WILLIAM BUCHINA
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plate 1 low information settings #5, 2020 acrylic on canvas 72 × 48 inches (182.9 × 121.9 cm)
W I B
L
U C
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I A M
H I N
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L O W I N F O R M AT I O N S E T T I N G S ESSAY BY THOMAS MICCHELLI
H O L L I S TAG GA R T 521 West 26th Street, 1st Floor, New York, NY 10001
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plate 2 low information settings #8, 2021 acrylic on canvas 24 × 36 inches (61 × 91.4 cm)
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FOREWORD
Hollis Taggart is pleased to present Low Information Settings, a solo exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by William Buchina. A master at creating surreal, dystopian narratives, Buchina’s recent works were completed during the pandemic lockdown and resonate with the current cultural moment. Considering the effect of the news cycle in the digital age, this exhibition explores the contrast between places in the world that have little access to news and information and places with too much access such as the United States. Although unspecific and somewhat otherworldly, the settings in the paintings evoke familiar pandemic scenes such as dead shopping malls, empty office buildings, boarded store fronts, and temporary field hospitals. William Buchina was one of the initial artists selected to join Hollis Taggart’s new contemporary division in 2019. His work first came to our attention in 2004, through exhibitions of his drawings and collages at small, non-traditional art spaces. He was first featured at Hollis Taggart in Highlight: Summer One in 2016, and we were immediately captivated by the unique visual world the artist creates, defined by masks, rituals, layered references, and superb draftsmanship. Buchina’s imagery takes on additional meanings in the COVID era, underscoring that his paintings encourage us to look closely and to reflect upon ourselves and American society. We are grateful to art critic and artist Thomas Micchelli for his insightful essay in this catalogue, which unpacks the subtle political references and social-historical connections that are found through a careful analysis of Buchina’s paintings. Micchelli aptly describes them as “sign-saturated puzzles.” As always, it is a pleasure, and a honor, to collaborate with William and to witness his development as a painter. PAUL EFSTATHIOU
HOLLIS TAGGART
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WILLIAM BUCHINA
by Thomas Micchelli
IT’S LIKE POKING AROUND A CRIME SCENE.
The welter of detail, verging on chaos,
subverts logic and reason. Anything could mean anything, or nothing. Acting on instinct, you pick a scrap out of the disarray, a picture-withina-picture. It shows a fortress rising above a map of Texas; a thought balloon inscribed with the question, “WHAT’S UP, VERN?”; and two partially hidden phrases, one at the top and the other at the bottom. You deduce that the words at the top are “MT CARMEL ERUPTS,” and below “THE SINFUL EPISODE” followed by what appears to be the number one. A couple of Google searches later, you’re deep in the federal siege of the Branch Davidian cult’s compound in Waco, Texas, also known as the New Mount Carmel Center, a reference to the mountain in Israel where the prophet Elijah refuted the existence of the pagan god Baal. The siege began on February 28, 1993, after a gunfight broke out between cult members and agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, and Tobacco, who were attempting to search the premises for illegal weapons. It ended fifty-one days later, when an FBI assault resulted in a fire that led to the deaths of seventy-six Davidians, including the cult’s leader, David Koresh, whose real name was Vernon Wayne Howell. On April 19, 1995, the second anniversary of the Mount Carmel fire, Timothy McVeigh detonated a fertilizer-filled Ryder truck parked at the curb in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, resulting in one hundred sixty-eight fatalities. This particularly American thread of paranoia, idolatry, and violence unspools out of a relatively minor segment of William Buchina’s enormous, three-part drawing, Scenery in Red #4 (pl. 3). In another picture-within-apicture on the same sheet (the triptych’s right panel), a handgun floats on a
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white-flecked black field among other menacing paraphernalia, while in a third image, a man doubles over in curiosity, pain, or nausea, a nose cone hanging from his head. Overlapping the center panel, yet another independent image—this one supported by two poles, like a billboard or a drive-in movie screen—displays a masked man with his hands raised to his eyes, his index finger pointed and thumb cocked as if to pantomime a pistol shot. Formally, you can trace a diagonal line running from the cloud-like red swirls in the upper right-hand corner, across the bottom edge of the mock billboard/screen, and along a drainage ditch bookended by two discarded tires. The line ends at the bottom of the left panel, where a masked woman holds her breath, as if to ready herself for a full-immersion baptism in the same black depths that became a central motif in Buchina’s painting cycle, In and Around the Water (2016). The artist exhibited this series at Slag Contemporary in Brooklyn from February 27 to April 3, 2016 in the teeth of the Republican presidential primary. On March 26, 2016, I published a review in Hyperallergic, writing that Buchina’s cycle of paintings:
