Recently I was recalling a dinner party that was held on the occasion of the opening of Andrea Büttner’s first solo museum presentation in the United States. Like many dinner parties, the November 2015 event was a convivial situation staged to celebrate an occasion (the exhibition launch), but also to provide a social platform for connection and understanding. Each course was punctuated by remarks—presented in their entirety in the following posts—delivered by curator Lars Bang Larsen, Auburn University associate philosophy professor Keren Gorodeisky, exhibition curator Fionn Meade, and forager and nature enthusiast Elijah Ferrian.
The dinner was open to anyone—which informed a motley crew of gallerists, curators, academics, out of town visitors, artists, and the public (both the committed and curious). This echoed Büttner’s co-mingling of “high” and “low,” where she pulls her images and references from a range of sources, from anonymous content found on the internet to the categorically “in”—validated by academia or aesthetic theory.
A half year on, I contacted Andrea to find out what has stayed with her from that moment.
On 22 November 2015, the Walker staged a public dinner connected to the launch of your solo exhibition. What do you recall from that evening?
It was the third day of the private views, the third evening, the third dinner. It was beautiful because it was a response to the exhibition on so many levels. Lars Bang Larsen, Fionn Meade, Keren Gorodeisky, and Elijah Ferrian each gave thoughtful speeches on my practice: Elijah spoke about foraging, Keren gave a paper on my illustration of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, a work on display in the show. Lars spoke about appropriation, and Fionn finished the evening with a jubilatory speech on JA/Yes, on affirmation as a mode of criticality and being. What I recall most is the joy of the response to a show—a very silent cultural form in the end—a gestalt. A form of feast and reflection that served as a way of holding the exhibition and overcoming the strangeness of the private view. As a cultural form, the private view can be pretty awkward for artists: the work is already completed, nothing much happens, nothing is performed to channel anxiety and concentration and give a meaning to the temporality and the sociality of the gathering.
This is not the first time that programming connected to a showing of your work has taken the form of a dinner. What were those other events, and did they differ in format or content?
At Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt I organized a dinner with speeches for a solo exhibition in 2013. It was the first time that I have done this. At MMK the dinner was an integral part of the exhibition, which dealt with notions of poverty in art history and centered on an installation of tables. These tables were both real tables, for the dinner, which was a symposion like in Plato’s texts: drinks, food, philosophy. At the same time they were display furniture for research I have done on the iconography of poverty.
At the MMK, the dinner was an integral part of the exhibition and shaped the installation, allowing me to think about display. At the Walker, the dinner was part of the programming, and it complemented the exhibition in a meaningful way. It allowed one to think of private views as a specific type of durational performance.
Noting that in your work you have explored notions of vulnerability and shame, interestingly—perhaps also ironically—you allowed yourself to be subject to a moment that awkwardly combined both the dynamics of invitation and display…
You are right, it is important to think about the sociality of art as a moment of display and thus vulnerability at the same time. There is still much to discover within this potential. And it is important that vulnerability is contagious: both the person delivering the speech and the person the speech is about are exposed. But they share this moment in friendship.
I love speeches for that reason. If they are good speeches—if they are generous and if they have something to say—the exposure is mitigated. In this regard the generous and meaningful speeches are like art. They transmit a vulnerable moment and hold it, while at the same time giving form to it. I think the Russian toast is exemplary in that way.
Get Walker Reader in your inbox. Sign up to receive first word about our original videos, commissioned essays, curatorial perspectives, and artist interviews.
)