Object Dispute in Munich

Artist list

Tobias Birgersson, Jorge Manilla, Heiner Zimmermann

Object Dispute: Hecho en México - Hergestellt in Deutschland - Tillverkad i Sverige 

A round wooden handle, deftly turned on a lathe to soften the contours of the dowel and make it fit for holding, steering, conducting with the hand. But a handle for what? Attached to a metal piece reminiscent of, but clearly removed from, functionality. A piece that has been worked with the same level of craftsmanship as the handle, forged and hammered in the workshop, yet serving no obvious purpose. 

Nothing so useless as a tool without a function, or the irony of workshop full of non-functional tools. Someone clever once wrote that an object’s thingness emerges once it loses its functionality. 

Its opposite: a sharp wooden knife can still cut, still kill. Though a wooden blade seems to undermine the very essence of the knife as we know it: supposedly soft wood replacing hard hammered metall. Such a strung wooden piercer may once have represented the pinnacle of technology, and so the collection takes on a museological quality. But the careful onlooker will pick up on elements of contemporaneity, and question which knife might have carved the handles, let alone the wooden blades they are attached to. And how to manoeuvre a tool with an obstructive handle? The object’s status becomes disputed, and its thingness emerges. 

Some of our earliest tools will have been made from bone. With innate qualities of hardness and malleability, it made for the perfect material for shaping into a piercing, cutting, sewing, hooking or scraping device. But here we see the merging of the ancient and the modern. From the primitive bone our most modern tools emerge. They are everyone’s tool, usually anonymous and ubiquitous. Yet here they remain not yet fully divorced from their origin and their material, retaining a uniqueness and an almost complete uselessness. They appear unfinished, in process, still becoming. But were they to be completed we’d have to conclude their equally useless character, with a few exceptions. Replacing these usually metal items with bone replicas is unlikely to produce an object worth using for its purpose as a tool. 

Here, what is lost and what is gained differs from one object to the next. We have art acting as a tool, the tool acting as art, and the satirical tool, portraying tools but in such a way that its thingness emerges. 

Who made these objects? They appear almost as marked tools, reminiscent of the near forgotten brick stamps and mason marks, reminding us of the maker. They speak to the craftsman’s relationship with their tools, their specificity. The blacksmith will furnish their workshop with tools they have made themselves. Each item crafted for the maker’s specific use and purpose. 

With a product you write where it was made, whilst with art you write where the maker is from. Which should imply that it makes no difference if these objects were made in Mexico, Sweden or Germany. But there is a tension to these objects, their status is in dispute. Among the refuse and produce of the foundry, our objects make vain attempts at concealment. Hiding in plains sight they almost blend into the interior language of the workshop, as recently abandoned tools at the end of the workday. 

Art, product, object, thing, tool. 
Artist, producer, craftsman, maker, fool. 

Text by Hanna Gjelten Hattrem.