Daniel Buetti is currently inviting visitors to the SCHIRN to meditate in a sound installation. The Swiss artist became known for his alienation of fashion photographs.
Sometimes luminous dots flow out of the face of a beautiful young woman like tears, while other times they swirl around her head like a halo or flow over her entire body like a shower of gold. Or they merge to become letters and poetic messages: Is reality an illusion? Is beauty just the promise of happiness? Can beauty transcend culture? These are photographs mounted on light boxes from Daniele Buetti's series Dreams Result in More Dreams, which he began fifteen years ago.
The Swiss artist finds the immaculately staged faces of models in magazines. Then he alienates them by piercing them or mistreating them with a ballpoint pen. Artists began artistically exploiting images from advertisements, the daily press, and lifestyle magazines as early as the seventies. Termed "Appropriation Art," it was a strategy used by artists such as Barbara Kruger, Jack Goldstein, and Richard Prince. The latter's appropriation of the cowboy from Marlboro advertisements became legendary. He took pictures of details and presented them as independent works. As Marcel Duchamp had once done with his ready-mades, in doing so Prince radically challenged the concept of originality in art and used the seductive visual language of advertising to deconstruct the myths that had become ingrained in American society.
When Buetti takes up and processes pictures of models, this gesture also includes criticism of society and of a middle-class notion of art. In the nineties, he practiced the brutal criticism of consumption in his series Looking for Love by literally carving brand names such as Gucci or Versace into the skin of supermodels-- including, for example, Kate Moss and Christy Turlington--from the back using a ballpoint pen. The lettering resembles scarred tattoos--hardly poetic, but definitely striking.
Icons of Western Consumer Society
The works from the series Dreams Result in More Dreams come across as subtler. Buetti examines the construct of beauty we encounter daily on the street and in the media. Yet this time, the artist approaches the phenomenon in a poetic way. He stages the beautiful people as icons of Western consumer society and makes explicit reference to the aesthetics of cult images and images of saints. While he may destroy the surfaces of glossy pictures, whose appeal is based on their flawlessness, his ornamental and synergetic handling of them creates a new quality, an ambivalence between criticism and attraction.
Buetti wants to reach the viewer, to get down to the emotions we all share. Maybe You Can Be One of Us is the title of a monograph published in 2008 in conjunction with an exhibition at the Swiss Institute in New York. The artist's sound installation, a meditation instruction in color that visitors can now listen in to at the SCHIRN, is an experience that one can definitely share with others. Some of Buetti's images of models also have a meditative quality about them, such as one in which a young woman is lying on the floor and ponders the question incorporated into it of where strength comes from: pain or the lack of vulnerability? She is doomed to remain in this photographically frozen position and seek an answer.