One would always chuckle looking at Werner Büttner’s art. For instance, the Noch Less Monster peeking out of a Venetian lagoon against a searing, grainy yellow backdrop while clutching a tiny guitar—a classic Cubist element—behind which stands the Doge’s Palace rendered into a derelict building; or the bulls from the Lascaux Cave paintings are conflated into a cartoonish pattern on a washi tape that punctuates through an impressionist landscape, one after another, passing through the grove in an orderly fashion… In Analogies, Allegories, and Metaphors of the Human Condition, Büttner’s latest exhibition with Triumph Gallery, these profound yet absurd images come at us that titillate our perception of art in every possible way.
Büttner’s visual repertoire transcends the boundaries of art historical genres, from animals and humans to geometric and anthropomorphic forms. Ambiguous and anything goes, their origin can be traced back to the rise of Neo-Expressionism in 1980s Germany, during which “people grew weary of Minimalism and conceptual art, yearning for the revival of icons once again,” and Büttner’s epochal works blazed a trail. Born in 1954 in East Germany, his mother “kidnapped” him to West Germany two months before the construction of the Berlin Wall, where he studied law in 1973. During then, the legacy of Nazism was very much alive in the political and academic circles of West Germany, marked by the 1960s student movement and its abrupt dissolution. Against such a historical backdrop, Büttner took up painting and became a leading figure of the Junge Wilde movement in Germany, alongside Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen. His early works were mostly completed in the Alla Prima technique, which offers an image of a busy young man preoccupied with myriad duties beyond painting.
According to the artist, the rebelliousness of his paintings stems from the fact that he had never received any proper art education. “When I began to paint in the 1980s, no one showed me the ropes. For example, no one treated animals as a proper subject, historical subjects fell out of fashion, and graphic design elements were rejected by modern art. I didn’t understand why, so I painted everything.” His works sometimes appear in the lower art form of natural science illustrations. For example, in Is Humour a Concept of Nature? two flattened dinosaurs, clad in colorful mosaic patterns, float upon the clouds, grinning with one tooth missing; while at first glance, the ghastly face in the background ascends into the center of the composition like some kind of higher being, left with only one remaining front tooth—prophetically pointing to a future that could be as tragicomic as his satirical illustrations. Sometimes the allegories in his paintings are rendered with more nuances, as in Bathing Russians, where the artist, “…showcases a pair of soldiers’ uniforms, neatly folded near the seashore. No actual soldiers are in sight, hinting that they’ve gone swimming. In German, there’s an expression ‘baden gehen,’ which translates to ‘go swimming,’ meaning one loses touch and becomes unsuccessful with something—signifying the event that was about to happen in Russia.”
Unfettered by any pictorial conventions, Werner takes liberties in the compositions of his works, incorporating a plethora of symbols that range from art history, literature, and realpolitik, though his usages of these symbols often poke fun at their actual meanings. Huddled under a beam of light, Giacometti’s iconic sculptures of skeletal human figures became some form of spectral beings that lurk within the conical space and are further relegated to the title, Slender Lumps of Clay. Werner is also obsessed with Goya’s depictions of war and disaster. “In an attempt to make the violence (in Goya’s art) contemporary,” he borrowed the composition of Abduction of a Woman, an etching by the Spanish artist, replaced the murky background with a bright, sunny one, rendered the work with a stiff cartoonish style, and christened this absurd act of appropriation with a contradictory title—Orginal Copy.
“I see myself as a text-image strategist, showcasing the world under my observation and experience. In certain works, I think it is necessary to include texts in the compositions. They can instantly shout out the messages to the viewers.” In many cases, the inclusion of textual materials also enhances the humor of Büttner’s works. The painting The Pleasure of Functioning emphasizes the conflict between text and image, in which the German term “FUNKTIONSLUST” on the upper portion of the composition points to the pleasure higher beings such as humans and dolphins gain from engaging in physical activity itself—especially in the exercises of their particular natural gifts or animal power, while two tulip plants (lower being) in the center struggle to survive in the polluted industrial landscape.
