♪♪
-Tired of doing slow walk.
♪♪
I had to make something, and then wait for the show,
and everything was so slow.
But my creative mind goes so fast.
I just find new things to do all the time.
The dark side of creativity.
I mean, I can feel it myself
when I get kind of angry and frustrated,
and I want to kind of get back into the art.
So, that's kind of how the destruction aspect
comes into it.
I think I got a shot.
Fingers crossed.
[ Machine whirs ]
This is my studio.
You can see the chaos.
My machete.
Hello. I'm Jan Erichsen.
I'm an artist here in Oslo, Norway.
I guess you can say my work
has a sort of Scandinavian touch to it.
I'm always very serious in my videos.
No nonsense...
[ Laughs ]
...to it.
When I had small kids, and just, they were building things,
and then, immediately, just knocking them over,
and destroying them.
And in the beginning, you kind of feel like,
"Oh, no, don't destroy the tower
that we spent half an hour making."
But they were going to destroy anyway, right?
It's not going to stay up forever.
And there was something really satisfying,
with pushing something over,
just seeing it going into small pieces.
So, basically, what I'm trying to do today.
So...
I had this idea that I'm going to take these two drills,
and fasten them,
get them to drill continuously.
Have wheels under the board,
two rows of ball bearings on each side,
and then push it through.
Before I started uploading things to the Internet,
I was working mainly with sculpture installation,
and video, and galleries, and video festivals,
and was doing okay with that.
So, when I did things to Instagram
that things really start to snowball,
and I got attention from the whole world, suddenly.
So, I went from having shows with a few hundred visitors
to having hundreds of thousands of views on my videos.
It is quite a big change.
After a while of making these videos for Instagram,
I started collecting them in a compilation,
which I uploaded to YouTube, called "Destruction Diaries."
And basically underlining what I do here
is just, every day, I come to my studio,
and make things.
Now, that's all I do.
I don't want to go back to that slow-walk making process again.
It just never suited me that much.
I'm quite inspired by other performance artists,
especially those from the beginning
of the performance area.
And those are usually from the US,
like Chris Burden,
Bruce Nauman, people like that.
Also other artists that use a lot of humor,
and then DIY esthetics in their sculptures,
are quite inspiring to me -- like Tom Sachs.
I'm just getting back.
I've got the pasta.
Spaghetti.
It's loads of spaghetti.
This is a...
catapult.
Elastics.
In the front is a tray.
♪♪
[Indistinct]
♪♪
Yeah, definitely works.
[ Laughs ]
♪♪
Mainly, I'm doing this for my own.
And I'm trying to challenge myself,
how I view art, how I look at objects
how my art-making process should be.
And hopefully, other people
going to get something out of it, as well.
And I hope some people will look at the objects
that I use in a new way,
when they see them at home, or in the shops.
Like, if they -- if you've seen a video of me
breaking spaghetti off your head,
right before you make another spaghetti,
you might go look at it, and, for a millisecond,
you want take that spaghetti, and boom --
crush it with your head.
[ Laughs ]
And hopefully, some people who have never seen performance art
will look at my videos, get interested,
and try to check it out, and look at other artists.
Because, for me, that would be good.
That looks good.
So, this is what's left of the spaghetti project.
Now, it's just a greasy, very unattractive tube
and some dried-up spaghetti.
I mean, the main thing is just to make the videos.
And the videos are the finished product, really.
It's all about just having fun.
And I really enjoyed making it.
I like to challenge myself, and see if I can do things,
and just making my ideas come to life.
I don't really care about the [indistinct] that much.
I mean, they could always be created with new materials,
if the time comes.
I want to make as many videos as possible,
and reach as many people as possible.
Really, that's my main objective these days.
Hopefully, people enjoy it.
♪♪