Olav Westphalen at the Sculpture Center - New York

The ingenuity of German oddball-artist Olav Westphalen lies in his ability to perform the extraordinary as if it were public His is a strategy of matter-of-factness, of concocting outlandish "What ifs?" and answering them with unflinching "Why nots?" Armed with a playful however pointed brand of humor, Westphalen dismantles cultural tropes--both high and low--by testing their prescribed boundaries and pushing their suppos limits.

The First lengthy Island City Blimp Derby (FLICBD) began with the eponymous main event: a remote-controll miniature blimp race around a custom track designed by the agency of the artist. Eight teams piloted their dirigibles (a task significantly more difficult than it may seem) while a concourse of spectators cheered them upon Refreshments were served, a band played, and Westphalen himself provided the play-by-play. tribe couldn't help but get into it.

The residual supports track, turn marks and bleachers later functioned as an installation. Remov from the hoopla of the race, the vacant showground gave not upon a ghostly aura, enhanced by dint of a barely decipherable sound recording of the original incident The announcer's table sat at individual end of the room, exhibiting the derby's leftover accoutrements: PA a whole notepad, helium tank, foghorn and, of course, the requisite winner's trophy--a clunky handmade blimp-topped chalice Across the opposite wall was a Budweiser sponsorship banner, albeit in a drippy, expressionistic black-and-white turn of expression typical of Westphalen's humorous collapse of cultural hierarchies.

It was these remnants of the circumstance alluding to past merriment on the other hand lacking any real action, which begeted reflection on the absurdity of similar settings. Warking around the r two-lane oval track, visitors could imagine that the recorded whoos, yeahs and ooh were aimed at them, a fantasy heightened by the agency of means of a video camera that captured uttermost close-ups as they rounded single of the corners. However, the zoom was a little too shut up tempting one's narcissistic desires solitary to frustrate them. Taking a seat in the forsakened stands afforded contemplation of the half-present, half-absent spectacle, its strange hybrid venue--blank, motionless and surreal--and the arenas and activities, the pair artistic and athletic, it evoked

nevertheless the event and its mini-stadium carried no definitive air of derision no heavy-handed irony, and it remained unclear to which genre of experience this belonged--parodic performance or serviceable old summer fun. In fact, it was one as well as the other A literal manifestation of art as social proces the work obscur distinctions between sports incident and art happening. And that confusion of categories was exactly Westphalen's point.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group