Matthew Buckingham

Matthew Buckingham:
Play the story
February 16th to May 17th, 2008
Opening : Friday 15th February at 6 pm

Opening Hours : Monday to saturday from 2 pm to 6 pm (except holidays)
Guided Tour : Saturday 5th April, 2008 - 3 pm – free entry

The FRAC Bourgogne -- Burgundy Regional Contemporary Art Collection -- is hosting the first solo show in France of the work of the American artist Matthew Buckingham (born in 1963 in Nevada, Iowa, USA). His films, slide shows, and photographs all present various historical figures, real and make-believe alike: a politician, a freed slave, a drama coach, a lexicographer, a camera inventor, a philosopher, and the like. The artist chooses such figures for what their life experience reveals about issues running through the contemporary world.

For this exhibition, titled Play the Story, he is presenting three video installations produced in 2007. They revisit the route taken by two women of importance in the feminist movement, as well as an influential episode of film history. As a fully-fledged historiographer, no less, Matthew Buckingham invites viewers to experience history and its constructive methods, as well as feel its closeness to the present.

“The past is never dead. It's not even past”, wrote William Faulkner. This oft-repeated quotation perfectly situates what he has been involved with since the mid-1990s: challenging the connection we have with history. Surprised by our understanding of history, as well as by the objectivity value we grant it, the artist re-interprets historical facts, the better to question the meaning of documents and images, and incorporate them on the basis of different viewpoints.

For Buckingham, each work is the springboard for nothing less than an historical investigation. He seeks out ancient sources as well as the way in which publications have reported the event in the course of history. He chooses situations which retain an extreme topicality. Matthew Buckingham’s work may be fuelled by an important theoretical basis, but it matters to him to come up with installations whose scope is based on textual experience as much as imagery and space. Understanding, representation, and physical experience are all worked in such a way as to lend substance to thoughts and events.

Three installations made in 2007 are brought together in this show: The Spirit and the Letter presents the writings of the novella writer, essayist and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797); Everything I Need imagines the thoughts of Charlotte Wolff (1897-1986), forerunner of gender theories and theories about homosexuality, during her flight back to Berlin in 1978, after 35 years of exile in England; and False Future links back up with the early cinematographic images shot by Louis Le Prince (1841-1890), French inventor of the camera, who mysteriously disappeared in a train between Dijon and Paris. In these three installations the artist makes use of the principle of spectator identification associated with different image arrangements, aimed at giving to each one of these situations a stronger actuality.

These three works well illustrate Matthew Buckingham’s approach and method, which also borrows from the historian, the archivist, the anthropologist and the detective. In his installations, the artist gives preference to the way the viewer negotiates between several sources and documents. He is interested by the encounter between work and viewer, leaving the latter a great deal of autonomy, running counter to the conveyance of a more unified sense. Each project seems comparable to the state of the beginning of his own research, when things crop up in a dispersed way, without any immediate coherence. By summoning up historiography within the exhibition venue, Matthew Buckingham recognizes in the exhibition’s form a capacity for honing the onlooker’s perceptions. ”Looking for forms of interdependence, analyzing contemporary problems by nearing their complex relationships in mind, this is perhaps a way of sidestepping cynicism and naivety.”[Conversation between Matthew Buckingham and Mark Godfrey: New York and London, February 2007”,in Matthew Buckingham Play the Story, Camden Arts Centre, (Londres – GB), Frac Bourgogne, (Dijon – France), Dundee Contemporary Arts (Dundee, Écosse - GB), Des Moines Art Centre (Des Moines - USA), Henry Art Gallery (Seattle - USA), 2007, vol.1, p.45].

