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 common. His is a strategy of matter-of-factness, of concocting outlandish "What ifs?" and answering them with unflinching "Why nots?" Armed with a playful yet pointed brand of humor, Westphalen dismantles cultural tropes--both high and low--by testing their prescribed boundaries and pushing their supposed limits.

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

The residual props, track, turn marks and bleachers later functioned as an installation. Removed from the hoopla of the race, the vacant showground gave off a ghostly aura, enhanced by a barely decipherable sound recording of the original event. The announcer's table sat at one end of the room, exhibiting the derby's leftover accoutrements: PA system, notepad, helium tank, foghorn and, of course, the requisite winner's trophy--a clunky handmade blimp-topped cup. Across the opposite wall was a Budweiser sponsorship banner, albeit in a drippy, expressionistic black-and-white style typical of Westphalen's humorous collapse of cultural hierarchies.

It was these remnants of the event, alluding to past merriment but lacking any real action, which engendered reflection on the absurdity of such settings. Warking around the red two-lane oval track, visitors could imagine that the recorded whoos, yeahs and oohs were aimed at them, a fantasy heightened by means of a video camera that captured extreme close-ups as they rounded one of the corners. However, the zoom was a little too close, tempting one's narcissistic desires only to frustrate them. Taking a seat in the deserted stands afforded contemplation of the half-present, half-absent spectacle, its strange hybrid venue--blank, motionless and surreal--and the arenas and activities, both artistic and athletic, it evoked.

Yet the event and its mini-stadium carried no definitive air of mockery, no heavy-handed irony, and it remained unclear to which genre of experience this belonged--parodic performance or good old summer fun. In fact, it was both. A literal manifestation of art as social process, the work obscured distinctions between sports event and art happening. And that confusion of categories was exactly Westphalen's point.

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