This book presents the first comprehensive collection of writings by UK-based, expatriate Czech artist Pavel Büchler alongside extensive contextual material. As a teacher, critic and occasional curator Büchler has made significant contributions to debates about the history of photography, theories of media, the paradoxes of art education and artistic research, the peculiarities of art as a form of work and the politics and poetics of ‘making nothing happen’.
Spanning three decades, the selections are grouped in three sections that together cover seven thematic areas. Section One includes a sample of Büchler’s exhibition and book reviews and a spread of his more systematic writings on analogue media and their afterlives in our digital age. Section Two gathers articles and lecture scripts on the topic of teaching art and design and his interventions into cultural theory with a small ‘t’. Section Three presents a selection of more discursive, formally playful contributions to catalogues and artist's pages as well as an in-depth interview prepared especially for this book.
Between each of those sections are my Editor’s Notes, which focus on the poetic status of language in the foreground of Büchler’s gallery works, to take attention back to the interplay between what he writes about art and what he writes in his art. Bracketing the whole collection are my extensive introductory essay and a complete bibliography.
"This volume of writings is an invaluable resource for artists, students, curators and critics who wish to take a guided tour around the millennial cultural landscapes of Eastern and Western Europe, encountering on their journey the droll humour, poetics and polemics of a great conceptual artist."
– Iwona Blazwick, Director of the Whitechapel Gallery, London
"In this marvelous book we can see, up close and with the benefit of retrospect, the prophetic brilliance and penetrating insight of Büchler’s long ‘conversation’ with art. Running through each discrete text is the recursive vision of a world wherein art and life figure one another’s most dynamic extremes."
– Nikos Papastergiadis, Professor of Culture & Communication, University of Melbourne
"The work and opinions of Pavel Büchler blend together a unique array of subject matter, points of reference and cultural practices into dense conceptual propositions that are expressed simply, with a keen sense of urgency and a fair dose of esprit."
– Philippe Pirotte, curator and Rector of Städelschule, Frankfurt
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Somebody’s Got To Do It: Selected Writings by Pavel Büchler Since 1987
Somebody’s Got To Do It: Selected Writings by Pavel Büchler Since 1987, 2017
(Ridinghouse)
