Calculated Error
2012 - Ongoing

“Hanna’s mistakes, however carefully strategized in advance, trigger unpredictable consequences. Other episodes in this series allowed for equally radical — variously daring and daft — low-key calamities to take place in the name of testing an elaborate, serial art process. (Here, again, to use Terry Smith’s terms, are those “provocative testers, doubt-filled gestures.”) In one instance, Hanna made the purposefully foolish decision to have the word ‘unnecessary’ tattooed onto his torso; a mistake in itself, surely, but the main error on this occasion was that the word featured an intentional mis-spelling (an extra ‘c’ was added). It’s a gesture that points at a personal need to make a permanent statement, however trivial, but also at the hazards of such commitment.  Another planned mishap saw him temporarily losing the ability to see, as a result of his decision to order a set of new glasses based on a wildly inaccurate and wholly impractical prescription. The resulting, ridiculous lenses would have strained the eyes and clouded any clear perspective. It’s an incident that could easily arise in daily life, but it might also be read as an irony-spiked allegory of a frustrating artistic struggle: new clarity of vision is sought, but the outcome is merely confusion and obfuscation.

Such errors, like the others in this series, are, then, mostly recognisable from everyday life — there are websites, for instance, devoted to tattoos with spelling mistakes — but the effort to strategically sabotage ordinary situations in this deliberate way is nonetheless a powerfully unusual and perverse mode of artistic articulation. Hanna celebrates the promise of low-key crisis. He thrives on comic confusion as a form of ‘creation.’ And indeed, allusions to assorted forms of creation appear quite regularly in Hanna’s work”

Long, Declan. (catalogue essay) Michael Hanna: Behaviour Setting. January 2014

Poole, Amanda. Is it a mistake to give £1,200 of public money to an artist whose work is full of errors? Belfast Telegraph, 30 January 2012