March, 2004
Ben Butler
Ben Butler is like his art: Inside intensity there is liberation. Like when he breaks into a grin after he has described the very real and very convincing phenomena of boulders. Or when he laughs after explaining how chess is a perfect game since it also contains the three most essential elements in the universe. (Time, tempo, and matter if you didn't know.) Then there's the time he finishes outlining in ornate detail the process by which he sets up formulas and mathematical processes to accomplish his work - formulas that would make Will Hunting ask for a tutor - and then blithely punctuates it with, “But you know, the thing is, I don't have the best work ethic.”

It seems then it's the other person's turn to smile because, in spite of what he claims, there is something undeniably labor-intensive about Butler's oeuvre. Take those boulders. Titled Glacial Erratics (a term used to define the process by which stones are left by glaciers far from where they were absorbed), the sculptures came into Butler's mind one day while he was hiking. “I was out in California, and there had been wildfires that had scorched 60,000 acres before they contained it. So I was walking on this charred ground that was completely black, devoid of bushes, trees…and I saw these three boulders. I figured they were about an hour away, so I decided to stop and have lunch there. But as I went toward them, they kept getting bigger, the sense of scale went from something that looked like six feet to 25 feet by the time I got there. And these grey things became worlds unto themselves, and I realized how nature has so little regard for human scale whereas what we make has such specificity to what we do. You never see a table, for instance, that isn't the 'right' size.”

Scale is one significant element among many in Butler's sculptures, which he says operate on the “edge of definition.”

He means that there is a kernel of familiarity in all his work - you can surmise that the boulders are rock formations, or a chair with a surreal number of legs is still a chair - but that there is always something slightly askew, asking the mind to absorb something new about the familiar. For example, the boulders he made are not derived from stone but of plywood, a material chosen for the process of its making, which is similar to glacial structures: The wood is natural, but it is so warped by the process of making it - at one point being literally pressed and rolled out like toilet paper - that it's ultimately manufactured. For Butler, audience understanding about the choice and process of plywood is not essential, only that a viewer will see his boulders and know, intuitively, that something is not quite right, in this case stones made of wood.

“Finding the edge of definitions, making something that's unnamable, gives us conceptual clarity. It asks your mind to work with all your senses.” It also addresses what Butler seems most compelled by: the creation of an awareness that is distinct from actual terms, actual existence, or familiar experience. It's tempting to wonder how a world so bent on finding definition can provide a means to escape it. Surely the mind's first impulse is to identify and to learn, just as Butler's was wont to do with the scale of the boulders. But the surprise of what those boulders ended up being is the same surprise this artist is after, as though approaching his art is much like a hike in a setting devoid of any hints of scale, size, or any means of ascertaining reality. He wants you to think you know until you don't know at all. And go from there.

But barring a setting like the one in California, how does a person find that void in, say, a gallery and why is it essential? Here again, the artist is like his art. In much of Butler's work, there is an emphasis on repetition based on an exact system he sets up, often mathematically, to produce the end result. His dream project, for instance, is to find a house, take it apart and divide it into two houses, then divide it again and make four, and so on and so forth until he has made 32,768 houses (a number that equals eight to the fifth power if you didn't know). “It's about multiplication that's also division, which is a system in nature. It's also about the number eight.” Invoking a system like that echoes a lot of things - nature for one but also sexual reproduction, even domesticity if you want to factor in the choice of the house as subject - and Butler validates all of those. When it's mentioned that eight, as good symbologists know, is the number of eternity, he makes that familiar smile. “Well, Einstein wasn't really looking for mathematical equations, you know. He was looking for beauty.”

But repetition itself, he says, is a primary theme because repetition, though he's not entirely committed to this word, is close to the divine. “Think about waves,” he suggests. Doing things repetitively, he goes on, can be about transcending and accessing that place where the mind is limitless within the confines of even its own learning. And anyone who's experienced a moment of pure lucidity whether doing ordinary housework or chanting a mantra can testify to that space. It's no different for Butler, which is why repetition itself repeats in his work and his process.

If the theory holds that inside intense structure there emerges liberation, then inside Butler's work there is also transcendence, beauty, and the uncommon gift for connecting both in the literal world of cut plywood, surgically altered carpet, and brick (all materials in his palette). “When you're taken with something, how often is that in a gallery?” he asks. “We are attuned to systems all the time. We wonder who made this? It's clear and understood that something's been made but the force is entirely unseen. We want to get to the root of that.”

John Bisbee
The worst question you can ask John Bisbee is one regarding his work. Unlike his former student, Ben Butler, Bisbee is humorously evasive. “Art is a metaphor and as soon as you give it a utilitarian life, there's no point. Art has to be useless.”

This is usually when he'll change the subject and find something in the room that could derail the conversation. But somehow this impenetrability belies a sincerity that makes Bisbee and his work all the more intriguing. It's as if the entire notion of sincerity of purpose - the heart of Bisbee's work - might be so novel in contemporary art that it's automatically compelling to look at. But it's only the first of many reasons a Bisbee sculpture won't let you take your eyes away.

“Frederick Busch, the author, said 'self-expression is for amateurs.' I love that quote. I want things to be archetypal, universal. I shamelessly pursue beauty. You know, no one makes things anymore; we only buy things. Once we lose our tactile sense of the world, we lose our souls.” By the looks of it, gaining soul is the aspiration of Bisbee's work; his sculptures demonstrate tactility like nothing else. They are derived from all different sizes of nails, welded together in patterns as fluid and fixed as water turned to ice. They occupy the synaptic center of left-brain geometry and right-brain poetry, producing a unique kind of interpretation, and one not easily dismissed by either prejudice.

Bisbee, who teaches at Bowdoin College in Maine for one semester and spends the rest of the year laboring at his craft, has worked with nails for years. This is not by chance. Materiality, he says, is an essential element to art making and working the material produces an anonymity essential to art relevance. “If you do anything long enough, it begins to have its own potency. It changes meanings and the artist is lost.” For Bisbee, that achievement of absence is perhaps the best barometer of success. “I want to be such a great craftsman,” he says, “that nobody knows who did this. I want to make beautiful screens where everyone will come to the work and have their own experience.”

The pairing of such utilitarian items with lofty notions isn't hypocritical. It's born from a real desire to connect. His mission to make work that “recognizes and rejects modern meanings” in order to discover something lasting makes the case that whatever his personal preference for talking about his art may be, the actual work must be guileless.

“Today's art is all about fashion and trends. Show me anything in a magazine from the last 30 years and I can tell you the year. People don't touch their work anymore. I mean, making stuff, it's about a physical residue of gesture and time. As a species, we've always done this. Creativity and our hands separate us. I tell my students that if you make things well, you'll never be out of style. Fashion, maybe. But never style.”