"ALWAYS ANOTHER PICTURE" MICHAEL BÜHLER-ROSE: Brussels
The wood inlay works in Always Another Picture recreate versos of works from the first generation of “Pictures” artists. Trained in Photography, in the wake of their success and fame, Michael Bühler-Rose has absorbed the influence of the Pictures generation, particularly in their methods for using the veneration of, and identification with the objects and images that surround. In this case, works by Pictures artists.
Unofficially named from a 1977 exhibition, Pictures, organized by art historian Douglas Crimp for Artists Space in New York, the artists loosely grouped under this name used the tools of mass media to critique issues of authorship, originality, and identity. Artists under the Pictures moniker, including Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, Allan McCollum, Richard Prince, and Cindy Sherman, have become among the most iconic contemporary American artists of the late 20th century.
The artists of the Pictures generation were the first to come of age in the era of mass media and widely broadcast entertainment. They understood that you no longer need to see a film to live in its story. Advertising, film stills, televisual language and ubiquitous reproduction became their subjects; appropriation became their tool. The counternarratives created by the Pictures artists undermined mass media’s manufacture of stereotypes related to masculinity, femininity, value, and power. Still, the resultant works became icons and standards of their own, to a degree that simply writing the names Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, Allan McCollum, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman calls to mind a lexicon of cowboys, businessmen, ingenues, and status symbols.
Photographic imaging and mechanical reproduction were common touchstones for all the Pictures artists, even when resultant work took the form of painting, drawing, performance, or sculpture. Here, Bühler-Rose engages with intarsia, or inlaid wood mosaic, a method likely derived from South Asian ivory and wood inlay traditions, and uses the natural colors of wood, with no dyes or paints. The process found its richest expression in Western Art during the Italian Renaissance. The ambiguity that is part of their construction--are these two-dimensional pictures, are these three-dimensional sculptures, are they both—harkens to one of the most salient features of Pictures art: something between original and copy, between a specific representation and simply a picture.
Douglas Crimp wrote in his essay accompanying the 1977 exhibition at Artists Space1 “Those processes of quotation, excerption, framing, and staging that constitute the strategies of the work I have been discussing necessitate uncovering strata of representation.” In these works Bühler-Rose points to the institutional labels and shipping tags on the backs of artworks tracking a history of exhibition and sale. The very stuff of value. In this, as artworks are exhibited and historicized, it is impossible to divorce the success of the artists from the spaces that supported them. As with the artists themselves, the galleries—among those featured here are Mary Boone, Barbara Gladstone Gallery, Yvon Lambert, Metro Pictures, Sprüth Magers — became some of the most iconic galleries for contemporary art. The galleries themselves significantly transforming how art circulates internationally, changing forever the valuation and traffic of art objects. To quote Crimp’s one last time. “Needless to say, we are not in search of sources or origins, but of structures of signification: underneath each picture there is always another picture”.
- Anthony Elms
