Glass magazine profile Oct / Nov 2011

Artist's Debt at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences

For 'Not Quite a Baker's Dozen' at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences I was invited to submit a proposal that related to the art market and notions of value. Inspired, in part, by Pierre Manzoni's seminal work, Artist's Shit (1961) I chose to exhibit the debt to the state I created while studying art as an 'immaterial' art work. Although three of my proposals were selected for the exhibition by HRL Contemporary two of the works were subsequently declined on the advice of legal experts at the LSE.

Please note that the printed statement that was hung on the gallery wall is not ‘Art’, it is just a legal document that confirms the debt’s existence, authorship and volume.

Artist's Debt

1999 - 2012, Dimensions variable

Full text about Artist's Debt

Fierce Festival start party

A chocolate cake produced by 'Quarantine Theatre' for FIERCE 2011 featuring a quote by composer John Cage.

I will be participating In Fierce Festival, Birmingham in Spring 2012

The Catlin Art Prize 2011

The Catlin Art Prize 2011

May 19th - 22nd 2011
The Tramshed, Rivington Street, Shorditch
‘The student equivalent of the Turner Prize’
The Independent online Wednesday, 12 January 2011

The Catlin Art Prize 2011

Filming Waiting to Fall at the Catlin Art Prize 2011

Photograph  © Sarah Kate Fowler






Waiting to Fall

(infinite) video of site-specific performance

The Catlin Art Prize 2011, The Tramshed, Shoreditch

May, 2011

'Waiting to Fall' is a site-specific video of myself hanging from one of the Tramshed's vast infra-structure of metal Ibeams. The Tramshed was dissected into a number of cubicles for the exhibition. My space was empty (apart from the screen that showed the performance).

When an audience member approached the screen they were directly beneath the space where I had been hanging. I was holding on by the tips of my fingers like Bas Jan Ader, hanging from the fragile branch of a tall tree in his seminal video 'Fall (Organic)', 1971.

Although my actions may have looked dangerous at first glance, on closer inspection the video revealed itself to be a heavily manipulated document. A short clip had been looped so as to extend the expectation of the fall forever and was framed so as to conceal all health and safety precautions. Because of the low resolution of the digital video it was hard to know if the event had actually taken place at all or if the image was a collage contrived in post production. 

For Life Series (2010 - 2012)

The Endless Press Up,

Single channel video intended for endless loop

August, 2010

'The Endless Press Up' is one of a series of videos in which a short performance by the artist is seamlessly looped to create ‘false’ evidence of an excruciating and ultimately impossible act of endurance or resistance. For example, in this work, I appear to perform the action of the title indefinitely. Although one may initially be entertained by the illusion, over time the figure can come to resemble a mechanised object, trapped in a Beckettian cycle of absurd, repetitive and pointless struggle: a subject being trained, disciplined or punished.
 



Stand Up Straight

Looped video. Filmed at Green Fields studio, Leipzig, Germany. February, 2012

Collaborators2, 10th September - 17th October 2010

Press Release




Stay Behind the Line 2010

Covert performance document, Framed A2 print, Edition of 5, POA, Availible through R O O M Gallery, London.

Reynir Hutber and Toby Huddlestone at R O O M Gallery, London

Stay Behind the Line (Example 2)

Video Installation, R O O M Gallery, London, UK

June - July, 2010

In this example of the work, a low resolution CCTV camera allowed visitors to view the installation space before they entered it. What the visitors on the other side of the barrier were actually seeing, and reacting to, was not revealed and from this 'outsider' perspective their behaviour may have appeared haunted and irrational. A white spotlight marked out the parameters of the space where my body was recorded and also had the effect of illuminating the visitors in a strange and spectral light as they reached towards its ‘mirage’. For more information about this project please see below…

Click for more images at R O O M, London

'Open' Magazine Interview

'Some people have chosen to cover the figure with their jackets to keep it warm or have tried to feed it. Others have reacted in a way that speaks of serious sexual abuse or gang violence.'

