Hackney artist makes Guggenheim YouTube shortlist

Hackney artist Russell Higgs has been shortlisted for the prestigious Guggenheim YouTube Play award for his video 999 days: Russell Higgs Urban Barbarian.

Higgs’s mesmerising video consists of 999 photographs of the artist’s head decorated with different headdresses. Each photo appears on the screen for a fraction of a second, before being replaced by a picture of the same face with the same deadpan expression, but another outlandish costume. The photographs were made over period of 999 consecutive days between 3 September 2006 and 29 May 2009, and the work was completed in March 2010.

“I think of it as Citizen Higgs clocking in, day after day after day,” says Higgs of his video. “Broadly speaking it is a project about Being and Time. One of my primary interests was a desire to work and play within fixed boundaries and commitments; for instance I had to create each self portrait every single day before midnight, I never cheated by creating any images in advance nor in retrospect. The project was also a natural progression from my earlier commitment to Naked Protesting, in the sense of exploring the idea that a culture’s power structure depends largely on how we look and how we are looked at”.

More than 23,000 videos from 91 countries were submitted for YouTube Play, of which 125 made the Guggenheim’s shortlist.

The jury is currently reviewing these and will select the top videos, which will be announced and shown at a special celebration on 21 October  2010 at the Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Following this, the videos selected by the jury will on show from 22 – 24 October 2010  in the Tower 2 Gallery of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and at kiosks at the Guggenheim Museums in Bilbao, Berlin and Venice, and available to a worldwide audience on the YouTube Play channel.

A preview of the You Tube Play shortlist can be viewed here; the final few shots of the video include several of the images in Higgs’s video.