Kent Anderson Butler’s video works
feel sacramental and, strangely enough, oddly transgressive
at the same time. Often, the performances Anderson Butler
documents with video involve the artist putting himself
in uncomfortable situations or at risk of injury—not
wildly so, but enough to notice. His body is central in
the creation of his work, and he provokes an immediate
visceral response in videos like Virginal Wound (2007),
in which he picks and scrapes at the cuticles of his thumb
until they bleed. His videos can be difficult to watch,
and also mesmerizing and quirky. His most recent video,
Embodied Fusion—also the title of this solo at Bunny
Gunner—documents the artist pushing the limits of
his physical endurance at a locale near the Salton Sea.
Embodied Fusion begins with the artist lying prone in
the dirt, with the desert foothills and a nearly transparent
blue sky in the distance. About 10 to 15 yards behind
the artist sits a mound of rusting automobile carcasses,
a twisted strand of rebar and some parched coastal scrub.
Anderson Butler raises himself to the plank position,
while two young women circle him and then stand in silent
embrace behind him. Over the next minute and 45 seconds,
Anderson Butler struggles against gravity. His grunts
are audible; his arms shake and his face reddens from
exertion. After he collapses, the women approach him,
flipping him on his back. Taking his ankles, they drag
him across a scabrous terrain of decomposed granite, Anderson
Butler’s back toward the wreckage and off screen.
Sometimes women in his performances present a kiss—as
if it were an anointing or a ceremonial farewell before
Anderson Butler is led off to the next immolation. In
other performances, they pick up the pieces. In Embodied
Fusion, the two women are quietly detached, more attuned
to each other than to Anderson Butler; they are the implements
of the artist’s willing mortification.
Anderson Butler also employs the body for the still images
in this show. He plainly and purposefully displays his
body in one of the two large, photo-based tapestry pieces
created for “Chic,” his recent solo at Carl
Berg Projects at Pacific Design Center. Portraiture is
accompanied by a mythology of truth: a feeling of a privileged
view into the sitter’s personality. Anderson Butler’s
tapestry portraits couldn’t be further from this
paradigm. At just over 6-and-a-half feet by 5 feet, these
two portraits are larger than life. In each, the subject,
shirtless and imposing, stares into the camera with an
impassive gaze.
More to the point is these portraits’ affinity
with glamour photography, the mythology of desirability
and the manufacture of consumer demand. Here the portrait
of the model is ripped from the context of the fashion
magazine and the sale of designer goods. While these tapestries
present ordinary men in all their fleshy imperfection,
the individuals in these portraits are still as unknowable—in
these images—as are the models in fashion magazines.
A third tapestry, created from a video still in Embodied
Fusion, features Anderson Butler squinting at the camera,
holding his push-up, just as it’s getting difficult.
It is his video work which leaves the biggest impression,
as if he is investing the ephemeral nature of existence
with sacred significance.
Kent Anderson Butler’s “Embodied Fusion”
solo exhibition at Bunny Gunner Gallery, 266 W. Second
St., Pomona, (909) 868-2808; www.bunnygunner.com. Thru
May 4.
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