Text by Claire Legrand, manager of the visitor’s department
Translated by Simon Pleasance

WerkRaum 24.
Matthew Buckingham
Everything has a Name

Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart - Berlin

8 June – 19 August 2007
Opening: Thursday 7 June 2007, 7pm

An Exhibition by the Artists-in-Berlin Programme of the DAAD in collaboration with the National Gallery in the Hamburger Bahnhof

Matthew Buckingham’s work is devoted to the historical enquiry into names and their origin. His film, Muhheakantuck – Everything has a name, investigates the question how the Hudson River acquired its name. Filmed from a helicopter following the riverbank from Manhattan to Beacon, the film’s added voice-track recounts the story of the Hudson. Images, texts and biographies are simultaneously the subject-matter of Matthew Buckingham’s work and the means by which it achieves its form.

This is also the case in his latest work Everything I need, dedicated to the biography of Charlotte Wolf, a Jewish doctor and psychologist. Wolf emigrated from Berlin, worked in Paris and London and finally, in August 1978, returned to Berlin. By superimposing texts upon images of the empty interior of a ‘70s-style passenger aeroplane, Matthew Buckingham in this work comments on the different stages of Charlotte Wolf’s life.

Finally, his third large video-work, which was made in 2006 for the Liverpool Biennale, deals with Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. This film, entitled Obscure Moorings, is shown in a wave-like cinema construction.

The voyage theme, as the telling of historical facts using symbolic images, is discernable as the leitmotiv of Matthew Buckingham’s work. Thus, the exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof leads the viewer to different places and sites in cities and landscapes. The knowledge of what lies behind a name corresponds to images that in a two-fold way suggest the theme of voyage: as a journey to these various places and as a point from which to enter the story of our culture.

Matthew Buckingham was born in Nevada, Iowa in 1963. He lives and works in New York. He has participated with his film works in international group exhibitions since the late 1990s. Comprehensive solo exhibitions have taken place in the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna in 2003 and in the Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster in 2005. Until 1 July 2007, Matthew Buckingham’s most recent work can be viewed in his solo exhibition “Play the Story” at the Camden Arts Centre London.

http://www.hamburgerbahnhof.de
http://www.daad-berlin.de

Opening Hours: Tue-Fri 10am-6pm, Sat 11am-8pm. Sun 11am-6pm

For further information and visual material, please contact:

artpress – Ute Weingarten
Fon: +49-30-21961843
Fax: +49-30-21961847
Mob: +49-175-221561
artpress at uteweingarten dot de

Play the Story
27 April – 01 July 2007
opening Thursday 26 April 6.30-8.45
Camden Arts Centre
Arkwright Road
London NW3 6DG
www.camdenartscentre.org
(press release attached)

Friday 20 April 2007, 19.00
Tate Modern
www.tate.org.uk
In conjunction with PLAY THE STORY, this special Tate Modern screening presents three of his films: Amos Fortune Road (1996), Situation Leading to a Story (1999) and Obscure Moorings (2006).

The screening is followed by a discussion with Matthew Buckingham, critic Mark Godfrey and Tate curator Stuart Comer.

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Starr Auditorium
Tate Modern, Bankside, London, SE1 9TG
Nearest Tube: Southwark / London Bridge / Blackfriars

£5 (£4 concessions), booking recommended
For tickets book online
or call 020 7887 8888
www.tate.org.uk/modern/eventseducation/film/8420.htm

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Matthew Buckingham: Play the Story

27 April – 01 July 2007
Admission free





Matthew Buckingham, one of today’s most significant critical artists, presents three new film and video works at Camden Arts Centre together with a site-specific participative installation. Buckingham has long been praised for the formal elegance of his films and his thoughtful approach to their installations. He investigates history and its representation, always concerned with addressing present day realities such as the impact of globalisation and colonialism.

Buckingham’s new video installation The Spirit and the Letter premieres at Camden Arts Centre following a research residency at The Slade School of Fine Art. It concerns the writer and social reformer Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 – 1797), best known for her books on education and on the inequality between the rights of men and women. Wollstonecraft’s turbulent life is often read more closely than her writing, and her status has been contested by generations of feminist thinkers. Buckingham’s video will present her as a kind of ghost whose legacy remains unsettled. Wollstonecraft appears as if walking on the ceiling of an inverted 18th century interior. The video is projected to fill the wall of a gallery which in turn appears as if inverted.

