Peter Buggenhout sees all the “rubble” of our spoiled world as salvageable, remaking glass, plastic, stone, steel, and dust into the flesh and bones of unearthly sculptures born of defunct and abandoned stuff long dissolved into uselessness. Plastic binds with steel, metal suffocates wood, paint bleeds over glass—everything sealed in an impenetrable layer of blackened dust or discolored by natural dyes. These configurations-turned-sculptures, accumulations of materials conjoined and pressed together, may look like nothing we’ve seen, but they have a beauty that emerges like bruises on the body.
Though Buggenhout appears to punish or mistreat his materials, the more compelling explanation is that he rescues them, offering a kind of redemption for the damage we have inflicted on the world. By sifting through the least desirable of material remains, he injects a tremendous tension into his sculptures, which seem to steal the air from the room. Benign monsters, their abject anonymity owes something to the historical and mythological, which turns them into symbols of our shortcomings. Seeking to restore the complexities of life glossed over by the smooth surface of modernity, these entities without known form are a testament to Buggenhout’s ability to see something where others fear to look. For him, ever greater complexity is the measure of what matters, the embodiment of reality. There are no easy answers in his search for the indefinable through sculptures that are entirely of and not of the world at the same time.
Rajesh Punj: I am deeply interested in your choice of materials and your disruptive decision-making. How did you arrive at this point in your work?
Peter Buggenhout: I started as a painter, but I never felt comfortable doing it, though I was quite successful until I was 30. During that time, I tried to escape from civilization, which is always the practice of a painter, and then I decided I wanted to make things that were real and autonomous, which isn’t what painting is about. Everybody knows what to expect from a painting, and I wanted to make things that didn’t look like anything else. In a huge shift away from everything I had known, I started working with the intestines of animals and cow stomachs. I wanted to make a shape that you couldn’t easily trace back to anything you had seen before—not made by me or somebody else, not in art practice, not in sculpture.
Many writers have made connections between my work and the French philosopher Georges Bataille. What intrigued me about the intestines was the object withdrawn from its original state. Because it had lost its shape and meaning, you didn’t know what you were looking at. That, for me, was dirty, but at the same time very attractive to the imagination, and the double meaning interested me, so I started thinking about other objects—found materials, dust, and uninflated body parts. With that in mind, I tried to make sculptures that I haven’t shown, a different series of “The Blind Leading The Blind.” With those works, I tried to create something completely different. The object has a face with no reflection, which remains undefinable and becomes disturbing to look at it, and I tried—from different perspectives and with different materials—to talk about a world we can no longer comprehend. We think we can trace it, but we aren’t able to. I think the best way to describe the world is as a necklace with different beads attached.
RP: How does that work?
PB: This necklace strung with different beads is lying on a table, and there is no link between these things—at least if there is we can suppress it. If we try to grab it with our poor human minds, the string is pulled apart, the beads all drop onto the table and start rolling everywhere onto the floor. It is supposed to emphasize that kind of chaos as resembling the real world— unfathomable, made up of a mass of happenings, objects, and things that coexist, and so on and so on. It’s this kind of complexity that I am intending to express all the time in my work, and how to deal with it in a way that allows for everything at once.
RP: This idea goes against everything we expect of the world around us; things are supposed to be organized, explainable, and correct.
PB: It is completely contrary.
RP: So, that tension interests you? There is an absolute idea that modernity equates to an organized society, routine and regimented. There’s an operational system in place that tells us how to live and how to think, but your work stands against that.
PB: The modern way of living and working, as you explain it, is an illusion. When I think about reality, it has forced me to make real objects that are autonomous and appear like nothing we know. In the late Middle Ages, a philosophy called nominalism became important.
RP: Plato had considered a similar idea—that general categories are just designations without any corresponding reality and that only particular objects exist—but I believe he argued against it.
PB: The nominalists took a philosophical approach to things, saying that every object is entirely separate from everything around it, and that individual elements should have proper names. Instead of saying “chair” (and there are likely thousands that have been made and designed), you name each one, even if they all function in the same way. In the end, if you think about the world in this way, then language becomes useless because you cannot talk about things anymore. When I say “take a chair,” you wouldn’t reach for the table, but if everything had its proper name, instead of a generalized label, as a chair or a table, is when language becomes unusable.
RP: Language becomes undone.
PB: So, we need to react against such simplification and communicate everything that we see. But language is not the real world; it’s like what Wittgenstein said, that “you can sense everything that you have words for,” and so he argued that words “pile up” illusions and that our understanding is limited to what we can explain.
RP: Wittgenstein may well have been right when he stated: “What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.” We are limited by language, and in that sense, the silence—the abstract and the misunderstood—proves compelling. So, you feel that we’re not able to account for or name much of what happens in our lives, and that a great deal is easily relegated to the edges of reality?
PB: You see it every day. Look at the news, the more we squeeze the world to take hold of it, the more object materials come out. It’s not a question that we should keep to these illusions; it’s more how we deal with the serious complexities of life, without insisting on simplifying everything.
RP: Simplicity appears to be the motor driving global development—cities resemble one another, and social media employs a universal language. The chair-is-all-chairs argument that you oppose is related to how experience has become universally mediated rather than individual, when it is the opposite—the abstraction, the uncertainty as I understand it—that Wittgenstein argued should be allowed to exist in art and life, for us to understand much more than we do.
