Teachers on a limited materials budget throughout the land rejoice as the variety of things you can do with a sheet of cardboard and bottle of PVA is demonstrated with staggering, inventive aplomb in Michael Beutler's 'Pump House' on show now at Spike Island!
 |
| Michael Beutler 'Haus Beutler' (2014/16) Mixed media. |
Industrial alongside low budget materials such as paper,
string, sticky-tape, cloth, timber and yes, copious amounts of PVA glue are used by
Beutler and his team to create large-scale, ambitious and immersive spaces. For
his first solo exhibition in a gallery in the UK the German born artist tailors
his work to fit the former Tea Factory space that is now Spike Island; here
cardboard is rolled, scrunched, wrapped and overlapped to create walls, panels,
lights and free-standing architectural forms or prototypes. The resulting work
is temporary and bordering between the precarious and surprisingly robust as
the limits to how these common-place materials can be recycled and manipulated is inventively
explored. Its professional amateurism let loose, in what is the first of what I anticipate to be many more oxymoron’s used to describe what Beutler has achieved in bringing Pump House to Bristol's Spike Island.
 |
| 'Tea Factory' (2016) Card, dye, rope, metal pipes, pulleys. |
Cardboard painted tubes in one area of the gallery, titled ‘Tea
Factory’ are one example of how play and low-tech experimentation with paper to
create structure and form can become vastly transformed when the boundaries of
scale and volume are pushed; the throw-away nature of these materials now
becomes more sculptural, more weighty and architectural. Are they arches, bridges or Christmas crackers, I'm contentedly uncertain...Walls within ‘Haus
Beutler’ (2014/16) become abstract, patch-work quilt like collages, blurring
the distinction between abstract surface and structure. All of it is a form of
serious or extreme play. I.e. If you could take a humble rag rug or toilet-roll
archway/bridge and make another one on a grand scale then it adopts a new sense
of purposefulness, celebration of the material properties the materials contain.
For example cloth is malleable, can be stained, stretched, scrunched, compacted;
it has a tension to it, all of which are properties that in Pump House are
adopted into large scale building techniques (the cloth becomes bricks for
building).
It is always refreshing to see art that is fun and walking
in and around Pump House feels like being a participant more than a spectator
to the work; watching other people inhabit these unusual paper-lined walls
feels like being in the art work. As
previously alluded to I also like the contradiction of everything in the spaces
looking very hand-made and unpolished yet being aware through watching the
video pieces (dotted throughout the installation) that it has actually taken a
huge amount of team work/effort to create all the stuff in it. It’s a testament
to making and the construction and attributes that come with a creative process.
 |
| 'Haus Beutler' (2014/16) Mixed media. (detail) |
I promised myself I wouldn’t write about comparing the work
to Phyllida Barlow here; I will not compare Michael Beutler to Phyllida Barlow.
I will not compare Michael Beutler to Phyllida Barlow. I will not compare
Michael Beutler to Phyllida Barlow....But, I think it is almost impossible not
to see similarities between the two artist’s works!!! I’m sorry. Originality
being only undetected plagiarism aside, both artists use low-grade materials to
create abstract, often unstable looking forms that can be walked in or around
by their audience. I think the crucial differences between the two being that
Barlow is more of a painter and Beutler is much more context and process driven; the materials often coming
from off the site they are built in and thus transformed back into their
original environments in an altered state; the central piece in the exhibition
alluding to Spike Island’s original use as a tea factory also echoed in the use
of tea-bag bricks throughout. The processes of how the components in his
installations are made is also often more ingenious than the result and within
Pump House a variety of Heath Robinson style contraptions which have been
designed to mass-produce walls of wavy, shiney corrugated card are displayed
alongside the resulting constructions themselves (and believe me they are quite wacky, but they do the job they were designed for!). I think Beutler wants the
audience to know how it’s made and part of the creative challenge is him
devising these contraptions made from bits of wood and sticky-tape that enable
him to quickly produce larger volumes of surfaces and components to build with.
Humour aside, I was in no way demeaning this exhibition when
I called it ‘professional amateurism’ because that is exactly what it is,
taking low-tech, low material and transforming it into something new, arguably extraordinary, which
retains the look of a DIY mentality. On a smaller scale these things could be
classed as amateur but the installation here is so complex in its variety and
volume that it must take a team of organising, planning and professionalism in
order to pull it off. It reminds me also of Spartacus Chetwynd, a Turner Prize
nominee whose work also sought to challenge the definition of ‘amateur’ within
art and critique it as a pure, unpretentious form of creativity rather than as
a negative; the perceived ‘lack of skill’ in a work of art is a kind of skill
in itself. Beutler’s installation shares some of those ideas I think and
possibly may make people consider how we define ‘skill’ and what expectations
that creates in terms of how we perceive skill and production within art.
Michael Beutler’s ‘Pump
House’ is on at Spike Island Bristol until June 19th 2016 http://www.spikeisland.org.uk/events/exhibitions/michael-beutler/
