A provocative homecoming

Pavel Büchler's retrospective at DOX is the grandest homecoming to date for this multifaceted conceptual artist, who is obsessed with texts, old-fashioned technologies and communication.

Born in Prague in 1952, Büchler studied art and design, but was expelled from his studies and ended up working as a janitor. He was imprisoned following a failed attempt to illegally emigrate. But after his release, he eventually managed to make his way to England, settling there in 1981.

He co-founded and co-directed the Cambridge Darkroom Gallery (1983-87), then served as head of the Glasgow School of Art's School of Fine Art (1992-96). In 1997, he became a research professor at Manchester Metropolitan University. In recent years, his work has been shown in Berlin, Madrid, Shanghai, Antwerp and Eindhoven, among other cities, and he also appeared in the 9th International Istanbul Biennale (2005).

Büchler's first Prague "homecoming" was the show "Czechoslovak Photography in Exile," curated by Anna Fárová in 1992 at Mánes. He appeared in other group shows in Prague during the '90s, as well as in Olomouc and Zlín, and in Prague's International Triennial of Contemporary Art (ITCA) in 2008.

There is only one photograph in this exhibition, the sole work Büchler made before he emigrated. Titled Lime Tree (1980), it effectively documents the artist's shift from documentary photography to conceptual art. The black-and-white photo shows a lime, or linden, tree on an embankment of the Vltava River, not far from the artist's home. One branch and a section of the tree's trunk are broken and hang to the ground. Before making the photo, Büchler carefully picked off all of the dried leaves from the living branches of the tree and left the leaves on the damaged part. So in the photo, the dead section appears to be living, and the living section looks dead.

The remainder of the works in the show are conceptual. Some of them can seem whimsical, yet are poetic in their simplicity. Il Castello (2007) consists of two pencil stubs, a sharpened yellow Faber-Castell with just "Castell" left on the side, nestled against a smaller, dull-tipped blue pencil that contributes an "o" to complete the title. In their juxtaposition, the pencils vaguely recall castle embrasures. Trophy (2010) consists of two old Czech typewriters, one upside down and the other mounted on top of it. Such works reveal Büchler's fascination with writing materials, particularly old-school tools of communication: pencils, pen, paper and the manual typewriter. Yet communication itself is always thwarted in his works.

A series titled "Idle Thoughts" and subtitled "Diary" is spread over several rooms. Büchler began the series in 2003 by taking one sheet from each month of a 2003 diary and scribbling in blue and black ink in the space where reminders and thoughts should be. Then for Diary 2005, he scribbled over reproductions of the 2003 diary; for Diary 2008, he scribbled over copies of the 2005 piece, creating further layers of colored scribbling. What should have been recorded or remembered? What is being covered up, year upon year upon year?

Old technology suffuses much of the exhibition, giving it an antiquated feel. Groups of stylish but outmoded slide projectors are used in several rooms to display manipulated light and text on the walls. There are also two old-fashioned television sets showing a silent video loop of Samuel Beckett in his later years, shaking his head up and down.

The exhibition fills up the four rooms of DOX's tower gallery, as well as a new, open space on the other side of the complex that is apparently still under construction. The two sections are connected by a corridor with seemingly endless rows of Kafkaesque letters issuing bureaucratic and nonsensical notices or orders to the addressees.

The newer space contains the show's main attraction: The Castle (2005-10). Initially shown at the 9th International Biennale in Istanbul (2005) and now in the collection of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, it was updated for this Prague show. The work consists of vintage megaphone speakers, banged-up, dusty and peeling gray paint. Such speakers were patented by Marconi in 1926, the year Kafka's The Castle was published. The speakers are skewered like shish kebobs and rise to the ceiling, emitting excerpts from The Castle read by synthetic-sounding voices in German, Czech and English, which overlap to create a multilingual chatter. Loudspeakers are also placed outside, so that Kafka echoes vaguely in the courtyards and the street outside the complex, occasionally interrupted by a fanfare of trumpets.

Büchler's philosophy is that the "labor of art is unnecessary labor." Following the reasoning of Marx's historical materialism, which posits that the purposeful uselessness of art is really what gives it its definition, Büchler will continue toiling away, announcing his efforts to the world via obsolete technology.

Tony Ozuna can be reached at
features@praguepost.com