Andrea Büttner | "Piano Stool", 2015 | (for Parkett 97)
Read a Parkett Text on Andrea Büttner
Parkett Vol. 97
Quote from Parkett
"Throughout her practice, the artist probes 'tricky' thresholds not often explored in contemporary art – the blurry line between amateur making and fine art production, for instance, or the unexpected relationship between marginal religious experiences and philosophies of modernist contemplation."
Julia Bryan-Wilson, Parkett No. 97, 2015
Additional Quote
“Büttner has remarked that throughout art history—from Joseph Beuys to Nam June Paik—men have destroyed pianos to symbolize the death of bourgeois culture—a violent last gesture in the face of its end. Her silkscreen Piano Stool and the eponymous object are a gentle response to this— a "Wistful reminder of the grand piano that once was". Büttner's visual economy in this print is striking, as curator Aram Moshayedi states: "Büttner's prints instead speak of slowness… insisting on a modesty of means seemingly at odds with the demands of the global art world." -Fineartmultiple
”Piano Stool”, 2015 (for Parkett 97)
Silkscreen in 4 colors, on 160 g/m2 Fabriano Design 5,
24 x 25 1/8”/ (47,5 x 62,5 cm),
printed by Atelier für Siebdruck, Lorenz Boegli.
Ed. 25 / XX, signed and numbered bottom right.
Artist Document
Andrea Büttner’s multichannel video installation Piano Destructions (2014) on view at the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, Minnesota), in 2016.
”The immersive video installation that presents, silently on four screens, interventions by (predominantly male) artists. A fifth screen offers a powerful counterpoint—and a soundtrack: nine women pianists, orchestrated by Büttner, perform works by Chopin, Schumann, and Monteverdi in tandem…
Piano Destructions takes as its starting point the international Fluxus performances of the 1960s, in which predominantly male artists destroyed pianos as part of their artistic process, notably George Maciunas…Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, and Ben Vautier. The burning, dropping, smashing, and hammering of the pianos—an instrument traditionally associated with bourgeois female education—resulted in highly charged and gendered acts.”
Photo and text courtesy Walker Art Center.
