Guru for the Google generation

Staged photographs of people dressed in weird masks and costumes, or down on all fours and covered with spaghetti, or bent over with their asses painted to look like faces. Simple cartoon-style line drawings whose humor is less like The New Yorker than a bored high-school student trying to amuse his friend in class. Sculptures assembled from ready-made materials into a wax sushi tower, or a smorgasbord of anthropomorphized fake food. Rambling, off-kilter films that have been likened to the MTV show Jackass.

On the surface, this oversimplified description of Olaf Breuning's work doesn't sound like a recipe for acclaim on the international art scene. Yet Breuning's restless bouncing among media and the wide range of topics his work skims is characteristic of the Google generation, the first one to suddenly experience a world of information placed at their fingertips. Simply put, he is tapping the zeitgeist of his generation. "We choose the fast way of communicating," he says.

Breuning's first solo show in Prague is at Langhans Galerie, a mini-retrospective that includes a representative sampling of works from different time periods and all the media he works in. Born in 1970 in Switzerland, he has been living since 2000 in New York City, where his work is represented by the prestigious gallery Metro Pictures.

His 2007 film Home 2 was one of the hot items at the most recent Whitney Biennial in New York. This half-hour film is a satirical travelogue that follows a hapless character as he "crashes into the Third World," as Breuning puts it. It lampoons tourists' lightly informed but deep fascination with the exotic, as the protagonist navigates Third World tourism with plenty of faux pas and missteps, sprinkled with a few shining moments of insight. Also screening at Langhans is Home 1, from 2004, which features two monitors playing simultaneously. On one, the same goofy protagonist is shown telling a series of anecdotes, while on the other accompanying exaggerated or dreamlike scenarios play out.

"He's a restless character with so much information, so many things in his head," Breuning says.

Breuning doesn't shy away from some of the critical labels that have been slapped on his work, like the Jackass comparison, or that it represents the "ADD generation." He says that while he doesn't have this condition himself, and insists that his attention is quite focused when he is working on a project, he also admits that he's easily bored - thus, his tendency to jump among different media.

The backbone of Breuning's work is people. He sees them as his "primary art material," and has no problem recruiting them. "Facebook is my new model agency," he says, explaining that after he comes up with an idea for a photograph or needs people for a film project, he puts out word on his Facebook page and watches the responses roll in.

In his photographs and in his films, Breuning says he aims to emphasize humanity's similarities rather than differences. "Our common language is eat, sleep, sexuality."

On the ground floor of the exhibition at Langhans are 10 of Breuning's large-format color photographs, representing a motley mix of subject matter. Many of them may leave the viewer wondering exactly what the artist is trying to express. Take one image, Double from 2002. It shows four people (who may be two sets of identical twins), all wearing tennis whites and crudely constructed bright yellow masks, and each holding a racket. Breuning says of this picture, "Maybe these are tennis players who play so much that their faces become like tennis balls. I just like how the colors look, the yellow and white together."

Still, one gets the feeling, which Breuning confirms, that there is more to his images than meets the eye. "These photos should be clear, immediately comprehensible," he says. "But, yes, each one has a back story."

The newest photographs in the show are from his series "Color Studies," installed as a group in one upstairs room. All of the photos are based on the three primary colors, with the addition of green. They are very direct in their expression - for example, one shows four women with similar hairstyles painted in minstrel blackface, but with stage makeup in the four bright colors. Another photo shows four figures hooded to resemble women wearing burkas or maybe Ku Klux Klan members, again in the same bright colors. Four other figures are bent over to show their asses painted in the four different colors and topped with rabbit ears, making them look like the Pokemon character Pikachu.

Breuning says that, for him, to work with these four basic colors was a great joy. "I'm fascinated with these four colors, and I'm happy to do something with them."

Also on display is a small selection of Breuning's simple line drawings. These visual one-liners may have a hint of social critique, through they are aimed at fairly easy targets and lack much subtlety. Again, he speaks of the directness he wishes to put across: "I draw so that people recognize it, but it's not really perfect." It is a visual shorthand, he says, with communication as its main objective. "I am not an artist's artist."

Whether in photographs, films, drawings, collages or sculptures, Breuning's work is infused with his own visual vocabulary. "It is my language and my way to speak about this life and world," he says. The function of his art in today's fast-moving world, he says, is "to stop it a little, to hold it for a few seconds."

Mimi Fronczak Rogers can be reached at
Features@praguepost.com