Source material for Buchina’s recent work
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plate 3 scenery in red #4, 2020 ink on paper (triptych) 50 × 114 inches (127 × 289.6 cm)
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plate 4 low information settings #3, 2020 acrylic on canvas 72 × 48 inches (182.9 × 121.9 cm)
…offers one artist’s vision of where we’ve come from and what we are, but without a hint as to where we might be heading. That’s the electorate’s job, and it’s not going well.1 Despite his references in these and prior works to historical figures such as Adlai Stevenson, Michael Dukakis, and Nixon’s Watergate henchmen H. R. Haldeman, Chuck Colson, and John Ehrlichman, Buchina never views his imagery as overtly political. The abundance of masks in the series presented here, Scenery and Low Information Settings, do not allude to the COVID-19 pandemic—he has in fact used similar motifs often in the past—and the angry mobs swarming the steps of a ravaged, cavernous mall in Low Information Settings #6 (pl. 6) are not a response to the sacking of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Uncannily, he completed them two days before the insurrection. And yet, these factors, to name only two, all but demand that Scenery and Low Information Settings be read as a summation of the four brutish years we have experienced since 2016, when the cultish contagion Buchina charted in the series In and Around the Water fully infected the national bloodstream. Two men, drenched in apocalyptic shades of red, pull a strongbox from a hole outside an abandoned commercial strip; gaping fish-mouths straight out of Hieronymus Bosch burst from the windows of an old wooden church; double amputees wave blank signs and arcane flags; a centaur floats on a black river as a faceless crowd crushes forward, brandishing camera phones. Buchina heaps folly upon folly, enigma upon enigma across scrapyards of environmental degradation, political vacuity, and spiritual bankruptcy. But these carnivals of the grotesque, by dint of their very inscrutability, are nevertheless permeated with the allure of secret knowledge—the conviction that a cryptic gesture, a private code, a narrative web will hold the key to subterranean truths. Buchina effortlessly navigates the double bind presented in his work: its significance lies in the specificity of its sources, while its avoidance of the topical enables it to singe the nervous system unimpeded by the distractions of current events. He maneuvers the obfuscation of those sources through a
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plate 5 low information settings #1, 2020 acrylic on canvas 48 × 72 inches (121.9 × 182.9 cm)
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plate 6 low information settings #6, 2021 acrylic on canvas 72 × 96 inches (182.9 × 243.8 cm)
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richly layered imagistic deluge dredged from the subconscious and guided through poetic indirection. The impossibility of fully fathoming such imagery is only deepened by the instability of the knowledge systems informing it: from Koresh to QAnon (in a rare reference to real-world violence, the artist has tucked the logo of Comet Ping Pong into the nether regions of Scenery in Red #6 (pl. 7), the imaginings of conspiracy cultists continuously twist and mutate as they collide with reality, only to slither back into the heads of the credulous. In response, Buchina has created a unique correlative: a straight-ahead approach to figuration that subverts, in both style and substance, the legacy of the Enlightenment as espoused by Western painting. Through his reliance on stylings more in common with book illustration and graphic design, he engages the varieties of Pop without indulging in their slickness, condescension, or irony, setting forth a visual idiom untethered from the scientific, psychological, and philosophical tropes governing the strands of modernism and post-modernism. It’s art mirroring life unbound by reality checks. Anything could mean anything, or nothing. The longer you ponder these sign-saturated puzzles, the wider their implications propagate—teasing, looping, echoing—before flickering out in a bleak, comic emptiness. Coherence is glimpsed darkly, if at all, like a face staring up at you from beneath a frozen lake. And yet the stroboscopic immediacy of Buchina’s formal vocabulary— the overlapping imagery; the flat, electric color; the vexing juxtapositions of subject and scale—creates an intoxicating buzz that compels deep looking while mitigating the stark pessimism of his private mythos. Buchina’s mind games cut across his entire body of work, but the differences between the various series are worth noting as much as the motifs binding them into a sprawling, operatic cycle of derangement and dissipation. That said, measured against his previous changes, the break from Scenery to Low Information Settings feels like a cold snap. Scenery and a related series, Attempts to Retain Significance, were completed between 2019 and 2020. Entirely done in ink on paper but varying in width from 19 to 114 inches, the individual works making up Scenery are
