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It’s art, but not as we know it
The Art Newspaper’s
first ever Bartlebooth Award celebrates the improbable, impossible and
incredible in international contemporary art. To nominate works for next
year's prize click
here
By
Adrian Dannatt
This festive
season sees the establishment of The Art Newspaper’s first “Bartlebooth
Award” to reward all projects of the previous 12 months that
seem outstandingly improbable, impossible or incredible, even by the
constantly rising novelty-bar of today’s art. Thus the Bartlebooth
honours current artists who devote themselves to truly unnecessary,
painstaking activities which outside the “contemporary art”
world would get one locked in the loony bin.
The award is, of course, named after Percival Bartlebooth, the millionaire
Englishman in Georges Perec’s novel Life: a user’s manual
who devotes his existence to an endlessly complex, pointless artistic
process. Bartlebooth studies watercolour painting for 10 years, then
travels the world painting 500 identical format seascapes. These are
sent back to Paris where they are turned into jigsaw puzzles. On returning
home Bartlebooth re-assembles the jigsaw images and returns the completed
watercolour to where it was painted, whereupon it is dipped in a detergent
until it becomes blank paper again.
Unfortunately Bartlebooth dies before his project is complete, but
he has plenty of descendants, some justly famous, whether it be Hanne
Darboven and her long-running “diary” or Bruce Nauman’s
endless film of his studio. Indeed Perec’s own fertile imagination
came up with such ideas as taking the Panthéon, slicing it
vertically and separating the two halves by 50 centimetres, very like
Gordon Matta-Clark. Or in The street section of Perec’s collection
of essays, short stories and writing exercises, Species of spaces,
he suggested photographing the same banal suburban road for 12 years,
from 1969 to 1981, similar to Tom Phillips’ Peckham photos.
However, the Bartlebooth should not be seen as a philistine exercise
in mocking the “wackiness” of contemporary art, a too
easy target. For much of my favourite art would fall into this category,
from the conceptual interventions of millionaire eccentric Michael
Asher to Stanley Brouwn’s calibrated walks. The Bartlebooth
honours the truly fecund invention of an art system without limits,
or one in which the only limits are the number of new artists, collectors
and editors can store in their memories. No wonder we have a press-release
culture, in which PR companies and savvy artists pitch themselves
as sound-bite sensations of immediate appeal.
So, many of this year’s contenders may well be highly serious,
long-gestated creative endeavours, but the way they are presented
to the wider public makes them seem preposterous or comic. But the
Bartlebooth also honours artists and exhibitions, festivals and themed
screenings that bring together exotic combinations of subjects or
places, the bizarre global mix, the Biennial aesthetic, that jams
together disparate realities.
Throughout 2006, Art Newspaper readers are actively encouraged and
implored to gather their own favourite examples of such work, and
with absolute anonymity guaranteed, forward
them for general consideration. |
And
the winners are...
 Seth
Weiner, The Terranaut Project (Exit Art, New York. Part of
“Exit Biennial II: Traffic” (until 23 December)
This robotic vehicle is piloted by
a goldfish: the fish steers the vessel by its movements. A
camera above the cockpit tracks the movements of the Terranaut
(that’s the name of the fish-pilot). Its location is
then wirelessly transmitted to a remote processing station
where the data is converted into motion commands and transmitted
back to the motion controller of the vehicle.
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 Reuben
Henry, All of the places (Exit Art).
This towering stack of thousands of sheets of A4
paper is a comprehensive list of all place names in America,
including states, cities, towns, villages and airports. Henry
wrote down all the names himself, not from an index, but crossed
off, one by one, from the most detailed map available, moving
from Maine to Alaska. As the artist puts it: “The challenge
of formulating the list via this primitive method, in an age
where several internet links and a printout may well have
granted an instant alphabetic list, stands as a form of self-punishment...”
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 Daniel
Edwards: Ted Williams death mask from the Ben Affleck 2004
World Series Collection (First Street Gallery, New York).
This is one of the more macabre and creepy nominees for the
first annual Bartlebooth Awards. The mask was created from
American baseball player Ted Williams’s decapitated
and cryogenically preserved head, stored at the Alcor Life
Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona. The work has
an autographed baseball positioned beneath its chin.
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 Lisa
Tan, Seven year itch—the Touring Club Italiano rubbings
(Grimm + Rosenfeld, Munich).
A long running project in which the artist sneaked into the
Getty Museum Rare Book Collection and illegally made rubbings
in situ from tiny Italian travel guides.
