#carylburtner

Caryl Burtner

Burtner has documented and collected objects and minutiae information about her own private life and - by extension - popular culture.  

Caryl Burtner was born in 1956 in Washington, DC., USA and grew up in Bellevue and Vienna, Virginia. Burtner went to study in Virginia Commonwealth University School of Arts located in Richmond, USA, where she still resides.

During her freshman year in art school, while viewing Willian Wegman’s videos of his dogs, Burtner realised that play and life itself could be art. “ A light-bulb moment” as she says.

Caryl Burtner Collections

In 1976, Burtner's apartment burned down and her toothbrush was one of the few things that was found intact. It got her thinking about how when you begin using a new toothbrush, you don't know what is going to transpire in your life during the life span of that brush. She had a party for her friends and asked everyone to bring a toothbrush and to document what had happened in their lives during the time they used that brush. For over 30 years, she has collected more than 1000 toothbrushes, which she displays by attaching them to a gallery wall with Velcro, having each of them numbered, and the history of each brush referenced in binders that are part of her art exhibition. In addition, Burtner’s collection also includes over 2000 plastic baggies containing annotated lipstick blots, notebooks with color-coded charts of changing clothes, hairstyles, and favourite music, her collections bring people into her world of personal and public history.

One of her most interesting and intriguing work is The Exorcism of Page Thirteen.  

Published in 1993 by Inc, Gates of Heck, the book has a great sense of humor since it is an example of a “self-conscious codex”. The book shows the fascination of Caryl with the number thirteen and to ensure good luck, she cuts the page number with its surrounding text from page thirteen in every book in her library. A little gallery of "13's" in various typefaces, fonts, sizes, and printed on various papers, it is a mixture of collaging and printing. The text thus gathered forms fortuitous poems and coincidences of meaning. The captured specimens create "...concrete poetry...that would warm the heart of Tristan Tzara.”