Dealing with Dyson and other anomalies

On entering Hopstreet Gallery during Brussels Gallery Weekend in September, you were welcomed by four Dyson Airblade hand-dryers, mounted next to each other on the wall. Not the aerodynamic, shiny ones, but bastardised versions made out of bits of recycled wood. Every item was rendered in a unique way, with the standardisation and serial production of the real product exchanged for a singular work of art. One of these sculptures, Quieter Lighter Prettier, presented in a separate room, was of a much bigger format, being the exact height of its creator. Where does this fascination for James Dyson come from? “It’s about the myth of the genius of engineering”, says Pieterjan Ginckels. “Dyson is the perfect combination of designer, businessman, and guru, like Elon Musk or Steve Jobs. This design represents the ideal consensus between form and technique, ideology, politics, and globalisation.” Ginckels was especially interested in the Dyson Airblade. “It’s a ridiculous invention! Imagine making a stop at a petrol station on the autoroute du soleil and seeing a row of six guys standing next to each other drying their hands. The sound is deafening, the water is leaking onto their shoes, and it’s expensive – you may as well dry your hands on your jeans!” It is just these kinds of absurdities of everyday life that the artist wants to capture by reinforcing or exaggerating them.

Ginckels did something comparable in his Dumbphone series, a handmade take on the smartphone. The original slick surface and touchscreen are swapped for a more rudimentary version cobbled together from roughly cut wood with all the nails, screws, and blobs of glue still visible. He also made a work based on the flat design of the now-extinct iPod – a relic of our high-speed technological revolution – that is nearly a minimalist sculpture. Donald Judd meets Steve Jobs, if you will. “The objects I hijack are always already past their peak”, he explains. The same could be said of the Dyson Airblade works, made of wood leftover from previous projects and performances. In some of them, one can still recognise pieces of PISTE, a cycling track the artist constructed for use in various performances. He recorded the sound of a cyclist riding over wood and another of him riding over steel. The tape was edited in a loop and brought out on vinyl. But fragments of the circuit were also showcased at the Am Hawerkamp museum in Münster, as autonomous minimalist sculptures. “My body of work consists of two parts”, informs Ginckels. “On the one hand, you have the almost neo-pop kind of objects. On the other are bigger projects that result from dynamic collaborations. With more people involved, every now and then it leads to a residue. You could see these residues as a kind of merchandising of the performance”, he smiles.

S.P.A.M. OFFICE

Ginckels’ most ambitious project to date is definitely S.P.A.M. OFFICE. For this installation – which he describes as a Gesamtkunstwerk or a bureaucratic performance – a group of employees set-up an office in a museum. During opening hours, they collected thousands of spam mails, ranging from the friend who was robbed on holiday to a special offer for penis enlargement. “The staff printed thousands of those emails, then annotated and filed them.

They were performing, but at the same time they were working. And meanwhile they assembled a lot of material I can use for future works.” Ginckels also designed a company logo for the staff uniforms, coffee cups, stationery, and office furniture, IKEA-style. The collected spam mails were edited in three big books of a thousand pages each. “The work is a document of the past 10 years”, he says. “I keep this archive because junk mail will eventually also die out.” Every book comes in a special case with a matching table, a nod to coffee-table books. Of course the design is not sleek, it’s assembled from pieces of used wood. As if done by an amateur handyman.