PB: What I’m doing doesn’t look like it’s political, but it is, and it has much to do with society. It’s as much about the now as when I started all of this, with the first intestine pieces from around 1997. I remember when people first saw my work and said, “This guy is crazy, what is he doing? What is he even talking about?” Until 2008, I wasn’t successful at all. Then, the bank crisis hit the global market, and suddenly people said maybe there was something to what I was doing—that this world isn’t entirely about the mental or rational. That this isn’t a world we can create or re-create the way we would wish to. And then there came all of these other questions, and they said, “Oh yes, and we as human beings are not made to do this either, my goodness, possibly this guy is talking about something serious.” Now, when I say two words, they immediately grab it, but when I told the same story 20 years ago, everybody said, “This guy is completely insane.” It isn’t that my work has changed; I think the world has changed.
RP: What’s interesting is that you are drawn to the things that the rest of us are likely driven away from. You have said previously that you have “no idea what the inherent meaning of a particular material or object is supposed to be. Things mean nothing. We imbue them with meaning because we are incapable of dealing with them otherwise. Nevertheless, every object is empty.” Do you see everything as equal, and the damaged and discarded as objects or entities in their own right? I want to understand what draws you to these materials and drives your interventions with them.
PB: I can only talk about the result, or what we come to in the end. I can’t explain why I’m attracted to these things. I see all of the elements in each of the sculptures in one moment or another as potentially useful. With “The Blind Leading The Blind” and with other works, what is very important for me is how it appears, and that when I come to complete it, it doesn’t look like anything else.
So, when you look at it for the first time and every time thereafter, you are framing it to reality—that’s how our minds work. You can say, “Oh yes, it looks like a shipwreck,” but then you see the work in the round, come back to its face, and think. “Oh, no, it’s the underside of a car.” There is no limit to the materials I can choose—what is fundamental is that they must have the potential for becoming something, without form and entirely indefinable.
RP: What you say about our desire to understand what we see is very interesting.
PB: Tagträumen, as they refer to it in German, or “daydreaming” in English. It’s looking out the window at the clouds when you are in the classroom. You might say there is a witch up there on her broom, or an angel hovering, and this kind of unspecific thinking, involving the imagination, means we are still able to distinguish between a chair and the table. We are encouraged to classify all the time, which limits us from seeing the real thing, the complexity of things, of whatever is in front of us.
RP: Do you collect objects/discarded materials all the time?
PB: Collecting or making things—often when I make a sculpture, it can be that parts of it fail, so there are no rules to making it. When I start creating something, many times I will put things aside, only years later seeing them as interesting, and I will make something from that older piece. It has all become part of the process because I am not making one work at a time; I can be involved with as many as 20 at the same time. Making the works is much more liquid than solid, and there are no rules.
RP: I can imagine you dragging in and ditching objects that are nothing before you pull one close to another, sensing and eventually seeing connections, points of contact between the disparate parts.
PB: It can be very strange. I’ve been working on a series of works that are quite colorful. I can take
a small red square object from storage, while searching for something else, and something happens.
RP: In “I am the Tablet,” your recent exhibition at Axel Vervoordt, I could see smaller objects pressed into much larger sculptures.
PB: I see something blue and say, “That could be useful,” and that’s the way I work. Sometimes when you want to put a nail in the wall, you don’t have a hammer; but, in the end, if the nail has to go up, then you think to use your shoe. It may not be the most practical way for the nail to go into the wall, but it becomes a more immediate way of working.
RP: It seems that as human beings, we don’t allow ourselves such improvisation anymore. Many people don’t understand how things are put together and are nervous about having to solve something, about making it work. We always reach for a sanitized and sensible solution to everything, and so we aren’t able to experience anything.
PB: This is what happens with simplification, we see less of complexity and more simplicity. I’m mainly talking about the Western world.
RP: What is your experience when you’re exhibiting in other countries? Do you sense a similar tendency to simplification?
PB: I believe that India, for instance, has a culture with the greatest potential to survive, just because it begins with such complexity. From the smallest creature to the largest mountain, everything is sacred, with an inherent complex mythology to it, and that kind of complexity is a powerful blast. With all due respect to America, you see already that its simplified culture has proved a disaster for a long time, and it’s only getting worse and worse. The United States had a peak of 10 years after World War II; then the decline started, and it has never stopped. Now, it feels like there is nothing anymore because there’s no complexity to what we see and feel. Complexity is a fundamental blessing if we can find it.
RP: Yours is a very philosophical approach, particularly in terms of the simple smothering the complex.
PB: An artist is a philosopher with his hands, and I think we have one huge advantage over writers, scientists, and a lot of other people. When we have an idea, we can go to the studio and immediately start working on that idea. From the moment we take an object, we want to realize what it says to us, even when it’s telling us, “That’s crazy, likely it won’t work, you need to rethink this.” For me, the object activates the sculptures that serve as my anchor. I feel very aware of what I am thinking and doing, because of the objects, because materials that real keep me rooted. I’m not a writer or a philosopher; as an artist, I have been searching, for 20 years.
“Second Sight,” Peter Buggenhout’s solo exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag in the Netherlands, is on view through November 17, 2024.
