May 2, 2005
Andres Butzer
This is one artist that I didn't meet in Berlin, but he is one whose name dropped constantly in conversation. I'm having trouble finding images of his work online (I'll update this post when I find a better image), but here is a shot taken in the gallery storage room:
O: I used to call my pictures "post-non-representational painting," and later "Procrustean painting." The first term was supposed to express that I wanted to get these problems out of the way. With the second term I reject all ethics of painting. "Procrustean" stands for bending, breaking, stretching, cropping. Not very careful of the material.
B: You must mean more than just the material. Namely also the alleged expression of a person, an expression that you can never get rid of (or abolish). Of course, it depends on what you apply the term "material" to in painting.
O: For me, putting paint on the canvas is like driving an unfamiliar vehicle or a rental car you just do it.
B: And for me, applying paint is cosmetics on the decline and fall of humanity.
O: So, that's supposed to mean that people can smear your paintings onto their legs(or: you don't care a shit what humanity thinks of your paintings). Sort of a "kiss-my-ass" attitude. But listen, with that you won?t get very far! Sometime you?ll want to come back into the human community, because of its warmth.
Because of its warmth?
This exchange is a beast, dense, obtuse, tough to read, flagrant with flights of fancy, hard work and rough on the eyesight with the font-color selection and website design. I wonder how people can actually talk like this. (Lemme try: "I'm typing this blogpost like dragons have breathed flaming ice on my family..." Uh-huh.)
But I've copied it onto a sticky note and I'm carving away chunks, looking for gold. I'll keep you posted if I find any.
Note that he is talking with Albert Ohlen, a painter whose program is deliberate bad painting. Here we go again.
Check it out.
PS: That's not Butzer on the cover of the catalog. It's Henry Ford and I've heard that he looks a llittle like the great industrialist.
Wow, Dennis, Berlin looks like it's really, um, choking.
"A successful manufacturing, after-all, is the one that you don't even notice as such?but gives that remedial good feel: a place/space you identify as something (of) the self: a place/space that holds comfort but delivers an edge, that besieges a plethora of otherness?sealed and saved-distanced, for (the) you and I to enjoy?the invisible. Sometimes it ends up that this invisible cloaks some great truth. Other times it works it's hiding something more trivial; something smaller. However, the point is it's this invisible 'dressed up' that lures us. That's the tricky Truth."
"...say that about a lot of painting stuff around the way at the moment (laughing junk is cool, well, OK. Perhaps these new bad bad artists are feeding off some similar myth that, despite the poverty of look behind is a well thread). Not that it should matter, but at least be attentive to mythmakers and their aimless plots."
Whatever.