Mick Hartley

For his new project, Err, artist Jeremy Hutchison contacted various factories around the world, and asked if one of their workers would produce an 'incorrect' version of the product they make every day: in doing so, the functional objects became artworks.

"I asked them to make me one of their products, but to make it with an error," Hutchison explains. "I specified that this error should render the object dysfunctional. And rather than my choosing the error, I wanted the factory worker who made it to choose what error to make. Whatever this worker chose to do, I would accept and pay for."

Some of the results can be seen here (via). Sadly it's all small stuff: a solid tine-less comb, a trumpet with a section missing. Fun, but nothing serious. No car, for instance: a car with malfunctioning brakes, perhaps, or a steering wheel that comes off in your hands when you reach 60mph. Now that's what I call art.

"[Err is] about creating deliberate miscommunication," continues Hutchison, "forging a moment of poetry within a hyper-efficient system of digital exchange. It's about an invisible global workforce, and their connection to the relentless regurgitation of stuff. It's about Duchamp and the readymade, but updated to exist within the context of today's globalised economy. It's about the rub between art and design, the mass-produced and unique, the functional and the dysfunctional."

Surely, in this spirit of producing intentionally flawed goods, and in homage to Duchamp and the readymade, an "incorrect" urinal would have been a delightfully appropriate choice. A urinal, say, with a hole that directed all the piss down the front of your trousers and over your shoes. Somehow the image of the artist pissing over himself as his way of forging a moment of poetry within a hyper-efficient system of digital exchange….well, yes, it has a certain appeal. Or maybe that's just me.

"Err" will be part of a group show The Pavement and the Beach at Paradise Row off Oxford Street from July 8th.