Peter Buggenhout
A remarkably convincing figuring of disorder—of irredeemable, contagious psychomaterial disarray—the solo New York debut of Belgian sculptor Peter Buggenhout coaxed improbably affecting nuance from viscerally brutish form. Functioning both as discrete objects and as elements of a larger installation scenario, the pair of dark heaps set in the ground-floor gallery of Gladstone’s Twenty-First Street space—The Blind Leading the Blind #66 hulking in the middle of the room, The Blind Leading the Blind #67, both 2014, appearing to simultaneously spill forth from and muscle up to a nearby wall—were ominously implacable, with heft to spare. Yet Buggenhout’s clumsy, looming things (both are larger than twenty by ten by ten feet) also possess a striking formal and situational unpredictability: They seem not fully stopped but only paused in the midst of some ongoing process of violent deformation that threatens to resume again at any moment, gathering up the viewer in its wake. They are wild concretions of familiar materials made unfamiliar, specific things ecstatically displaced into wretched hybridity—bent metal, crushed wood, melted plastic, torn paper, and more, all stirred together. All of it carries a detectable odor of industrial processes, suggesting the forcible operations of dedifferentiation it had undergone at the hands of the artist, and all of it is improbably covered in what seems to be decades’ worth of weirdly motile, webby dust.
The fifty-year-old Buggenhout has been showing regularly in Europe for some two decades, but his presence in the US has up to this point been limited to the presentation of works in a pair of group shows here in New York—a single, relatively smallish sculpture in last year’s “EXPO 1” at MoMA PS1 and several larger ones in “The Spirit Level,” a 2012 exhibition organized for Gladstone by one of its artists, Ugo Rondinone. Perhaps Rondinone detected in his contemporary’s choice and use of materials a shared interest in the strategies of Arte Povera—even though Buggenhout’s works here did not, as they sometimes do, include actual organic material (often blood or hair), his poor, grimy combines managed to radiate a good deal of malevolent funk. The artist has invoked the notion of the informe as a touchstone for his approach, and the works certainly conjure a sense of uncanny Bataillean heterogeneity, their interest in categorical disruption routed through a vocabulary of base material. And if they initially present as monotone—and monochrome—extended looking reveals certain oddly poignant details. Despite the fact that most evidence of artifactual specificity is erased from or obscured among the constituent elements of the two sculptures, unexpected moments of variegation do poignantly interrupt the dirty uniformity—a small field of green lurking within the embrace of the filthy mass of #66, for example, or a clot of red visible within the soiled body of #67.
Brute material force is, of course, by no means a singular strategy. Yet whether deployed in the service of serene Apollonian orderliness (as it was to such familiarly dramatic effect in the new Richard Serra sculpture that just a month earlier had filled Gagosian next door), of the more Pop-influenced commodity interrogations of Nancy Rubins, or of the kind of colossal Dionysian abandon conjured ever more by Matthew Barney’s program, great scale inevitably aspires to sublimity. Buggenhout’s work is physically and emotionally big, to be sure, and the immediacy of its immensities certainly engenders both awe and fear. Yet it is in the more subtly revealed oscillations between large and small—between what his sculptures are and what the elements of them once were—that another attitude emerges, one suffused with a strangely resonant sorrow not just for things but also for us, their users. Buggenhout’s project operates as an extended investigation into the physical conditions of breakdown, of system failure; his works are abject, ruined anti-monuments to the disquieting friability of the stuff of the world, inanimate and otherwise.