The Marginalian
The Marginalian

The Art of Cleanup: Artist Ursus Wehrli’s Playful Defiance of Life’s Chaos

By Maria Popova

As a longtime fan of Swiss artist and comedian Ursus Wehrli’s playful crusade to organize the world, I was thrilled for the English release of The Art of Clean Up: Life Made Neat and Tidy (public library). From bringing new meaning to ordering the cosmos to arranging alphabet soup in alphabetical order, his obsessive deconstruction and reorganization of life’s necessary small chaoses is at once utterly delightful and playfully philosophical, reminding us of the quintessential human longing to bring order to the chaos of life.

Complement The Art of Clean Up with Wehrli’s equally charming Tidying Up Art and these deconstructed grids of famous cities, likely inspired by Wehrli’s work.

—
Published March 28, 2013
—
https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/03/28/the-art-of-cleanup-ursus-wehrli/
—

BP

www.themarginalian.org

BP

PRINT ARTICLE

Filed Under

View Full Site

The Marginalian participates in the Bookshop.org and Amazon.com affiliate programs, designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to books. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book from a link here, I receive a small percentage of its price, which goes straight back into my own colossal biblioexpenses. Privacy policy. (TLDR: You're safe — there are no nefarious "third parties" lurking on my watch or shedding crumbs of the "cookies" the rest of the internet uses.)