Maybe you know him as the balloon guy. Or the knife guy. Or the guy who bashes vegetables with his own clean-shaven head. If you’ve misspent any time stuck in the visual treacle that is Instagram Reels, chances are you’ve found him, this bald man with the cucumber glasses or the carrot visor, the gherkin halo, the corn-on-the-cob unicorn horn. Maybe you’ve been icked out, maybe entranced. Quite possibly you’ve laughed out loud, said a big “Sorry, what?”, but then you’ve watched it again and again and again.
Since 2017, Norwegian artist Jan Hakon Erichsen has carved out a distinct niche on socials with absurdist performance art videos. They’re almost always shot in a corner of his studio. They feature foodstuffs, confetti and all manner of other household items. And they’re set in motion by way of simple systems built with basic timber, pulleys, rope, hinges, pegs, hangers, hammers, and whatever appliances he has that can make something move (a drill, a fan, his own body).
These contraptions almost always smash something, squishing an orange, say, or popping a balloon, and threaten to hurt him or at least cause some measure of discomfort in the process (the orange attached his knee; the balloon taped to that hairless head). As such, Erichsen sits in the Venn diagram of a Fischli & Weiss or Pitagora suitchi set-up, slapstick comedy and elemental body horror. People respond gleefully, often with thought-association gifs so good, I’m tempted to collect them in a folder.
“Even though it’s not always destruction,” Erichsen says, “I call them the Destruction Diaries. I’ve been making video work since, like, 2007 or 2006, and then it was always slightly aggressive videos. So people who know my work all the way back from my student days, they recognise the same kind of person behind it.” Cue the photo he posted in the early days of his studio way back in 2005, just before a solo show entitled Fury, with a wall full of knives.
On 1 April 2020, Erichsen did in fact hurt himself, though not with something he was using for a post. He was doing a test run for one of his furniture aerobics videos, jumping off a rickety stool, and he fell on to a knife sculpture he’d had propped up on the window sill. The latter, a basic office noticeboard through which he had stuck hundreds of knives facing in the same direction, features in earlier videos, as a tool for popping small balloon animals. Erichsen just hadn’t got round to – or even thought about – storing it safely.
“Turns out I’m an idiot,” he posted, detailing the 25 stitches and multiple surgeries that resulted. If he found the safety-pinned cast he was fitted with hilariously (his word) similar to one of his sculptures, it nonetheless shifted his attitude to safety. Before the accident, he says, he always felt like he was doing “the friendly version of Chris Burden”, the artist who famously arranged for a friend to shoot him in the arm with a rifle. “But then, of course, I did have a big accident, which made me realise I’d been taking a lot of risks.”
Erichsen cites Burden, Bruce Nauman, and Fischli & Weiss as foundational influences. He liked how they would just put a camera on a tripod and do something wild.
I ask him if he remembers what work he submitted when applying to attend the National Academy of Arts in Oslo, in 2000, and he says it was a pun on Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (8): “I went on a skateboard, nude, down a staircase, but falling. Yeah … I was falling down a staircase repeatedly.”
“You would remember that,” I say.
“Yeah, I remember that. And the professors couldn’t forget it either.”
More than any expression of interiority or emotion, though, Erichsen says using his own body is about making use of what is most readily available: “I have potential in the same way that a packet of spaghetti has potential. It’s like, how can I use myself in an interesting way? The fact that I am bald, I use that a lot, attaching things to my head, which I couldn’t do if I had lots of hair. In the same way, I use materials over and over again. I haven’t bought a plank in years.”
He was recently looking at a cucumber when he thought, “What if I drilled a hole into it and inserted something [an asparagus spear, in the event]?” Once he’d done that, he says, it made sense to pull it out again. The results are often pure poetry.
“It’s not pre-planned,” he says. “It’s going with an idea and trusting it,” which is exactly how this all began. In 2017, Erichsen had just finished installing a big show and was looking around his studio when he saw a wooden pallet standing upright and quite tall in the corner and thought it could be fun to push a sledgehammer off the edge of it. Of course it would have to hit something. So he screwed upturned skateboard trucks and wheels on to the palette, as a makeshift conveyor belt, then placed the sledgehammer on a plank on the wheels.
In that first video (“the beginning,” as one commenter said with a kind of cinematic gravitas), you watch him give the thing a gentle nudge. Plank and hammer scroll left and fall on to a waiting balloon, bright green and instantly popped. “I filmed it on my phone and posted it and my friends thought it was funny.” After doing a few more, he realised he was on to something, but says he knew he’d have to make at least 100 or so, before it started making sense.
In March he passed the 2,000-posts milestone and the consistency – the continuity – in what he’s doing is remarkable. So too, the number of people glued to his work. “I didn’t expect to have hundreds and thousands of followers. I mean, an artist doing sort of well on Instagram – it’s like a few 1,000 is good.” Instead, he’s about to hit 800k – not too shabby, by any standard.
“Before I started this internet project, I was always stopping myself from doing things,” he says. “I’d think ‘Ah, you can’t do that’. Or ‘Someone else has done something similar’. But then I just decided to do everything, and then look at it and then decide. And 99.9% of the time I publish it and it usually has some kind of value. I don’t think I really ever stopped myself since.”
