Inside the Artist's Studio: Jonathan Butt in Bushwick
by Benjamin SuttonPage 6 of 7
Are there any artist's who've been particularly significant influences for you?
There have been many, many artists who I've been inspired by: Richard Tuttle is an important person for me, Franz West obviously, to more structural artists or procedure-driven artists like Sol LeWitt. I think right now, I just saw a few really great shows: there's John Williams's painting show at Brennan & Griffin that's really fantastic. And I don't think of myself as a painter, but I really identified with the work he was doing; it's gone from kinetic sculpture to painting and back, and video, so he really jumps all over the place so far as material, but it all has this incredible consistency and complexity. There was a really great show up at Marc Jancou, the Jacques Louis Vidal sculpture show; I really took a lot away from that.
Is there any other medium you're really interested in or drawn to, aside from sculpture?
For now I'm very invested in sculpture. A parallel track to my making this work has been doing a lot of video and post-production—not as my own output just as an activity. So I'm very fascinated with that and also I think a very contemporary problem of what it means to go back and forth between analog-physical and virtual-digital. I think there's something very exciting there. but as far as projects I'm slated to work on in the near future, not so much, it's still going to be very physical. But definitely digital-making and working with time and animation is of interest.
That matches up nicely with these new sculptures and their tension between really fluid and dematerialized forms and their very physical, linear grid-like shapes.
As far as a play between materiality and physicality, and then this more weightless, virtual interest or aesthetic, I think I'm more acclimated or used to some of the shortcomings of building objects, whereas I think I'm still more seduced by what is possible with digital production. I don't feel quite as confident that I will be shrewd in my editing of that kind of work. So I think that's why I still kind of lean towards physical building. Also, I think that because there's such an overabundance of digital media and digital images that this for me is almost a salve to that over-saturation. Not only are we looking at screens more, but then the objects that we're interacting with are more sleek and more seamless and we don't even recognize them as being physical. They kind of pass themselves off as not even existing—they're paper-thin—so I think there's something very important about reminding at least myself that there is material and we are traversing space and there are these things that are sculptural.
You've mentioned a couple of times now this notion of editing, of removing from a work; is that something you find yourself doing physically by pulling and cutting elements away from a work, or is it more during the process that you decide not to do certain things to a piece that you had planned?
For me editing goes both directions: it's selectively adding and then very much subtracting, taking out the saw, and something that was very whole and resolved will then kind of get undone and there'll have to be a new solution. And I think that's been very liberating. I think maybe 70 percent of it is selective adding and then there's this important and usually more brutal step of undoing. And of course undoing with material is a very physical process so I've also learned to embrace the artifacts of that undoing and usually that becomes in a way an added feature even though there's less material, there's this new quality.
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Regina Rex
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