Ken Butler: Hybrid Visions – Center for New Music

Atrium Display: Ken Butler, Hybrid Visions

Artist Statement

Contemporary urban life is a bewildering collage of multiple images, ideas, sounds, and objects in a constant state of flux as information overload becomes the touchstone of our age. As we move from the mechanical to the electronic, this churning mass chews up and spits out material with re-assigned priorities and updates. The resulting detritus is a living corpse – a random and chaotic body of juxtaposed and deconstructed items and associations. From this storehouse of forsaken objects and hardware I, the urban bricoleur, further dismantle and reassemble the consumer society into assemblages in the form of musical instrument/objects, then coax them to sing for their supper.

Biography

Ken Butler is an artist and musician whose Hybrid musical instruments, performances and other works explore the interaction and transformation of common and uncommon objects, altered images, and sounds as function and form collide in the intersection of art and music. Butler is internationally recognized as an innovator of experimental musical instruments created from diverse materials including tools, sports equipment, and household objects. The idea of bricolage, essentially using whatever is “at hand”, is at the center of his art, encompassing a wide range of practice that combines assemblage art, live music, instrument design, performance art, theater, sculpture, installation, photography, film/video, graphic design, drawing, and collage.

Ken Butler studied viola as a child and maintained an interest in music while studying visual arts in France, at Colorado College, and Portland State University where he completed his MFA in painting. He has been featured in exhibitions and performances worldwide including The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, The Prada Foundation in Venice (as part of the “Art or Sound” exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2014), The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Mass Moca, and The Kitchen, The Brooklyn Museum, Lincoln Center and The Metropolitan Museum in New York City as well as in Canada, South America, Thailand, and Japan.

His works have been reviewed in The New York Times, The Village Voice, Artforum, Smithsonian, and Sculpture Magazine and have been featured on PBS, CNN, MTV, and NBC, including a live appearance on The Tonight Show. Awards include fellowships from the Oregon Arts Commission, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Pollack/Krasner Foundation. He won first prize in the 2016 international Guthman Musical Instrument Competition at Georgia Tech University.

Butler has performed with John Zorn, Laurie Anderson, David Van Tieghem, Butch Morris, The Soldier String Quartet, Matt Darriau’s Paradox Trio, The Tonight Show Band, and The Master Gnawa musicians of Morocco. His CD, Voices of Anxious Objects is on Tzadik records. Works by Ken Butler are represented in public and private collections in Portland, Seattle, Vail, Los Angeles, Toronto, Montreal, Washington, Paris, Tel Aviv, and New York City including the permanent collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He resides in Brooklyn, New York.

Created primarily from consumer detritus with a patina of use, the hybrid instruments express a poetic spirit of re-invention and hyper-utility as new associations momentarily create a striking and re-animated cultural identity for forsaken objects. String instruments become body, tool, weapon, toy, machine, phallus, creature, fetish, sculpture, icon, symbol, and voice. Pianos become cybernetic and symbolic architecture. Anxious objects speak in tongues.

Collages

Collages and other flatworks, made principally from altered photos of the artist’s hybrid musical instrument sculptures, further re-configure and amplify the head-neck-body ergo-iconography of string instruments, pushing it into the realm of abstraction and color-field painting. The hands-on physicality of these works echoes the improvisational sensibilities of making live music and creates a reliquary of silent sound shapes that reflect this transition from found object to body to instrument to abstract icon and architecture. Proportion, balance, harmony, texture, scale, tension, release, dynamics, and resonance aptly apply to numerous art forms.

Drawings

In addition to the collages and assemlages, a series of complex and detailed pencil drawings from 2004-05 illustrate envisioned and often elaborate audio-visual sculptures and installations that further extend the formal dialogue of art forms and the transformative deconstruction of musical instruments into surreal realms of high and low technology and invention. Bicycles, pianos, projectors, musical chairs, exotic racing cars, and dinosaurs are subjected to transformation and re-construction.