Everything I Need follows the psychoanalyst and radical feminist Charlotte Wolff (1897 – 1986) who trained as a doctor in Berlin, and was part of a circle of intellectuals that included Walter Benjamin. Wolff escaped Nazi Germany in 1933 and during her exile in Paris and London, wrote some of the first books about same-sex relationships. She was embraced as a figurehead in the 1970s by the lesbian movement in Berlin, where she returned in 1978 to present aspects of her research. Buckingham’s video was shot on a retired plane of the sort that made trans-European flights in the 1970s. As images of its plush interior unfold, a text is narrated drawing viewers to imagine Wolff’s thoughts during her journey back to Berlin.

Buckingham’s third new piece, a 16mm film projection titled False Future, concerns Louis Aimée Augustin Le Prince (1842 – c. 1890). LePrince invented a camera which could record moving pictures some years before the Lumières, but having made some very short films in New York and Leeds, he mysteriously disappeared from a train during a journey from Paris to Dijon. Buckingham shot his film at the exact location in Leeds where LePrince filmed in the late 1880s. The film is accompanied by a textual component which discusses LePrince’s achievements, and the desires for moving images in the late 19th century.

In a site specific installation Specularia, Buckingham invites visitors to engage with the architecture of Camden Arts Centre, connecting the very fabric of the building to wider historical events. He considers the materials, labour and industrial methods used in its construction and the changing function of Camden Arts Centre. This work is a result of a collaboration with students from The Slade School of Fine Art. The Camden Specularia is the second of a series of works where Buckingham responds to the architecture of the gallery in which he exhibits. The first version of Specularia was realised at the Kunstmusem St Gallen in 2005.

Together, these four works will indicate Buckingham’s diverse interests, and his varied approach to installation. One thread running through the works will be his concern with the political legacy of historical figures associated with feminism; another will be his investigation of the history of the very mediums that he deploys - video and film.

‘Matthew Buckingham: Play the Story’ is accompanied by a four-part publication. Three new artist books accompany the three new projected works featuring essays by Cora Kaplan (on Mary Wollstonecraft); Tom Gunning (on Louis Le Prince); and Darcy Buerkle (on Charlotte Wolff). A fourth book includes an interview between Mark Godfrey and Matthew Buckingham on the new works in the exhibition, and an essay by Sara Krajewski on Matthew Buckingham’s previous work.

After Camden Arts Centre, the exhibition will tour to FRAC Bourgogne Dijon; Dundee Contemporary Arts; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle and Des Moines Art Center, Iowa.

The exhibition at Camden Arts Centre is curated by Mark Godfrey, Lecturer in History and Theory of Art at the Slade.

The Spirit and the Letter is being co-commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella, London and Camden Arts Centre in association with the other venues. Everything I Need is the culmination of research conducted during Buckingham’s DAAD residency.

Notes to Editors:

Camden Arts Centre is a venue for contemporary visual art and education, where ideas are made visible and people of all ages and abilities can engage in the creative process of making art. Our pioneering and varied programme of artist-led courses and other education activities has gained an international reputation as a model of good practice. We are known as a forward-thinking organisation where artists and others can see, make and talk about art.

Over the past two years, Buckingham has had solo exhibitions at international institutions including the Dallas Museum of Art, the Saint Louis Art Museum, Kunstverein Westfalischer, and the Kunsthalle St Gallen. His work has been included in the Corcoran Biennial (2004), Faces in the Crowd (Castello di Rivoli and Whitechapel Art Gallery, 2004-05), Universal Experience (MCA Chicago and Hayward Gallery, 2004-05), and This storm is what we call progress (Arnolfini, 2005). A new work titled Obscure Moorings featured in the Liverpool Biennial (2006). A text on his work appeared as the lead article in Artforum (March 2004) and monographic articles are appearing in OCTOBER (April 2007) and frieze (May 2007). Buckingham was a DAAD fellow in 2003. He is represented by Murray Guy, New York, where he has had many exhibitions.