Marcel Winatschek

What Diddo Made

Dutch artist Diddo found a bag of cocaine on the street and pressed it into a skull. Twelve by eighteen by twenty-two centimeters—a solid chunk of shaped powder.

What gets me is the choice. Not the crime, not the risk, just that he looked at it and decided it was material to work with. That kind of thinking sits somewhere between genius and absurdity.

I’ve never seen the piece. Probably it’s less impressive in person than as an idea, which is fine—the idea is strong enough anyway.

He didn’t use it, didn’t sell it, didn’t do any of the obvious things. He shaped it—took what he found and made it into something that wasn’t there before. And that’s the move I think about: the refusal to do what you’re supposed to do, the choice to take material and reshape it into something else. Most people don’t think that way. Most people see a problem and solve it. Diddo saw material and made it into art.