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apportioned among the three primary colors—Scenery in Red, Scenery in Blue, Scenery in Yellow—and many are composed of two or more sheets. The paintings from Low Information Settings (2020–21), on the other hand, are all in acrylic on canvas, in sizes ranging from 24 by 36 inches to 72 by 96 inches. The material differences, however, which contrast a raggedy-edged warmth with a sleekly machined cool, are just the beginning. The Scenery series is clotted with incident, a teeming dreamscape with no center of gravity and no place for the eye to rest, made all the more frenzied by the overlapping brushstrokes of colored ink that render the surface into a mottled, pulsating skin. My description of the three-part drawing, Scenery in Red #4, discusses a number of elements but leaves out many more, including the center panel’s main event—three naked men marching through a desolate suburbia, their shaggy manes falling beneath their shoulders, toward a simple brick building, its purpose unknown, with a billboard-size placard rising above its roof bearing the letters “GSdM.” While there is a suggestion of political activity—in the left panel, a group of three women and six men appear to be voting at a line of narrow booths— the allusions to cults and sects, from the Branch Davidians in one corner to the woman preparing for her apparent baptism in another, bracket the composition and thicken the atmosphere with the heady incense of gnostic credos. A Google search of “GSdM” comes up blank. Religion, or what passes for it among evangelicals adorning their altars with golden calves, is foregrounded by the fish-filled church in Scenery in Red #6 and the pyrite-rimmed pool of black water in Scenery in Yellow #5 (pl. 8), where a man leans forward in a director’s chair, holding what looks like a makeshift cross in his hands. The hollowness of an orthodoxy that elevates the prosperity gospel and the divine providence of charlatans, however, seems beside the point, too obvious to bother with; rather, these works have more in common with Goya’s “sleep of reason” and the monsters it produces. Buchina’s monsters, however, fit seamlessly into contemporary American life; instead of flitting about on bat’s wings to frighten the peasantry, they clamp on custom-fit blinders to distract themselves with improbable, pointless pursuits. Still, it is possible to pick at least some of them out of a
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plate 7 scenery in red #6, 2020 acrylic on canvas (triptych) 57 1⁄2 × 30 inches (146.1 × 76.2 cm)
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plate 8 scenery in yellow #5, 2020 ink on paper 52 × 52 inches (132.1 × 132.1 cm)
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lineup, which is not the case with the anonymous crowds occupying Low Information Settings. Here, the hollowness of the soul is magnified in the dehumanization of the built environment, represented by imposing structures designed to diminish the stature of anyone attempting to pass through their spaces or gather outside their walls. These tabernacles of late capitalism—malls, airports, office blocks—are abandoned and derelict, groaning under the weight of unsustainable business plans. Fissures yawn; weeds propagate; rubble and soot pile up. The cascading crises they represent, their severance of societal bonds and failure of civilizational stewardship, have sullied the country’s political comity and daily life; like the gods of Valhalla, they seem to yearn for their own destruction. The series title, according to the artist, comes from a news report on the recent conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the region of NagornoKarabakh. The report referred to the area as a “‘low information setting,’” a condition that “made it hard to make the residents accept…the fact that ownership of the land was changing hands again, and they had to vacate.”2 The net cast by the title, then, encompasses the widespread distrust of facts that is currently eroding our faith in institutions and one another, as well as the generations-long shortfalls in education, most pointedly in the area of critical thinking, that have allowed an influx of unorthodox narratives— the mystical, the conspiratorial, and the outright psychotic—to control behavior. In the mostly unpopulated Low Information Settings #8 (pl. 2), which was completed in the aftermath of the Capitol siege, a couple of pyramids rest on a knoll while a gaggle of protestors, all wearing COVID masks, raise their signs. One of the protest posters is emblazoned with eyeballs, which, paired with the pyramids, echo the Masonic “Eye of Providence” printed on the dollar bill, invoking one of the first secret societies at play in the United States. In the equally deserted Low Information Settings #2 (pl. 10), the humans are outnumbered by a small flock of birds darting through the air or perched on walls and wires. A smokestack blasts out a single sulfurous cloud high above tiers of gridded walls that are singular in Buchina’s output for their dedication to pure opticality. Below, several posters emerge from a recessed, maze-like passage; while most display images—a bottle topped by a leafy