Click here to read an interview with Reynir in 'OPEN' magazine.

Screen captures

Guardian Online



Independent Online



Saatchi Online TV and Magazine

Reynir is awarded the Catlin Art Prize 2010

'Artist Reynir Hutber is named as Catlin Art Prize winner by eminent panel of judges as collectors flock to purchase shortlisted works.In the most exciting year yet for the Catlin Art Prize, collectors vied for the opportunity to purchase work by some of the most inspiring new names in visual art. Featuring painting, sculpture, film and performance work, the prize provides a platform for artists who have graduated the previous year.'

Judge Ben Lewis commented: ‘...Reynir’s video installation, which turned the viewer into a perpetrator with an unmistakeable reference to Iraqi and Afghani prisons, eventually won out over the rest, thanks to its combination of pressing political urgency yet modest and un-theatrical form, and the relational way it turned the position of the viewer into the real subject of the piece.’

Reynir said of his work: ‘My current art is broadly concerned with the devices through which social behaviour is coerced, monitored and evaluated. Rather than focus on the production of objects, I stage open-ended scenarios whose implications are ultimately determined by the audience’s response and interaction. I am hugely excited to have won the Catlin Art Prize, especially as the other work on show was of such a high standard.’

Quote from www.artcatlin.com

Stay Behind the Line

Interactive video installation,The Village Underground, London, UK

May, 2010

"In a small enclave to the back of Shoreditch’s Village Underground, a video screen captures artist Reynir Hutber’s naked body lying curled into a ball on the floor. A haunting evocation of surveillance culture, Hutber’s Stay Behind the Line won the Catlin Art Prize, a selection of over 500 young artists selected by curator Justin Hammond from last year’s graduate art show program."

"The screen mixes footage of Hutber twitching with a live-feed of the screen’s viewers. It’s only upon seeing one’s movements echoed behind the prone body that one realizes that the space Hutber occupies in the video is the vacant gap right besides you. It’s a subtle and clever exploration of those parts of ourselves we lose within the media watching us."

Dont Panic Magazine, Brian Welk, William Alderwick / 17 May 2010

Images © Justin Green photography and Nathan Toper

New works in Video and Performance

The Eigenheim Gallery in Weimar, Germany

Installation View

The Eigenheim Gallery, Weimar, Germany

February, 2010

Artist's Debt

Artist's Debt

1999 - 2013, Dimensions variable, £8026.65.

Last updated Feb 2010

In the modern global market, debts are traded and sold like assets. A debt has no physical form and yet it exists, undeniably. It is immaterial but also measurable; it has a precise dimension that grows and/or erodes over time. As a young sculptor, I created a debt to the state: a work that would prove to be the most enduring and politically relevant product of my early studies. Inspired, in part, by Pierre Manzoni's seminal work, Artist's Shit (1961), this piece comes with a framed bank statement to verify its conjoined scale and market price. Although ‘Artist’s Debt’ (1999 – 2012) has an intrinsic and increasing monitory value, transferring it to a collector represents a significant economic and artistic challenge; if it were purchased, the work would effectively cease to exist. Please note that the printed statement is not ‘Art’, it is just a legal document that confirms the debt’s existence, authorship and volume. ‘Artist’s Debt’ is a ‘worthless’ piece of conceptual art that continues a broader social interest in the notions of ‘owing’ and being ‘without value’.

Room 237

Room 237

Interactive video installation

The University Of Brighton, Brighton, UK

July, 2009

The view into 'Room 237' was blocked by a false wall with a clinical soap dispenser mounted on it. Before entering the installation, visitors were encouraged to clean their hands using the antibacterial gel provided. Above the soap dispenser, an embossed plaque read: 'Strictly No Photography', a sign common to art galleries, military institutions and state detention centres.

