NothiNg SpeCiAl
By Julien Berthier
JRP Ringier / Christoph Keller Editions, €25 (hardcover)
Art can’t change the world? That depends on
what you expect it to be able to change, and how
you expect it to do it. Some would be happier
with art being nothing special. And sometimes
the way expectations and reality can get confused
can be extremely funny, even if that humour
describing the correct sequence of friends,
often comes with obligatory doses of pathos and
animals and valuable objects to follow you during
melancholy. Paris-based artist Julien Berthier
your triumphal process to your hometown – you
knows there’s an absurdity to wanting to make
sitting in your fancy sportscar, carried by bearers;
things better, but it’s more absurd not to try in
and then a bleak drawing of a solitary screwed-
the first place. In his new collection of cartoonish
up piece of paper lying inches from an otherwise
musings, the latest in Christoph Keller’s lively
empty dustbin, titled Another Bad Day.
series of artists’ publications, Berthier imagines
What’s uncanny about Berthier’s mad
situations in which a diligent artist might modify
professor/hopeless dreamer/professional sceptic
various aspects of the world, if only he could get
perspective is how closely it mirrors the tone of
round to making his projects a reality.
much real art that intervenes in public space,
Berthier’s droll attempts at amelioration
and how much it in fact satirises the many artists
are the kinds of well-intentioned butting-in that
who have pursued that line as the basis of their
makes art worrying and puzzling to ordinary folk.
real, serious careers. Often Berthier’s projects
How about double-glazing for churches, but all
are explicitly directed at the gallery: the 2,000-
done out in stained glass? Or a two-percent-
metre-high air-conditioning duct that relays pure
enlarged version of the Taj Mahal, made entirely
stratospheric air down to ground level and directly
from plasterboard? Or an adjustable device to
into ‘some gallery or other’, or the ‘memorial to
raise that important book above the edge of your
the living’, which is simply the inverted negative
jacket pocket, so that others can clearly read the
shape of a memorial to the dead, dug out of the
title and see how intelligent you are? Or helpful
ground. If these recall such playful public-art
plans for how to pimp your standard agricultural
approaches as Carsten Höller’s Tate Modern
tractor into a customised hot-rod-cum-… erm…
slides, or more sombre public monuments such
agricultural tractor?
as Jochen Gerz’s disappearing Monument
Berthier’s cartoons for unrealised,
Against Fascism (1986), Berthier’s borderline
unrealisable projects swing inevitably from
plagiarism only goes to reveal how the language
grandiose, overreaching futility to morose
of post-conceptual public art is a simple one,
introspective musings: a plan to produce exact
easily learned and quickly circulated. Berthier’s
copies of landmark buildings elsewhere in the
teasing ironic humour – of failed copies and daft
world; an earthquake generator that allows
originals – highlights the quixotic innocence that
couples to make love without really having to
lies behind the figure of the contemporary artist;
Edited by Nancy Spector
move (‘did the earth move?’, etc.); a sketch
the wayward, sober researcher, exploring the
Guggenheim Museum Publications, $60/£35 (hardcover) limits of their own significance in a world too big
to change all on your own. J.J. Charlesworth
DEC_books 2-4indd.indd 149 5/11/07 09:21:35
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