Andy Wauman - Art Statements Gallery Hong Kong

�What I try to do is make one copy out of a trillion.� The young Antwerp artist Andy Wauman (b. 1975) tries to look with unprejudiced eyes at the world around him, at the deluge of visual and verbal information that washes over us every day. Everything in this massively digitised society has become a copy of a copy. The original has become so rare that it may even have lost all real interest. A fascinating idea, that Wauman explicitly plays with: perhaps an original way of copying a copy is more interesting than desperately seeking originality. A pair of worn-out sneakers, for instance, of the kind churned out by the billions in sweatshops, get a new life when he paints them in the colours of the Belgian or the Dutch flag. There is a reference there to the work of Marcel Broodthaers, who once turned a stack of unread poetry books into a sculpture. There was no money in poetry, but the fine arts might do the trick, or so Broodthaers hoped (and he was proved right, in a way).
Meanwhile, Andy Wauman has a good sense of how these things work. He knows his history: not just Marcel Broodthaers, but also artists like Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince and Robert Longo have influenced him. The essence: to uncover the meaning imposed by some power or other. To reinterpret things that people take for granted, in word or image, to give them different shapes, to make them read differently. With letter cookies, you can make the sentence �What the Fuck am I Kidding�, printed T-shirts can proclaim �Think Crooked to see Straight�, rubbish can spell �Heart�. The point here is not a verbal or visual pun. Wauman locks horns with the laziness and slavish docility with which
people read words and accord them a meaning that soon becomes a universal clich�.
�What fascinates me is the creative versatility of chaos. Chaos is important to spread your imagination; chaos that drives you like a bus.� Creativity needs chaos to prosper. Chaos as the roller coaster for new ideas. The world of information flows, of the internet, but also of mass- consumption goods, is very stimulating. The word �Ideal� seems to have been carved from coal: an old economic commodity that disintegrates easily. �Heart� is made of compressed scrap metal: the world�s discarded mass-produced articles and chaotic rubbish can be used for a new and totally different form.
�City where all the things pass through human hands�. The city is the no man�s land for Andy Wauman. The graffiti are messages from an anonymous recalcitrant. The tags he draws are, in their turn, interpretations of clich�s, copied a thousandfold. �Temptation city, asphalt stage, black heart of an unoccupied city�. In the city, in suburbia, things happen; signs, stencils and emblems emerge that are not interpreted and retrieved until later, but meanwhile brand themselves on the retina of the subconscious.
�Typo ruins in fix letter uniform. Spitting black dust of contemporary consumption.� Everything wears down and falls to pieces. Today, anything that crumbles, ages or rusts has had its chips. �Oxy Date�. But Andy Wauman has a special eye for old things. �Social energy� is what he calls it. The things that are taken to the dump now are the treasures and memories of what was once young and daring itself. �Trash in bikini &
media tears�, no one has the right to throw the baby away with the bathwater, to dump old stuff without any respect. Because old stuff is often less of a copy of a copy than all the stuff that is young and new today.
The trivial. �I hop from red light to red light. Take the elevator down, 1000 flights & walk the long 7-weeks hall.� Andy Wauman runs, tears, bikes and hurtles through the beginning of the 21st century. He makes graphic interventions in magazines that try to keep a finger on the pulse of the times: they are glossy and frenetic, but they are always a fraction too late. Wauman points to the trivial, to things even experienced trend-watchers do not notice, because they keep on running after the latest and most original things. Wauman reveals the strength of the trivial, if it is carefully pulled just a few degrees out of joint, if it gets a marginally sharper focus, a slightly distorted form, or a shade less exposure. �What I try to do is make one copy out of a trillion.�

Marc RUYTERS
February 2006