No ART Around

From 2007 to 2010, dilettantin produktionsbüro in Bremen ran the dining room project ‘dreijahre’ (threeyears), a conceptual restaurant, that was based on the question: Can this be art? – “A restaurant with a café and bar: The table is set, the time is limited. A digital countdown is metering the days. 1095, ie three years, on the border between art and gastronomy, the seen and the unseen, the banal and the extraordinary, the sensual and the spiritual.”

The book No ART Around is a continuation of this project that carries further the cross-border approach: In both content and form, the publication oscillates between artist book and discourse reader. 13 authors explore the various levels of the project and open a fundamental discourse about the limitations of art. The essays interweave themes from art history, aesthetics, social space, philosophy, economics, physics and sensory perception. The theoretical and literary texts are connected to various image layers which add another substantive and atmospheric colouring. Even the tonality of paper and Pantone print picks up the colour scheme of the place.

The book includes a booklet with recipes, that brings together many of the recipes of the (guest-)chefs of ‘dreijahre’, that might, detached from the book, get lost in the reader's kitchen. With an introduction by Mona Schieren and texts by Elke Bippus, Carsten Brehm, David Donohue, Wolfgang Fuchs, Michael Glasmeier, Harald Lemke, Nora Sdun, Rolf Thiele and Thomas A. Vilgis, and a conversation between René Block, Anna Bromley and Anneli Käsmayr.