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plate 9 low information settings #4, 2020 acrylic on canvas 44 × 44 inches (111.8 × 111.8 cm)
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plate 10 low information settings #2, 2020 acrylic on canvas 44 × 44 inches (111.8 × 111.8 cm)
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Source material for Buchina’s recent work
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sprig, a profile of a woman asleep—one bears a question: “IS YOUR CHURCH ATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms] APPROVED?” And in the upper left quadrant of Low Information Settings #1 (pl. 5), a yellow citadel resembling an armory, prison, or luxury hotel rises above the horizon. Beside it, a scrap of paper—an apparent FBI memo from the 1990s (the last digit of the year is missing)—offers up phrases like “The source advised that [REDACTED], a resident of Eagar, has [REDACTED]” and “radio broadcast in which he frequently condemn[ed].” These odd, elliptical clues eventually lead to Milton William Cooper, a voluble conspiracy theorist and author of the 1991 book, Behold a Pale Horse, a rambling must-read among survivalist militiamen and prison inmates. His short-wave radio program, The Hour of the Time, was broadcast from 1992, the year before the Branch Davidian siege, until he died at the age of fifty-eight in a gunfight with police on November 5, 2001, at his home in Eagar, Arizona. Four months before his death, during a broadcast on June 28, 2001, Cooper predicted an attack on the United States by Osama bin Laden. Eleven days earlier, one of his fans, Timothy McVeigh, was executed by lethal injection at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. Just below Buchina’s yellow citadel, a dump truck and a steam shovel prepare the earth—for a time of renewal, or a day of reckoning—amid sinkholes and pits, diseased teeth, and buildings without windows or doors.
Notes 1. Thomas Micchelli, “Take Me to the River: William Buchina’s Redemption Paintings,” Hyperallergic Weekend, March 26, 2016, hyperallergic.com/286049/ take-me-to-the-river-william-buchinas-redemption-paintings/. 2. William Buchina, email message to author, January 18, 2021.
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plate 11 low information settings #7, 2020 acrylic on canvas 24 × 36 inches (61 × 91.4 cm)
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WILLIAM BUCHINA’S
art is a mesmerizing
or inscrutable iconography. Ambiguities
fusion of the real and unreal, woven with
run amok; meaning is refracted through the
complex meanings and executed with the
prism of the viewer’s own experience.
graphic snap of black lines against flat, electric color. His dystopian anti-narratives,
Buchina’s paintings and drawings have been
which share a visual vocabulary with vintage
featured in solo exhibitions in New York
book illustrations and graphic novels,
and Brooklyn, as well as Upstate New York
obscure their profusion of topical and
and abroad. He has been the subject of
historical references with imagery dredged
profiles in Interview, White Hot Magazine,
from the depths of the subconscious. Buchina
Artsy, and New York Times Magazine, and
makes paintings with the insouciance of a
his work has been reviewed in Hyperallergic,
Dadaist and the curiosity of a collagist,
Blackqube Magazine, and elsewhere. Buchina
selecting magazine photos and other source
lives and works in Brooklyn.
materials from his own pictorial archive, rendering them onto paper or canvas, and then riffing on them with abandon.
THOMAS MICCHELLI
is an artist, writer, and
co-editor of Hyperallergic Weekend. His Buchina’s new work offers two distinct
paintings and drawings have been
perspectives on the chaotic social and
featured in group and solo exhibitions in
political culture we now inhabit. In his
New York, Brooklyn, and Hudson, New
series Scenery, the images teem unabated
York. In addition to Hyperallergic, his
across the surface, filled with unsettling
writing has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail,
mashups of scale, context, and subject—
Bookforum.com, Art21, and NY Art, and in
shifting from interior to exterior, day to
books and catalogues including Alice
night, all in the same composition.
Trumbull Mason: Pioneer of American
Dissociated figures, often outfitted in masks
Abstraction (Rizzoli, 2020), Ron Gorchov: At
and blinders, drift through multi-leveled
the Cusp of the 80s, Paintings 1979–1983
dreamscapes in the thrall of secret societies
(Cheim & Read, 2019), Maria Bussman:
and conspiracy cults. The second new
Allerdings (Passagen Verlag, 2018), Judith
series, Low Information Settings, in contrast, is
Bernstein: Cabinet of Horrors (The Drawing
dominated by the soulless architecture of
Center, 2017), Brenda Goodman: In a New
office blocks, airports, and malls,
Space (David & Schweitzer Contemporary,
populated by directionless loners and
2017), and Cordy Ryman: Free Fall (Tower 49
milling crowds, many holding signs or
Gallery, 2016).
