Matthew Buckingham
22 Oct - 27 Nov 2010
MATTHEW BUCKINGHAM
"An Alphabet"
October 22 - November 27, 2010
Opening: Friday, October 22 2010, 6 - 9 pm
The Konrad Fischer Galerie Düsseldorf is proud to present a retrospective solo exhibition of the American artist Matthew Buckingham. Video, slide and sound works as well as several prints and photographs made between 1999 and 2010 explore the relationship between speech, language, handwriting and historiography.
In his multi-piece work “An Alphabet” (2010) Buckingham questions the use and finiteness of the phonetic system. The title “An Alphabet” doubles as an English pun on the German word “analphabet”, meaning “illiterate”. The 16mm projection shows Matthew Buckingham’s father, an elementary school art educator, cutting out the letters of the alphabet freehand from sheets of paper. This used to be an educational tool for his pupils to compose statements of their own without using a letter twice. All letters not used in the statement were displayed as open storage alongside the arranged messages.
In the installation “Definition” (2000), an image of the London attic where Samuel Johnson wrote the first dictionary of standard English between 1747 and 1755 is projected on the wall. The recorded voice reflects upon the circumstances that brought the dictionary into being and on the complexities of languages as reflected in dictionaries, as well as the attempts to question the growing hegemony of English as an “international language”.
The date “1720” (2009), set in black Caslon type on a white background, is projected on a small suspended screen while the third movement of J.S. Bach’s Sonata in G major for Flute and Continuo is heard on the film’s soundtrack. Bach is believed to have written the sonata in 1720, the same year that William Caslon began creating the typeface that bears his name. The film is designed as an intersection between aural and visual artifacts that share a common date of origin but are otherwise arbitrarily paired. In this work Matthew Buckingham manipulates the viewer on purpose, while works such as “Address Unknown” ((2010) and “Rudi-Dutschke-Strasse” (2008) exemplify arbitrary handling with history and historiography of public agencies. Buckingham’s vain attempt to send a postcard to the dismantled Palace of the Republic, the cultural seat of the German Democratic Republic’s parliament, ends with a “Return to sender”. The renaming from Koch-Strasse into Rudi-Dutschke-Strasse in Berlin near to the Axel-Springer-House in April 2008 documents the terminated importance and rehabilitation of a historically controversial celebrity.
"An Alphabet"
October 22 - November 27, 2010
Opening: Friday, October 22 2010, 6 - 9 pm
The Konrad Fischer Galerie Düsseldorf is proud to present a retrospective solo exhibition of the American artist Matthew Buckingham. Video, slide and sound works as well as several prints and photographs made between 1999 and 2010 explore the relationship between speech, language, handwriting and historiography.
In his multi-piece work “An Alphabet” (2010) Buckingham questions the use and finiteness of the phonetic system. The title “An Alphabet” doubles as an English pun on the German word “analphabet”, meaning “illiterate”. The 16mm projection shows Matthew Buckingham’s father, an elementary school art educator, cutting out the letters of the alphabet freehand from sheets of paper. This used to be an educational tool for his pupils to compose statements of their own without using a letter twice. All letters not used in the statement were displayed as open storage alongside the arranged messages.
In the installation “Definition” (2000), an image of the London attic where Samuel Johnson wrote the first dictionary of standard English between 1747 and 1755 is projected on the wall. The recorded voice reflects upon the circumstances that brought the dictionary into being and on the complexities of languages as reflected in dictionaries, as well as the attempts to question the growing hegemony of English as an “international language”.
The date “1720” (2009), set in black Caslon type on a white background, is projected on a small suspended screen while the third movement of J.S. Bach’s Sonata in G major for Flute and Continuo is heard on the film’s soundtrack. Bach is believed to have written the sonata in 1720, the same year that William Caslon began creating the typeface that bears his name. The film is designed as an intersection between aural and visual artifacts that share a common date of origin but are otherwise arbitrarily paired. In this work Matthew Buckingham manipulates the viewer on purpose, while works such as “Address Unknown” ((2010) and “Rudi-Dutschke-Strasse” (2008) exemplify arbitrary handling with history and historiography of public agencies. Buckingham’s vain attempt to send a postcard to the dismantled Palace of the Republic, the cultural seat of the German Democratic Republic’s parliament, ends with a “Return to sender”. The renaming from Koch-Strasse into Rudi-Dutschke-Strasse in Berlin near to the Axel-Springer-House in April 2008 documents the terminated importance and rehabilitation of a historically controversial celebrity.