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 Lee
Walton (Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, New York).
For his contribution to the group exhibition “Sport”,
Walton carried a set of 35-pound weights all the way from
a sporting goods store in Manhattan to Socrates Park in remotest
Queens.
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 Nina
Katcha-dourian, Wanted (Location One, New York).
In Wanted, an audio work from 1995 (a collaboration with Julia
Meltzer), an ad was placed in the Village Voice advertising
a fictitious studio apartment for rent with the dimensions 6
x 9 x 7 feet, the size of a standard American jail cell. Eager
to see the room, 117 callers left messages on Katchadourian’s
answering machine in the first 24 hours alone. |
 Sislej
Xhafa, Yellow associates in motion and association in Yellow
(Performa 05 Festival, New York).
Performers dressed in yellow sportcoats travelled on the back
of a flatbed truck around Manhattan calling on New York lawyers
listed in the Yellow Pages.
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 Mungo
Thomson (Location One, New York).
For The collected live recording of Bob Dylan, 1963-95, Mungo
Thomson compiled the applause from Bob Dylan’s live
albums. Beginning with a banned appearance on The Ed Sullivan
Show in 1963 and closing with an MTV Unplugged session in
1995, the 30-minute work abstractly captured a history of
Dylan’s audiences and turned radio space into a place
of celebration and unrewarded expectations.
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 Damali
Ayo, Rent-a-negro.com (New Museum, New York).
As part of Rhizome Artbase 101, Rent-a-negro.com was a service
that offered the companionship of an African-American for
a price but free of the need of “challenging your own
white privilege”.
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| One2one
festival (New York). A small performance festival, based on
the concept of direct communication between the artist and the
audience. All performances were designed for an intimate audience
of one, and the festival offered around 30 individual appointments.
Some of the performances included: |
 Michelle
Nagai, Untitled sit—an observation score.
Guests were invited to sit with the artist in silence in her
kitchen. No prepared “performance act” took place,
rather a collection of incidental sounds and movements that
arose naturally as visitors entered and left the space. Visitors
could come and go as often as they liked. Nagai is a founding
member of the American Society for Acoustic Ecology (ASAE)
and holds a certificate in Deep Listening from the Deep Listening
Institute.
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 Kathe
Izzo, The look of love.
Izzo offered to teach visitors how to “focus their love
through their gaze to maximum effect”, in appointments
lasting around one hour. Visitors were the benefactors of
the artist’s unconditional love the entire time, “with
all that entails”. Izzo has loved the world, one person
at a time for the last four years through her True Love Project.
To this date, she has loved over 200 people.
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 Carey
Young, Consideration (Paula Cooper Gallery, New York).
The London-based artist’s first solo exhibition in the
US featured a series of legally-enforceable contracts between
artist and viewer. Created in conjunction with a legal team,
the text, video and performative works explored notions of
individual autonomy, freedom of speech and the “social
contract”. Engaging participants in a series of contractual
agreements, Young dissected the viewer’s experience
of the exhibition, from accepting the exhibition invitation,
to entering the exhibition space and voicing an opinion about
the works. The exhibition was organised with assistance from
the British Council.
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Other
highlights:
Karen Russo, Economy of excess (VTO, London).
Russo’s latest film installation. Economy of excess
was a filmed excursion inside a sewage pipe system in, er,
Essex.
Vincent Goudreau (Gallery Boreas, Williamsburg,
Brooklyn, New York). The gallery, based in Brooklyn as well
as Lenox, Massachusetts and Reykjavik, Iceland, shows a film
titled Harry and Janet by the artist Vincent Goudreau, based
in Hawaii, following an elderly Glaswegian couple who face
impending displacement from public housing in Glasgow.
Roger Andersson, Four seasons (Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm).
This solo exhibition in the gallery consisted of a sound installation.
In the sound piece Goat choir, a choir of goats performed
The four seasons by Vivaldi. Roger Andersson recorded a number
of separate goats bleating. After that their voices have been
pitched and put together to perform as a choir. The title
of the show references a popular type of pizza in Sweden,
as much as the work by Vivaldi.
Heather Wagner, Attempted-not-known (Location
One, New York). Attempted-not-known came out of a longstanding
hobby of sending recording devices through the mail, gathering
acoustic documentation of their journeys. In this version,
the packages were sent to impossible addressees, for example
“GOD” or “Amelia Earhart” and were
returned to sender. Inexplicably, the reasons for non-delivery—“insufficient
address”, “outside delivery limits”—varied
from addressee to addressee. |
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