Artie Doyle

Artie Doyle is an underground legend in international conceptual art circles. Irish born Doyle has travelled extensively and has lived in over seven different countries. As you might expect this has given his work an international flavour. An enigmatic figure who drops in and out of the art world with typically flamboyant projects and then completely disappears for long periods of time. His last project " Truth or Consequence" which was also his most controversial took place in 1992. Truth or Consequence took place in the small Norwegan town of Lorenskag. Lorenskag is an isolated town of exactly 1000 inhabitants. For this project Doyle was to drop by parachute 1000 specially designed electronic devices on the town. These devices were specially made to look as complicated as possible and each contained a badge declaring it to be part of an experiment conducted by the European Space Agency and contained a freephone number to ring to arrange collection of the valuable device. In fact the devices were simple tracking devices similar to those carried by military pilots . Doyle planned to track all unreturned devices and confront the culprits on video, he was in Lorenskag with a camera crew posing as a documentry film maker when the devices were dropped. Unfortunatly things began to go badly wrong, it was snowing when the drop was made and the devices caught fire, ignited their parachutes and fell on the town like 1000 incendary devices. This spectacular scene was caught on video and copies of the tape are much sought after by art collecters and are rumoured to sell for $50,000. Large portions of the town were burnt to the ground but luckily there were no injuries. Recriminations abounded after with Doyle blaming the supplier of the devices and the supplier counter claiming that he was told the devices were for indoor use only. Doyle quickly left Norway before he could be arrested and the Norwegian Government are still persuing him through the international courts, however the project was funded through a complex series of shell companies and it has been very difficult to trace it to Doyle. But Doyle is dogged by allegations that the result was what he originally intended and he has found it difficult to obtain permission for subsequent projects.

Doyle's latest project is typically controversial, based on the work of psychologist August Klein. By extensive use of psychoactive drugs Doyle intends to fragment his memory into the constituent fragments or as Klein called them 'playlets' . This project has been underway since the start of 1998 and this project is a representation of the Play-let fragments which Doyle has been documenting in his more lucid moments