Have a Nice Day
I first met Paul Butler in Winnipeg in 1993, as he was about to head off to Calgary to attend the Alberta College of Art. That summer, he was preparing himself for the demands of academic life by making drawings and drinking beer. Of course, this did not seem noteworthy at the time—just the diversions of a typical undergrad—but these two activities have since found their way into Butler’s work as a professional artist. When I saw him again shortly after graduation, instead of drawings he showed me several collages he had made using found imagery, quirky or inspirational phrases and startlingly expressive pieces of adhesive tape. These works combined a wry sense of humour with a strong sense of graphic composition and an innovative approach to materials. The technique, which he referred to as “drawing with tape,” is one Butler continues to evolve. In addition Butler was busily curating exhibitions of friends’ work and organizing social events whose DIY-BYOB ethos prefigured the “Collage Parties!” for which he has also become known. At these events, participants are invited to collectively cut and paste (and chat and drink) in a social setting where process is emphasized over end-product.
Butler’s early collages are part of an ongoing body of work collectively titled “The Positive Mental Attitude Series,” which he describes as “basically a visual Prozac.” This description makes a nice pull quote, but it does not adequately convey the tension that exists within works whose uplifting, New-Agey title suggests certainty and confidence. The supports for the collages consist of magazine pages bearing images that would be equally at home on postcards or motivational posters: billowing clouds, majestic mountains, lush forests, crashing waves. Slogans lifted from similar mass-media sources seem to hover over the images, bidding the viewer “Heal Yourself” or assuring us that “Getting there is half the fun!” Sometimes a single, self-satisfied word sums up the mood: “Beautiful.” Torn pieces of tape assert themselves flatly—disrupting both the IMAX-like perspective of the photography and the text-image partnership that has been the mainstay of most print advertising. However, it’s not a simple matter of subversion. Butler’s interventions don’t do anything as pedantic as “deconstruct the image” or “critique the language of advertising.” Although they might obliquely imply both of these things, the end result rescues all that may have otherwise been laid bare by bringing it into the service of something entirely new—a sumptuous, beautiful quasi-painting.
Applied to the surface of the magazine images, the tape creates relief—whether it is the goopy texture of duct tape or translucent layers of Scotch tape. (His palette of tapes also includes adhesive vinyl, masking tape, packing tape, surgical tape, electrical tape —and others whose métier remains a mystery.) Unevenly torn, the strips suggest the artist’s hand while simultaneously evoking industrial manufacture and standardization. The tape proves a remarkably versatile medium, creating texture and surface interest, and introducing varying degrees of opacity, but it also functions as a device for palimpsest. This is perhaps most obvious in a series of Edited Drawings Butler made around 1998 which he refers to as “failed drawings that I’ve ‘repaired’ with tape.” Until then I had assumed that his early predilection for drawing had simply been overshadowed by his newfound multi-medium, but these works suggested that Butler had all along indulged in some clandestine mark-making. Although no marks are actually visible, the handling of the tape seems to suggest that its placement is not merely arbitrary. One can’t help but be curious as to what lies beneath and wonder if perhaps Butler has judged himself too harshly. Nonetheless, even when confronting his own failures, he retains his upbeat sense of humour: one edited drawing includes a snippet of text that reads, “Butler vows to continue.”
In another series of collages, Butler brings his sticky fingers to bear on a number of advertisements for gallery exhibitions, culled from magazines like Artforum. Nearly all the text, including the names of artists and galleries, has been taped over so that only strips and fields of colour are visible. (Occasionally a word or phrase such as “Catalogue available” is allowed to remain, thus adding to the sense of suppression.) While the works in the Art Ads series look like the bastard children of hard-edged abstraction and Colour Field painting, they are distinguished by the suggestion that something representational (language) has been effectively gagged so that we might focus on their formal qualities. Like Dave Muller, a similarly gregarious young artist from Los Angeles who paints acrylic replicas of exhibition invitations, Butler takes the ephemera of the art world and turns it into his own art. By salvaging the art world’s collateral materials and transforming them, both artists demonstrate an awareness of the business of art while attempting to insinuate themselves into the system. Butler’s recycling efforts, however, differ from Muller’s in that there is no implied chronicle or tribute. He does not earnestly attempt to document the activities and alliances of a particular community, nor does he choose the art ads based on any particular affinity for the artists. Instead of representing who showed what, when and where for posterity, Butler shrouds them in anonymity.
Searching for influences and references to explain Butler’s work is, for the most part, a fruitless task. Certainly in the early 20th century artists such as Kurt Schwitters and Hannah Höch played an important role in legitimizing collage as a medium for art and, more recently, Barbara Kruger and David Wojnarowicz mined the potential of combining text and image in the service of social critique. The work of these and other predecessors affects Butler’s simply by virtue of its having come before, but he makes no attempt to emulate them. In the end Butler just does what feels right. He did confess to me, however, that he had a small epiphany when he visited “Playing With Matches,” a touring exhibition of work by Fluxus artist Al Hansen and his grandson, pop musician Beck. Butler apparently recognized something of his own sensibility in Hansen’s collages and writings and in Beck’s remixing of musical genres.
Butler’s desire to mix it up has led him to do so formally and socially through the medium of collage. However, I fear many of his original works will cause conservators the same grief as Hansen’s Hershey Venus or Schwitters’s Merzbild assemblages, since their components were never intended to last. Luckily, Butler has had the foresight to produce limited-edition photographs of many of his collages, which he considers to be the final step in their conceptual development. The images lifted from glossy magazines then layered with text and tape are returned to flatness, their shiny surfaces as seductive as anything found in advertising. The tactile, paint-like quality of the tape becomes a serviceable illusion, not unlike the perky text messages or the sublime, Photoshop-enhanced landscapes. Its rough edges are smoothed out. Maybe the Prozac comparison is not so far off after all.
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