Peter Buggenhout, I am the Tablet

More information on the artist talk and RSVP can be found here.

Axel Vervoordt Gallery is pleased to present, I am the Tablet, Peter Buggenhout's second solo exhibition at Kanaal, an expansive installation that encompasses the Patio and Terrace galleries. The exhibition features 24 sculptures that, consisting of dilapidated or abject materials, turn away from any narrative, despite resources with a certain past, or constructions with a certain amorphous recognition. Besides works from the well-known series — The Blind Leading the Blind and On Hold — this exhibition also shows for the first time in Belgium works from the series I am the Tablet and King Louie.

Shortly before he died and to the great surprise of his fans, Lou Reed collaborated with the U.S. rock band Metallica. The song, The View, contains a kind of translation of precepts, given by God through Moses to mankind via the Ten Commandments or Decalogue. “I'm the aggressor; I am the tablet; These ten stories.” It became one of Reed's most polarised releases – largely panned by the press; described by David Bowie as the best thing Reed had ever written.

These precepts are in stark contrast to the leitmotif of Peter Buggenhout's work: human over-consumption, over-accumulation, decadence, the West’s protagonist feeling, impermanence and the digital dominance and rapid succession that results in a loss of attention and of the willingness to devote time. It is the latter that Buggenhout asks for as an artist, making sculptures that can only be mentally reconstructed in their entirety, after dedicating time and effort to comprehend. That dedication also reveals that despite the carefully constructed, confrontational, and uncomfortable disorder, the works also offer a stillness, a peace in their indeterminacy. It is as if the efforts spent in trying to understand the works result in a kind of compassion, perhaps even empathy.

The biblical story of the Ten Commandments is one of destruction and reconstruction, but also it is a story of interpretations, translations, and additions. The shape of the stone tablets, for example, differs strikingly from right angles (Michelangelo) versus rounded tops (Rembrandt), along with sizable height differences, despite the description of the features in the Talmud.

For this series, Buggenhout also started from a stone surface in marble, as the basis of his artwork but also as a reference to “the simplest way to reduce the understanding of the world”. Just as the rules of life eventually became illegible through additions and additions, the work’s stone basis is no more than a surface – like a canvas (tableau) of what presents itself almost two-dimensionally. “I wanted to show these marble tablets but on top of them, I added comments, and comments, and comments.... until the stone slabs became illegible, thus causing chaos. Our modern civilisation seems to create the same jungle.”

Buggenhout places his work in line with the emergence of diffuse confusion. A construction of unexpected materials results – only a look of recontextualisation and associations of different points of view can lead to a reconstruction of the whole in the human mind, like a search for the core through a diaphanous accumulation of robust materials. That core, however, remains only laden with what it is: no narrative, no symbolism, no iconology. For Buggenhout, it is parallel to society, resulting in a similar limbo.

With the latest series, King Louie, Buggenhout refers to a similar destructiveness, but also to a loss of originality through apocryphal additions. Seen today as one of the best-known characters from the Disney adaptation, King Louie did not appear in Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book – orangutans do not even occur in India, where the story is set. For Disney, the character was a vehicle to project doom, embodied by a clumsy ape with self-centred and chaotic personality, working against himself and others but hopping to tones of New Orleans jazz and swing.

With a pasty application of oil paint and silicones, it is not difficult to think of an extension of informal art and expressionism with the un-functionality of Arte Povera, although, if one had to use an art-historical term, post-minimalism is probably the most accurate. Buggenhout, trained as a painter, accepts a painterly statement when it comes to his sculptures: “The skin is our contact with the world. When you look at the painting, you look at the skin of the painting as it is what makes contact with your eyes. It is about the surface and how the surface communicates. It is not just the form, or the shape, or the material. The part that takes contact is the skin of the sculpture.”

It is a thought that resonates in the Mute Witness series. Like silent witnesses, they hang on the wall, composed of dented casts covered with canvas. From the depth of the material, but also from cognitive associations with artists who worked with burlap sacks, other materials seem to emerge, as if they want to unveil what has been, untold stories. In their silence and concealment, these works seem even more radical than others, such as the sculptures from the On Hold series, which only just seem to keep balance, where the creak of a wooden beam can be so imagined.

In his On Hold series, Peter Buggenhout combines large inflatable, organic shapes intertwined with rigid constructive materials that both support and restrict them amid their expansion. Formally, the sculpture indicates a state of incompletion and instability, embodying the concept of unfixed identity. The result is an accumulation of brutal, yet brightly coloured materials and objects stripped from their original context and forced/squeezed into a complex composition that pushes the viewer towards confusion and disorientation through a sense of blurred recognition. Again, underneath a seeming turmoil of composition lies a carefully considered logic that is an equivalent representation of the elements and events, the complex reality that surrounds us.

A similar apparent decay is in the Gorgo series, of which this exhibition shows a work - named after the Gorgons of which Medusa is the best known. Some versions of the legend hold that blood from the left side of a Gorgo's body is fatal poison; blood from the right side is said to be all-healing and could even revive the dead. Like a landscape decomposing or a still life in decay, Buggenhout makes almost ritualistic sacrificial images with detritus, dead organic material such as blood and hair. They refer to our vulnerability, but also to the constant cycle of disappearing and reappearing, to a concealing and emerging reality.

That reality, in a perpetual state of transition, which cannot be grasped despite the sum of gestalt moments, is what the works in this exhibition – and those from Buggenhout's entire oeuvre – share. It is also why Buggenhout works with different materials and colours, to signify the totality of that complexity. In summary, his materials are ‘abject’: in their original existence (waste, dust, blood, or guts); others in their use or application – so is the application of paint. Although a synonym for wretched, Buggenhout uses the word ‘abject' explicitly referring to the French philosopher Georges Bataille. In the shadow of the burgeoning war and power struggles of the 1930s, he used the word abject to describe “the dehumanisation of labour, the class struggle, mass fanaticism”, which is the coercive force of sovereignty, an edifying exclusion that turns a section of the population into moral outcasts, as also later described by Hannah Arendt. Buggenhout's upcoming book Erotism also refers to Bataille's L'Erotisme, his main philosophical work. In it, he explores the concepts of eroticism, violence, prohibition and transgression, continuity, and discontinuity. It is only through transgression that a prohibition acquires meaning, through the revelation of its sacred nature. In an ever-evolving society, man finds himself straddling – on hold – between extremes, and here too: between order and enforcement on the one hand, the urge to transgress boundaries on the other.

But man is blind, Buggenhout says, just as he is blind in making his works, although each step follows one another with an intention. “The process has become the content of the work. When I start making a piece, I take one element, then I add a second one, and a fourth, and a fifth. So, this complete unpredictability, how it's going to look like in the end, is very often a blind way of working.” Not knowing where to go, is why Buggenhout named his most iconic series after a painting by Pieter Bruegel, The Blind Leading the Blind. Ongoing since 2000, examples from this series can be found in the collections of Centre Pompidou, Paris, and MONA, Tasmania. As hermetic constructions, they reveal themselves as bodies from another era, perhaps even the future. The layer of household dust Buggenhout adds at the end of the production process literally ‘shrouds’ the work in a haze of ignorance. To quote the Bible again: “Let them. They are blind who guide the blind. And if a blind man guides a blind man, they will both fall into the pit.”