For a while now, I have been wanting to do something with papier-maché, and a visit of a friend, who is at art school, finally made it happen. People at art school are up for anything. There are two ways to make papier-maché, one is with paste and the other one is glueing the newspaper strips. I bought a ready-made paste, let it rest in water for a night, and then we had some sticky and messy fun outside on the balcony.
The great thing about papier-maché is that it is bound to be a disaster. So after it went all wrong, which was very much to my liking, I was reminded of Franz West. When I gave guided tours at Hamburger Bahnhof, I loved his furniture pieces and his Passstücke made of papier-maché but I had never looked into the artist himself. It turns out he is as fun as his sculptures.
First of all, it is utterly confusing to listen to Franz West talking, and if he wrote the way he talked, I'm pretty thrilled that I ordered his Franz West Schrieb. Texte von 1977-2010 (edited by Hans-Ulrich Obrist, who is literally everywhere whenever you try to buy something in the art book market).
West played with language. Take for instance his work Eggs, which was his first attempt to get away from round forms. The title is the result of trying to translate the German word "Ecke" into English: "corner" - which clearly is too round as a word to express what it means. So West translated "Ecke" based on its sound into "eggs", which of course refers to something rather round.
I like also the pedestals that West created for his work. Turns out that Jan Hoet gave him the idea to put his furniture pieces on a pedestal. Since West thought this idea was not worse than his own "nicht-Meinung" (his non-opinion), he took the curator's advice. He called it his "responsive working method", which meant to pursue things that come from the outside, may it be from an individual, a radio, or a table, ...: "Ich stehe da vor der Welt und beantworte – so gut ich kann – ihre Anforderungen und das ist meine Arbeitsmethode." (I stand there in front of the world and answer - as best I can - its demands and that is my working method.)