in the day before I went completely techno I would print out a copy of the fingerprint do a graph over the top and then transfer that times ten in chalk onto the floor of my studio, very laborious. Now I just print the whole thing out on A4's and cut and tape them together. Equally laborious but perhaps a smidge less tedious. I was on to something...




Wow, organic forms, beautiful I really liked the result and not only that I got great responses from the posse that would normally come around the studio and gawk, drink beers and generally get up to things disreputable.
I continued to ruminate on the subject and it took me to all sorts of strange places, a little bit like a labyrinth.... Yes a labyrinth! And yes a portrait, a hyper realistic portrait. Just a bit of a twisted angle on the age old idea of portraiture. Like always I like the graphic quality of the bars of steel and with the fingerprint they meld together to make a very bold portrait. the vast majority of these that i did are about one meter to one meter twenty wide and one meter fifty to one meter sixty high.



Big suckers using twelve millimeter round steel bar. Up until this point these were the first works that I did that I really had problems to get around the studio, they weigh a ton. After the first couple though you realize the creative work is done and it's really just about fabrication and a lot of fabrication at that. Cutting, bending, grinding, cutting, bending, grinding.... and on and on forever and ever.
The figerprints have treated me well and I have exhibited them far and wide across the land and I even branched out into what I consider the collective fingerprint of human communities, maps. The photo below was taken at Sala Can Felipa from a juried show called "Dades Essencials" from the 9th of December 2003 until the 10th of January 2004.








The map shown here is that of Paris. I have always liked maps and with creating this one I wanted to try and strip it of it's normal meaning as a tool for orientation and navigation and give people an oppurtunity to look at it as only a complex formation found in nature, not unlike the fingerprints. Maps as design, as semi calculated evolving grids and networks with their own inherent aesthetics.

Chuck Taylor's (Converse All Stars)... And Other Icons

In early 2003 I was contacted by Paul Collier, an American architect based in Paris who had seen some of my work through a mutual contact. He asked permission to maybe use some of my work in proposals he did for clients. Personally I prefer architects to gallerists so I readily agreed. About six months later he got in contact again and said that he had spoken with a client about a yet to be developed piece of mine for the entrance of an office building that they had recently rennovated. So we began to throw some ideas back and forth. He mentioned that the building was home to various design businesses and photographers if I remember correctly. The space it needed to fill was about three meters fifty by about two and a half meters of usable space high. I also remember him saying that something with a sense of humor would be good.

"Chuck Taylors", Steel, 356x98cm, 2004

Hence after about five or six ideas that fell by the wayside we settled on a drawing of a photo I had taken of... yep you guessed it, my Converse All Star sneakers. Or Chuck Taylor's or just simply and affectionately "Chucks".

"Chuck Taylors" (Detail), Steel, 2004

Now I've been wearing these shoes, not this particular pair mind you, for the better part of twenty five years. I remember my first pair and how I proudly strode into the YMCA thinking that they were actually going to make me a better basketball player, they didn't.... But it was like being introduced to a club of people in the know. I wore black chucks all through high school and college where they became billboards for my favorite political staements and musical tastes and even now I have a beat up pair lying around, yea the ones in the picture up top.





Sending the chucks off to Paris




Also working with images that are in some ways icons or have some sort of social weight is something that I'm interested in. Taking images that first and foremost attract me compositionally with the added weight of whatever social or cultural imagery they represent. such as the images below




Brain, Steel, 140x140, 2001
The consummate image for intelligence and or human awareness (or stupidity for that matter).



Boombox, Steel, 150x118, 2002

Cultural icon of black america c.1975, revisited and embraced by white middle class suburban america early 1990's until present. This piece got sucked into a larger Installation called F2T? or Free to Talk?


Pistol, Steel, 202x152, 1999

I got very strong reactions to the pistol, I don't know if something can be quietly violent but if it can it's this image. The pistol obviously is a fairly good icon for violence, for me I'm really attracted to the composition as well. It has to be said that a gun is a tool, whether for shooting beer cans in your backyard or more nefarious uses. I also like most things that represent the evolution of a design and hence could be considered the sum of our knowledge at the point of their fabrication, in a form follows function sense. Regardless it's a potent image and now lives in Brussels.


Heart (Various), Steel, 160x120, 1999

Human Compassion, Love, Life... etc....



Headphones, Steel, 128x117, 2001

Image for everything DJ, electronic culture, and so on.... as is the below image




Tone Arm, Steel, 157x58, 2004

One Man's Garbage....

Barcelona and Spain in general are going through a period of prosperity and growth, and the construction industry is one of the driving forces behind the unsustainable economy. I am truly amazed at the amount of growth, a reflection of that growth is the amount and variety of containers that you see sprinkled on the streets to handle the refuse that spills out of these sites. The most common of these is the construction sack which is ubiquitous on the streets of Barcelona. This is basically a very strong bag of maybe 1.2 square meters that you buy at the local hardware store. Included in the price of purchase is that once the bag is full you call up a number normally printed on the side of the bag and magically within a day or so a truck appears and lifts it in to the back of the truck and whisks it away to construction sack heaven.


The sack, more common on the streets of Barcelona than pay phones and mailboxes put together.



At some point in time I began to look at these objects with different eyes, they are ever present yet somehow they blend into the urban landscape to the point that you don't even register them. They come, they fill, they overflow, they disappear leaving a residue as the only testament to their existence. Like some wierd temporary organic installation. Anyway they caught my interest and I began to plot out a way of making some sort of creative registration of them.






Now it's 2002 and I have recently acquired my very first digital camera, which is going to change my life. No more trips to the camera store to develop a roll of film that will probably yield 4 interesting photos out of 30 at the low cost of 20€ or something. No digital photography liberated me from all that. Now I could click to my hearts delight or at least until my memory card was full and delete all the garbage (no pun intended), in the privacy of my own computer.


Previously if I wanted to use photographic material I would have to develop the photos and scan them, now I just download them directly onto the hardrive and into photoshop or whichever program I happen to using. also This would be my first excursion into actually incorporating original photographic material in the finished work. The manner in which I am working in steel has it's limitations as far as the amount of detail you can recreate.





So the idea was to recreate some of the information in steel and then have photos blown up to the according size and glued onto pvc plates that I cut to the exact dimensions of the photos then mount them on the drawing in steel


Basuralona Saco I, Steel, PVC, Photo, 95x74, 2002


It wasn't long before I began to look at not just the construction sacks but trash containers of every shape and size, domestic dumpsters, recycling bins everything. These objects play a role in the everyday existence of the city dweller and by recreating them in steel and photo I wanted to people to focus and think about this small detail of their daily experience. I proposed the series for an exhibition of BAC! ( Barcelona Arte Contemporanea ) Organized by La Santa and it inaugurated in November of 2002.

Basuralona I, Steel, PVC, Photo, 172x83, 2002



Basuralona II (Man), Steel, PVC, Photo, 118x85, 2002

Technical description of construction