my name is ursus wehrli and i would like to talk to you this morning about my project tidying up art first of all any questions so far
first of all i have to say i'm not from around here i'm from a completely different cultural area maybe you noticed i mean i'm wearing a tie
first and then secondly i'm
little bit nervous because i'm speaking in a foreign language and i want to apologize in advance for any mistakes i might make because i'm from switzerland
and i just don't hope you think this is swiss german i'm speaking now here this is just what it sounds like if we swiss try to speak american
but don't worry i don't have trouble with english as such i mean it's not my problem it's your language
i am fine after this presentation here at ted i can simply go back to switzerland and you have to go on talking like this all the time
i've been asked by the organizers to read from my book it's called tidying up art and it 's as you can see it's more or less a picture book so the reading would be over very quickly
since i'm here a ted i decided to hold my talk here in a more modern way in the spirit of ted here and i managed to do some slides here for you i'd like to show them around so we
actually i managed to prepare for you some enlarged pictures even better so tidying up art i mean i have to say that's a relatively new term you won 't be familiar with
it's a hobby of mine that i've been indulging in for the last few years and it all started out with this picture of the american artist donald baechler i had hanging at home
i had to look at it every day and after a while i just couldn't stand the mess anymore this guy was looking at all day long
i kind of felt sorry for him and it seemed to me even he felt really bad facing these
red squares day after day so i decided to give him a little support
and brought some order into neatly stacking the blocks on top of each other
it was great with this experience i started to look more closely at modern art then i realized how you know
world of modern art is particularly topsy turvy and i can show you a very good example it's actually a simple one but it's a good one to start with it's a picture by paul klee
the artist doesn't really seem to know where to put the different colors
the various pictures here of the various elements of the picture the whole thing is unstructured we don't know maybe mister klee was probably in a hurry
maybe he had to catch a plane or something we can see here he started out with orange and then he already ran out of orange
here we can see he decided to take a break for a square and i would like to show you here my tidied up version of this picture
we can see now what was barely recognizable in the original
that's great so i mean
that's just tidying up for beginners i would like to you see a picture which is a bit more
what can you say what a mess i mean
see everything seems to have been scattered aimlessly around the space
if my room back home had looked this my mother would have grounded me for three days so i'd like i'd like to reintroduce some structure into that picture
we swiss are famous for chocolate and cheese our trains run on time we are only happy when things are in order but to go on
here is a very good example to see this is a picture by joan miro and yeah we can see the artist has drawn a few lines and shapes and dropped them any old way onto a yellow background
and yeah it's the sort of thing you produce when you're doodling on the phone and
my
the whole thing takes up far less space it's more economical and also more efficient with this method mister miro could have saved canvas for another picture
i can see in your faces that you're still a little bit skeptical so that you can just appreciate how serious i am about all this i brought along the patents the specifications for some of these works
well i could have translated that but you would have been none the wiser i'm not sure myself what it means but it sounds good anyway i just
it's important how one introduces new ideas to people that's why this patent are sometimes necessary
i would like to do a short test with you everyone is sitting in quite an orderly fashion here this morning so i would like to ask you all to raise your right hand
the right hand is the one we write with apart from the left handers
and now i'll count to three i mean it still looks very orderly to me now i'll count to three and on the count of three i'd like you all to shake hand with the person behind you ok one two three
clearly in this next painting this is a painting by the artist niki de
and i mean in the original it's completely unclear to see what this tangle of colors and shapes is supposed to depict
but in the tidied up version it's plain to see that it's a sunburnt woman playing volleyball
this one here that's much better that's a picture by keith haring
i think it doesn't matter
so i mean this picture has not even got a proper title it's called
and i think that's appropriate
so in the tidied up version we have a sort of keith haring spare parts shop
this is keith haring looked at statistically one can see here quite clearly you can see we have twenty five pale green elements
of which one is in the form of a circle or here for example we have twenty seven pink squares with only one pink curve
i mean that's interesting one could extend this sort of statistical analysis to cover all mister haring 's various works in order to establish in which period the artist favored pale green circles or pink squares
and the artist himself could also benefit from this sort of listing procedure by using it to estimate how many pots of paint he 's likely to need in the future
one can obviously also make combinations for example with the keith haring circles and kandinsky 's dots you can add them to all the squares of paul klee
in the end one has a list with which one then can arrange then you categorize it then you file it put that file in a filing cabinet put it in your office
and you can make a living doing it
my own experience so
actually i mean we have artists that are a bit more structured it's not too bad this is jasper johns we can see here he was practicing with his ruler
i think it could still benefit from more discipline
and i think the whole thing adds up much better if you do it like this
and here that's one of my favorites
up rene magritte this is really fun you know
asked what inspired me to embark on all this it goes back to a time when i was very often staying in hotels so once i had the opportunity to stay in a ritzy five star hotel and you know there you had this little sign
so after a while i decided to have a little fun and before leaving the room each day i'd scatter a few things around the space
like books clothes toothbrush et cetera and it was great by the time i returned everything had always been neatly returned to its place
then one morning i hang the same little sign onto that picture by vincent van gogh
and when i returned it looked like this
at least it is now possible to do some vacuuming
i mean i can see there are always people that like reacting that one or another picture hasn't been properly tidied up so
we can make a short test with you this is a picture by rene magritte and i'd like you all
to inwardly like in your head that is to tidy that up
so it's possible that some of you would make it like this
i would actually prefer to do it
some people would make apple pie out of it but it's a very good example to see that the whole work was more of a handicraft endeavor that involved the very time consuming
cutting out the various and elements sticking them back in new arrangements and it's not done as many people imagine with the computer otherwise
it would look like this
now i've been able to tidy up pictures that i've wanted to tidy up for a long time here is a very good example take jackson pollock for example it's
that's a really hard one but after a while i just decided here to go all the way and put the paint back into the
you could go into
here we have the fur cup by meret oppenheim
here i just brought it back to its original state
and it's great you can even go you know or we have this pointilist movement for those of you who are into art the pointilist movement is that kind of paintings
where everything is broken down into dots and pixels and then i this sort of thing is ideal for tidying up so i once
applied myself to the work of the inventor of that method georges seurat and i collected together all his dots and now they're all in here
it's the future we will create
but to round things up i would like to show you just one more
this is the village square by
yeah maybe you're asking yourselves where old brugel 's people went of course they're not gone they're all here
just piled them up
and i'm happy to sign it for you with any name of any artist
but before leaving i would like to show you i'm working right now
another in a related field with my tidying up art method i'm working in a related field and i started to bring some order into
just my new proposal here for the union jack
and then maybe before i leave you
yeah i think after you have seen that i have to leave anyway
that was a hard one i couldn't find a way to tidy that up properly so i just decided to make it a little bit more simpler
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