Büttner’s works inherited the legacy of political satire from Berlin Dada, and it’s easy for one to discern the influence of the propaganda posters from 1970s China. Around the same period, the West German art world took a few steps back from its Maoist fervor and it gradually evolved into a more complex attitude, where the longing for such art form was mixed with derision. The curator of the show Thomas Eller delineates the historical thread of this intersection between German and Chinese art: “Lu Xun amassed a huge collection of prints by Kollwitz because she shed light on the suffering of commoners during wartime. Lu Xun was inspired by that and organized workshops that revitalized the interest in woodblock print among young artists. This movement later influenced the art of Maoist propaganda, which in turn fueled the creativity of the German art world, and now the thread is returning to China via Werner.”
Envisioned his paintings to be a visual expression of “la Comedie Humaine,” Büttner veils his works with a façade of comedy while concealing irony to be its core. He is knowledgeable, yet sly, playful, and naive, just like Socrates walking down the street, pretending to know nothing, pulling a wise man in to ask questions, and through a chain of questions, his interrogation turns the questions against the wise man himself. Irony is the core of Socratic dialectic, and εἰρωνεία, its ancient Greek etymology, translates to “feigning ignorance.” According to Kierkegaard, Socratic irony goes beyond abstract ideas, denying the sublime and leaping from reason to passion, hoping to improve the ethics of the city-state.
For Kierkegaard, the irony is never nihilistic and cynical, but a positive approach toward the root of existence by manifesting ignorance as the facade of truth. Büttner’s works respond to such an approach. He sees irony not as a mode of expression, but as a way of existence. “It is pointless to try to teach moral lessons with artworks. It only pisses people off, so I pretend to laugh at the world. As in the works of Rabelais, Jonathan Swift, and Cervantes, there were often countless tears behind the laughter.”
Because of this, Büttner’s works require attentive reading and one to converse with. His cunning wordplays and pictorial allegories forbid conventional autobiographical and historical interpretations. “I am always looking for plausible images that can represent the things I’ve been through, but you better not believe anything I’ve said about myself either—honesty is the most elegant mask.” Büttner believes that people are constantly being thrown into a family, or even a zeitgeist, “…into a political and social order of uncertain quality and duration.” In this sense, personal history is involuntary and fragile. If we failed to recognize his deceptions, we will, in the end, be dumbfounded by his retorts.
Perhaps this is why art historians called Büttner a “bad boy” or viewed him as a devoted advocate of “Bad Painting (Schlechten Malerei)”. First appeared in an eponymous exhibition curated by Marcia Tucker in 1978 at the New Museum of Contemporary Art; the term “Bad Painting” renounced the traditional aesthetic and taste that stemmed from “good painting” and was characterized by its distorted figurations, unconventional juxtapositions, and non-artistic style. Led by Büttner, Kippenberger, and Oehlen, the German camp of “Bad Painting” was known for its crude artistic technique and disrespect for traditional visual language, but more emotionally charged than its predecessor, encapsulating a multitude of political and social metaphors.
For today’s standard, the label “bad” may seem too emotionally charged in the case of Büttner. We have learned to be alert of the ideologies and social rules that accompany the good and the bad, and we are often hesitant to talk about the dichotomy of morality. But Büttner can always proclaim: “Yes, of course, my works are about ethics. I adopt the credo of Satan—‘non serviam,’ I will not serve.”
The curator Thomas Eller employed Nietszchian theory in an attempt to unpack the “bad” in Büttner: “In German, ‘bad (schlecht)’ doesn’t equate to evil. It is just purely bad, or one could compare it with the meanings of simple and downscaling. This act of debasement is exactly the creative practice of Büttner. Although he is a moralist, with an unflinching honesty that never gives in to any misdeed, he never takes it as an opportunity for virtual signaling, which is remarkable for a man and even rarer for an artist.”
Nowadays, Büttner lives in Geesthacht, a small town east of Hamburg, where his studio is housed in a 1930s hotel building that once served as a theater. Once filled with music and guests, the bygone glamour of the hotel was buried alongside World War II within the grand flow of history. In this renovated, pristine showroom-like studio, Büttner continues to paint the repeated failures of humanity. The laughter we make when we look at his works, much like people’s derision over Don Quixote and Prince Myshkin, in the end, only reflects the absurdity of society: there’s nothing within the sublime that upholds human dignity.
