Uglycute

This book summarises more than a decade of work by one of the most influential Swedish art and design practices of recent times. Markus Degerman (artist), Andreas Nobel (interior designer), Jonas Nobel (artist) and Fredrik Stenberg (architect) developed their collaboration into a truly genre-crossing hybrid that takes place between art, design and architecture. The group has had a strong influence in Europe as part of a generation of artists, designers and craftspeople who have challenged the values of class, sex and style of modernism and neomodernism. By virtue of the members’ different professions, the group’s work comprises theory, practice and education in equal proportions, and has now branched out into the Nordic and international art and design worlds through objects, exhibition architecture, interiors and teaching, which are labelled according to their clients. It all started in Stockholm 1999 when the group Uglycute issued a fanzine with the telling title Katzenjammer – the German slang for hangover. Katzenjammer consisted of a stapled booklet of texts, written by the group and by others, which, in different ways, discussed the debate climate in the fields of design and architecture, interspersed with drawings and recipes for pickled herring. The group’s production picked up speed when they realised that instead of just writing about and discussing how things should be done, they had to take action. The Swedish 1990s was a decade characterised by a stagnant design climate which fostered a cool, “blond” pseudo-modernism, while, paradoxically, the art world displayed an almost feverish interest in works and practices that crossed the genres of art, design and architecture. In a Nordic context Uglycute achieved their distinctiveness and influential position by moving between these fields. The name Uglycute (an English translation of a Swedish expression) reflects the group’s attempt to identify that which receives its appeal and value by diverging from the norm, according to the motto, “The interesting is the beautiful.” It is often this desire to create new (beauty) values by deviating from the norm that has led design magazine writers in particular to describe Uglycute’s design as deliberately amateurish and ironic. However, their so-called amateurism is the result of consciously avoiding that which most people would consider a professional finish, and this serves several purposes. On the one hand, their “amateurism” is the outcome of the kind of production processes that interest Uglycute; a combination of economically accessible materials and a production in experimental workshops in collaboration with students, the unemployed and other clients. On the other hand, their “amateurish” feature represents a generous gesture: anyone can create their own furniture. But first and foremost it stands for a liberating “otherness”: - “Oh, I see, things can also look like that!