Pavel Büchler

Büchler was born in the Czech Republic in 1952 and, as a very young man, watched the Soviet tanks enter Prague in spring 1968. He studied in Prague at the School of Graphic Arts (1970-2) and the Institute of Applied Arts (1973-6), where he was inspired by images of Conceptual art in Western Europe, which presented an alternative to the traditional activities of painting and sculpture, prescribed by the communist regime. As a student he formed the group K.Q.N, which offered creative resistance to state control through ‘street-actions‘ and ‘samizdat’ publishing – the clandestine printing and distribution of banned literature. In 1981, Büchler was evicted from Czechoslovakia and settled in the UK.

Since his student days, Büchler’s practice has encompassed performance, installation, writing and books. In the mid-1970s, he started to experiment with photography, which is still an important theme in his work. He co-founded the Cambridge Darkroom Gallery in 1984 and served as Design Consultant for Creative Camera from 1985 to 1991. From 1992 to 1996, he was Head of the School of Fine Art at Glasgow School of Art and is currently Research Professor in Art and Design at Manchester Metropolitan University. His research interests include theories of photography and film.

For Büchler, art is an act of subversion: a rebellious attitude of mind. Instead of making objects, he intervenes in the real world, manipulating found materials – objects, images, audio recordings, photographs and texts – to reveal the strangeness in everyday life. With a background in graphic design, he is skilled at putting things together. He juxtaposes objects to create witty visual puns and metaphors and narrative riddles, in which text, embedded in the work or in the title, often plays an important role.

Büchler’s arrangements can be erudite, full of art historical and literary reference; but, in their physical manifestation, they are always concise, hinging on simple visual and verbal disjunctions. Some of his richest work is barely there – would hardly be noticeable unless set on a plinth or sited in a gallery. Indeed, he has described his own practice as ‘making nothing happen’.

For instance, Il Castello (2007) is composed of two pencil stubs: a blue one, which has been cut down by hand and worn to almost nothing, and was apparently left behind by a builder in Büchler’s house; and a yellow one – made by ‘Faber Castell’ – which has been carefully sharpened by the artist himself to leave just the word ‘Castell’ on the shaft.

Büchler considers used pencils as tools, representing the creative hands they once belonged to. He is also interested in their microcosmic architectural and aspirational presence, when placed on end, points upwards. In another work, Short Stories (1996), he gathered together pencil stubs abandoned in the public library in Cambridge and bound them together tightly in groups with elastic bands, so that they appeared almost as a series of miniature fortified hill towns.

In Il Castello, the pencils are placed side by side, the contrasting blunt and sharp tips reaching to the sky. The title refers to the novel, The Castle by the Czech writer, Franz Kafka, in which the protagonist struggles to gain access to the mysterious authorities of a castle, which govern the village where he wishes to work. The work is specifically linked to the following quotation from the novel: ‘an earthly building – what else can men build? – but with a loftier goal than the humble dwelling houses and a.clearer meaning than the muddle of everyday life’. The Castle is a book about alienation, bureaucracy and man’s struggle against the system, which are also recurring themes in Büchler’s work.

The tiny Il Castello can be seen in relation to Büchler’s monumental work The Castle (2007), in which he attached eighty 1920s Marconi loud speakers to the exterior of the Kunsthalle Bern, booming out sections of Kafka’s text to casual passers by.

Büchler’s installations often incorporate obsolete audio-visual technology – loudspeakers, projectors and tape recorders from the 1920s to the 1970s. For him, these machines have a life and energy which modern digital equipment fails to match. In their noise, heat and design, they summon up the original alchemy of technology, which has now become commonplace through everyday use.

In Eclipse, he uses nine 1950s Leitz Prado slide projectors to project circles of light on to the gallery wall. The overlapping discs and the title call to mind the famous photographs of a total solar eclipse taken in 1919 by Sir Arthur Eddington to prove Einstein’s theory of general relativity. However, the image on the wall is not a projection of a photograph of the cosmos, but of old rubber balls, a basket ball and other everyday spherical objects placed in front of the lenses of the projectors. The piece is shown in normal light, so as to give as much prominence to the presence of the projectors and balls as to the discs on the walls, highlighting the disjunction between one and the other.

Büchler is interested in the critical theory of photography, which challenges our reading of photographic images as neutral documents of reality. In Eclipse the installation itself recalls the experiments of 1970s ‘expanded cinema’, as well as studio images of his own early photographic projects – such as Untitled Portraits (1988) – in which he explored the physical parameters of the medium.

Büchler’s work challenges our reading of everyday life. Yet, it does not seek to impose new meaning, but rather to expose a wonderful absurdity at the heart of things. It is deliberately open-ended, inviting interpretation and serving as a catalyst for our own imagination.

Büchler has exhibited widely in Britain and Continental Europe, as well as China and America, since the mid-1980s. Most recently, he has participated in group projects The Human Stain (Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 2009), Involved (Shangart Gallery, Shanghai, 2008), Frieze Projects 2008 (Frieze Art Fair, London) and ITCA 2008 (National Gallery, Prague); and solo shows at Street Level, Glasgow (2009), Museum Van Hdendaagse Kunst Antwerp (2007) and the Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (2006). He has a forthcoming retrospective at DOX, Prague in 2010. A monograph on his work, Absentmindedwindowgazing, was published in summer 2007. His work is represented by Max Wigram Gallery in London, Tanya Leighton Gallery in Berlin and annex 14 in Bern.

by Sophie Raikes, Assistant Curator (Sculpture), Leeds Art Gallery