In the next space there was a monitor mounted on the left-hand wall. When visitors looked into the monitor, they saw a live relay of themselves filmed from behind, with their turned backs framed in an open doorway. They could now also see the formerly concealed space on the opposite side of the doorway, where a naked body was crouched against the wall, twitching slightly with its face in its hands. The body was a looped and filtered recording of the artist, posed so that its age, health and gender were indeterminate. If the visitor looked for the body directly, they would not find it; it was a kind of digital mirage that could only be witnessed through mediation.

The work continued an interest in social visibility and responsibility and marked a development of the live video-compositing technique first used in 'Private View' 2008. 237 was the number of the studio in the art institution where the installation was sited: it is also the number of the hotel room in Kubrick's version of 'The Shining' where the caretaker stacked the bodies of his murdered family.

Room 237 is one outcome of an ongoing body of research. Areas have included the ethics of war photography; how human suffering is represented and the related notions of endurance, transcendence and authenticity in the work of Chris Burden and Marina Abramovic.

The University Of Brighton, Brighton, UK, July 2009

In these images : Lina Bjorno, Lori O'regan and Lau Mun leng

Don't Look Down

Don't Look Down 

The University of Brighton, Brighton, UK

January 2009

Visitors arriving to see a presentation of my new work were asked to wait outside a studio with a closed door and shaded windows. A screen placed outside the room showed a relayed image of myself, apparently inside the studio, lying on the ground in front of a table with two framed white prints on it. Visitors were let in one at a time, not sure whether the slumped body would turn out to be real or virtual (a mediated image) as in my recent work. If they made it across the threshold of my body they would discover the frames were not blank but contained embossed imprints of my debit card. These cards were positioned upright (like tomb stones) and the prints were priced at the exact amount of the debts their titles referred to. After everyone had seen the work, the plug was suddenly pulled from the wall and the screen outside went dead.

ATM

Performance for video

2009

The body is a resource. Having exhausted my bank account I attempted to use my mouth as an ATM machine. I wanted to draw out the value from my body like oil from the ground. This task was interrupted by my gag reflex which acted as a form of natural and innate resistance. The card was repeatedly rejected and expelled from my body along with tears, saliva and sweat.

Exchange

Exchange

Commissioned pencil drawing (detail) and signed contract

June, 2009

An artist, skilled in forgery, was paid with a twenty pound note in exchange for a realistic scale drawing of that note. Sole legal ownership of the work was then signed over to its author, Reynir Hutber. The note’s number is CD14 521111 and it has a slight tear in the upper left hand corner. The original mass produced note may now take on an aura of enhanced cultural value through its association with a unique copy. The artistic “forgery” can be acquired by a collector today for £20,000 while the original note has been released back into the ebb and flow of daily economic activity, like a fish returned to a vast river.

UNIT

UNIT

Proposal 2009

UNIT is a proposal to cast a pound coin in several hundred pounds worth of solid gold. The coin will be tarnished and introduced into economic circulation where its intrinsic value will be far greater than its symbolic value, the opposite of most art works. It will drift, unnoticed, into the highway of everyday economic transactions. The project will leave no tangible evidence of its creation apart from the empty presentation box. As this work involves introducing unofficial currency into Britain’s economy, it constitutes a kind of unprofitable treason.

Private View

Private View

Interactive video installation

The University Of Brighton, Brighton, UK

July 2008

In Private View the audience member walks into a studio and is confronted with a familiar scene, the relayed image of him or her self entering the frame of a wall mounted CCTV style monitor. However, in this instance, there path appears to be obstructed by the digital apparition of a slumped, scarcely breathing body. The body's presence in the frame is an illusion, a chimera of pixels.My hope for this work is to put the viewer in an unfamiliar position; to observe their response, and consider their responsibility, to a non-person.

Documentation of new media installation by Reynir Hutber.

Out of repect for those recorded please do not publish or post without consent. Thanks.