Sticky-taped utopias
Michael Beutler’s art is a playful, speculative response to a given place. A systematic exploration of the possibilities of a room’s architecture, in which he takes the very simplest of questions and gives it a twist. What happens when a wall divides a room? How is a ceiling held up? How does an atmosphere change when the light is altered? Questions that by extension are about the way we experience and use architecture, about the world that we ourselves create. What restricts and what enables? And if we dare to think the thought through to its conclusion: What do we want and dare to do with these places, with our architecture? In his art Beutler sets up situations in which these questions can be asked afresh.
The new work that Beutler is making for Bonniers Konsthall is specifically one such situation. There are three givens: A grid drawn to echo the Konsthall’s structure of pillars and window frames; A machine that bends cardboard and steel wire into the pillars that are used as the basic building block; And finally a group of art students and the Konsthall’s hosts who, together with the artist, for a few intensive weeks, are improvising a new architecture that accentuates and makes visible the shape of the Konsthall by imitating it, but also through unexpected disjunctures and contradictions. The scope of what can be done is actually only limited by the properties of the space, the plasticity of the material, and the inventiveness of those involved. The unforeseen and momentary has the same weight and value as the planned.
For Beutler the making of art is an open-ended set of events in which the artist exists in a forcefield of collaboration. His work comes about in the company of a group of friends – or, as here, of a group of students and the Konsthall’s staff. Other people’s hands and ideas influence the task and thereby the artwork itself. This open, generous approach is also tangible in the way that Beutler allows many of the artistic decisions to be taken during the course of the working process. Only in the present and in the working process can the material and the possibilities of the space be grasped. The artwork can only come about and be understood by being made.
This emphasis on the energy and, dare I say it, the pleasure of the working process itself also permeates his response to the invitation to be guest artist at Bonniers Konsthall and to the possibility of staying on site for an extended period to make a new work especially for the Konsthall. Here the Konsthall’s main space has become a kind of halfway place, somewhere between a studio and an exhibition space, in which the artwork is made, displayed and documented for the exhibition catalogue.
The main space is the site for four of the machines that constitute the core of Beutler’s working process. As artworks it is hard to decide where they belong. They are, at the same time, both fabricators of art and artworks in themselves. They are strange machines, handmade implements with very specific purposes: one corrugates paper; another stretches plastic into large volumes; a third uses glue and cardboard to form large rings that are then stacked on top of one another. In the Konsthall’s entrance hall a machine puts household aluminium through a mangle to produce long, winding pathways that cover the floor, and which are subsequently ripped to shreds by visitors’ feet during the course of the exhibition.
‘Machine’ is a word that evokes associations with industrial mass production, precision and repetition. Beutler’s machines are something radically different: crafted, enigmatic prototypes, apparently made with whatever came to hand. Made and used by human hand, as distinct from industrial robots, these products become more or less different on each occasion and bear clear traces of their user. This slipping between the handmade and the industrial, between DIY and the artistic, permeates Beutler’s works, which defy all categorisation. They are neither architecture nor sculpture, neither handmade nor industrial, neither in progress nor finished.
One after another, during the course of the exhibition, the machines are set running by the Konsthall’s hosts, thus creating an exhibition that is in constant metamorphosis, and which changes character and content over time. Returning visitors can see how the space is transformed through gradually being filled with the output from the machines. Visitors who arrive late in the exhibition period do not encounter the same work as visitors who were here early on. For each machine the artist has made a set of operating manuals that can be found on the walls of the space, as well as in this folder. Here we find humorous, almost affectionate, notes on how the artwork is to be used so that it will be left for others, too. The artist takes a step back and leaves the final form of the artwork open. When the machine is set going, it creates another artwork that is different from the previous occasion. The operating manuals serve as a manuscript – the staging always bears the imprint of the space, the moment, and the “machine minder’s” interpretations.
One connecting thread running through Beutler’s artistic work is an intensive testing, to see which forms and qualities can be extracted from a material – whether it be rolls of gift paper, aluminium foil or glue and cardboard. Ultimately, his works end up being a reflection on the nature of the man-made world. How do the things that we touch, look at and use every day actually feel and act? What do they express, and what can we do with them? Here Beutler’s art serves as fundamental research of the most basic kind, in which, with a both straightforward and amused curiosity, he dares to test out the simplest things of all. Something is stacked up, twisted or flattened out. A paper intended for the packaging industry is freed of its utility, becoming a volume that fills a room, a filter that lets light through, or shapes that cover a wall.
One thing that has become the artist’s distinguishing mark is a plastic material that is actually used as a mould for concrete in construction. In Beutler’s hands this bright-yellow plastic is transformed into temporary sculptures in an urban space, a labyrinth in a castle garden, or a staircase with its roots in the form language of the baroque. The use and transformation of industrially manufactured building materials are a major strand running through Beutler’s work. A material that is made for a specific purpose – such as the reinforced plastic – takes on another value and purpose. What we have here is a subtle interrogation of the way we use the stuff of the world. A recycling of our culture’s utility products, produced to serve a goal as efficiently as possible, an act of resistance to the way we use and construct things, by creating totally autonomous worlds in which our way of categorising things is turned upside down.
Beutler’s works exist in an explicit art-historical context, filled with references and fervent conversations with previous experiences. He likes to borrow from the form language of classical architecture. We can also see in his works the abstraction of modernism and a faith in the way that form was supposed to change the world, along with an interest in what can be expressed using colour, light and space. But the playful physical approach takes us away from all utopian, universal claims to a firmly experienced reality. The most intense of all is his relationship with the consequences of minimalism. In his art we see traces of an interest in the industrial, and in the serial and repeated. An attention to the way the presence and movements of the body affect the experience of the work and an interest in shifting the boundary between architecture and art. But Beutler’s handling and development of these experiences has clearly come about in another time and is played off against a background of other experiences. The industrial is transformed into handmade uniqueness. A fascination with the series has been replaced by an accentuation of the specific character of the moment, of the unrepeatable, and of what is improvised in the present moment. In Beutler’s art we find ourselves on the other side of the promise of the machine society, in a world that strikes us as being infinitely more fragile and breakable. The supplies are not inexhaustible, matter is not interminable – we know we are using up those resources. Here Michael Beutler’s playful recycling, his proposals for other ways of using things, take on the character of humble suggestions. We can do it this way if we like.