Description
Edition of 351 copies, one-sided LP, first presented at Alte Grammophon Fabrik, Hannover, October 1st 1999.
“In Live (2003), sounds composed from 351 ‘live’ recordings in the artist’s record collection, spanning a variety of musical styles from improvised jazz to rock, pop, folk and classical music, the artist brought together the sounds of audiences recorded over the last forty years in many parts of the world. In this way the concept of a live presence of the art audience was created in an empty hall from ‘nothing’.“ (Kunsthalle Bern)
“Art, in general, is often said, is a verb. It makes a difference to the world and to our perceptions of it not by producing works, but by working in the world: where and as it can, pursuing and activating opportunities which lie close to life and discovering not what may, but what needs to happen. What happens when an artist succeeds in making nothing happen?“ (Pavel Büchler)
“Pavel Büchler (b.1952 in Czechoslovakia) is an artist, influential teacher and occasional writer. He is Emeritus Professor in Fine Art at the Manchester School of Art.
Pavel Büchler’s formal training, first as a printer’s apprentice then student at the School of Graphic Arts (1970-72) and as a typography student at the Institute of Applied Arts (1973-76), and the circumstances in then-communist Prague where his craft-learning was undertaken, have indelibly marked his artistic life ever since. They return time and again as an inseverable mix of the learned and the unlearned. Coming from a country that no longer exists, Czechoslovakia (where a debate currently rages about renaming the state again: “Czechia”?!), to Cambridge, England, via Paris in 1981, where he found a West he knew less about than he expected, the immigrant experience of living with the real and false antinomies between communism and capitalism during the collapse of History anchors a common perspective in much of his work. It is the lived – in the sense of the everyday – slippages and imperfections in the various forms of cultural unity promised by translation, assimilation, democratization and collective action that seem to preoccupy his attention. And these everyday aberrations are filtered into his practice through the explicit and constant theme of work, as explored through the labour of and commitment to art working.“ (Tommy Simoens, Antwerp)
“Summing up his own practice as “making nothing happen”, he is committed to the catalytic nature of art – its potential to draw attention to the obvious and revealing it as ultimately strange. His subtle interventions and wry texts are concerned with revealing the accepted and everyday as ultimately bizarre. A key-operative mode in Pavel Büchler’s praxis is a reinvention of storytelling, long-time peeled away from the surfaces of modern and contemporary art or too often replaced by mere testimony. Büchler works with old technology, audio recording, light and the material and mental presence of texts in his installations that deal with the emergence of experience and meaning in art.
Büchler’s work evolves around two fundamental concerns: time and the manipulation of found materials. Concerned with the distortions of language, he gives a critical attention to the gaps in communication, fascinated as he is with the limits of the communicative properties of visual language. He often addresses the question of the legitimacy of communication in addition to its ephemeral and long-lasting nature.“ (Kunsthalle Bern)