Art Project Chose the Best Stick – Here's How Much It Cost

This spring, the cultural center Fyren in Kungsbacka put out a call. They wanted the public to submit the best stick they could find. Now, the artists behind the project have selected the ultimate stick. Samnytt has found out how much this process cost taxpayers.

Kanslibyrån is described as “an activist group and institution” consisting of artists Per-Arne Sträng and John Huntington. They are “committed to opposing established norms and conventions and act in a distinctly democratic and philanthropic spirit,” and “explore the irrational as an act of art and resistance, bureaucracy as aesthetics, and everyday life as an art surface.”

The duo’s latest assignment at the Kungsbacka Art Gallery, part of Fyren, was, among other things, to find and select the perfect stick.

The public was involved to help collect good sticks.

Volunteers who wanted to donate sticks had to fill out a form.

“Through humor, curiosity, and unexpected perspectives, they invite visitors to see the familiar in new ways,” writes Kungsbacka municipality about the exhibition.

In the project Standard Stick, a simple object takes center stage – a stick. Through a citizen science initiative, the public has contributed sticks that they believe have particularly good qualities. The result has become a new standard for what characterizes a good stick. The project explores imagination, intuition, and values that cannot always be measured or put into words.

The exhibition An Alternative Standard opened its doors on June 13 and runs until August 18. After receiving 162 sticks from the public, one was finally chosen as the standard stick. This one is 55 centimeters long and 1.4 centimeters wide.

“The stick is an object with a certain charge. When you find a good stick, you often feel it, but you can’t always describe why,” says John Huntington to Göteborgs-Posten.

Costs

So how much did Kungsbacka taxpayers have to pay for the project? At Kungsbacka Art Gallery, art developer Theo Ågren says that John Huntington and Per Arne Sträng were compensated according to the MU agreement, which most state and municipal institutions follow. The MU agreement is the framework agreement for artists’ compensation for participation in exhibitions.

This consists of two parts:

Participation fee, which covers attendance at mounting, press preview, preview, and opening. 5,000 SEK/person + VAT.

Exhibition fee, which is compensation for displaying the artist’s work to the public. 21,600 SEK/person + VAT.

The total cost for compensating the two artists thus amounts to 53,200 kronor.

John Huntington tells Samnytt that it was Theo Ågren who also hired the duo.