waving flags inscribed with cryptic messages
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WILLIAM BUCHINA BIOGRAPHY
1978
Born in New York City Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY
EDUCATION
2002 B.F.A., Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2021 Low Information Settings, Hollis Taggart, New York 2019 Between Objects & Actions, SLAG Gallery, Brooklyn, NY 2018 312 Bowery: London, private venue, London 2016 In and Around Water, SLAG Gallery, Brooklyn, NY 2015 Time to Speak a Human Language, Garis & Hahn, New York 2014 Lower Than the Lowest Animal, Garis & Hahn, New York GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2020 Figure as Form, Hollis Taggart, New York Look Again, A Survey of Contemporary Painting, Hollis Taggart Contemporary, New York Taggart Times 7, Hollis Taggart Contemporary, New York Of Folly, Fortune, Glory, Ruin: William Buchina and Christina Nicodema, Hollis Taggart Contemporary, New York 2018 Highlight: Chelsea, Hollis Taggart, New York SLAG Gallery, Volta New York, New York 2017 312 Bowery: Paris Two, private venue, Paris Highlight: New Canaan, Silvermine Arts Center, New Canaan, Conn. 2016 Highlight: Summer One, Hollis Taggart Galleries, New York Homage to Hieronymous Bosch, National Arts Club, New York Art Bondensee, Maximilian Hutz, Bregenz, Austria 312 Bowery: Paris One, private venue, Paris SLAG Gallery, Pulse Art Fair, Miami 2015 312 Bowery: Stagecoach Run Art Festival, Franklin, NY Antidote for Daily Life, Hawkins, Hudson, NY
2014 312 Bowery: Los Angeles, private venue, Los Angeles Launch: InSitu Arts, New York 2013 City: Surface & Texture, Dickinson Gallery, New York 6 × 9: The November Show, National Arts Club, New York Image, Painting, Text, Garis & Hahn, New York 2012 Outside/In, ALAN Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey 2011 Near/Far, Burçak Bingöl and the Goethe Institute, Ankara, Turkey PRESS & PUBLICATIONS
Thomas Micchelli, “The Bioweapons of Culture War,” Hyperallergic, November 28, 2020, hyperallergic. com/604271/the-bioweapons-of-culture-war/. “Betting on the Figure at Volta 2018,” Arcade Project, March 2018, arcadeprojectzine.com/features/ betting-on-the-figure-at-volta-2018. Eileen Kinsella, “From a Ravaged Home to Creepy Mannequin Heads, Here’s What Caught Our Eye at Volta,” Artnet News, March 9, 2018, news. artnet.com/market/leonardo-dicaprio-voltamust-see-1240559. Thomas Micchelli, “Take Me to the River: William Buchina’s Redemption Paintings,” Hyperallergic, March 26, 2016, hyperallergic.com/286049/takeme-to-the-river-william-buchinas-redemptionpaintings/ Laura van Straaten, “Meticulously Assembled Paintings That Find Grace in the Gesture,” New York Times, September 2, 2015, nytimes.com/2015/ 09/02/t-magazine/william-buchina-paintingsgaris-hahn.html. “William Buchina’s Graphic Dreamscape and the Archive That Inspired It,” Artsy, September 9, 2015, artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-williambuchina-s-graphic-dreamscape-and-the-archive. Thomas Micchelli, “Every Picture in the World: William Buchina’s Dream Logic,” Hyperallergic, October 3, 2015, hyperallergic.com/241500/every-picturein-the-world-william-buchinas-dream-logic/. “312 Bowery Group Interview,” White Hot Magazine, July 2015. Kurt McVey, “Lucid Dreaming with William Buchina,” Interview, April 2, 2014. Ella Riley-Adams, “The Good Old Boys: Four New Faces in Art,” The WILD Magazine, August 15, 2013.
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This catalogue has been published on the occasion of the exhibition “William Buchina: Low Information Settings” organized by Hollis Taggart, New York, and presented from March 4–April 24, 2021. All Artwork © William Buchina Essay © Thomas Micchelli ISBN: 978-1-7333303-9-8 Publication © 2021 Hollis Taggart All rights reserved. Reproduction of contents prohibited. Left: William Buchina, 2021. Photo by Sinejan Buchina. Hollis Taggart 521 West 26th Street 1st Floor New York, NY 10001 Tel 212 628 4000 Fax 212 570 5786 www.hollistaggart.com Catalogue production: Kara Spellman Copyediting: Jessie Sentivan Design: McCall Associates, New York Printing: Meridian Printing, East Greenwich, RI Photography: Joshua Nefsky
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