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Picasso once said, “Art is a lie that makes
us realize the truth.” This paradox is the theme of Eugenia
Butler’s The Book of Lies, a set of three portfolios
comprising works by over 70 artists. Begun in 1991, the project
was originally intended to span four volumes, but Butler passed
away in March at the age of 61 leaving it unfinished.
With roots in a strain of 1960s conceptualism that
proposed that any activity could be seen as art, Butler developed
her practice within a community of artists that included Lawrence
Weiner, Joseph Kosuth, and Robert Barry. From 1968 to 1971, her
mother, also named Eugenia, ran the Eugenia Butler Gallery, an early
venue for conceptual art in Los Angeles.
Yet, compared to her male contemporaries, Butler has
been largely left out of art history. While sexism is certainly
a factor, her interests also led her away from the mainstream. In
the seventies, she and her young daughter moved to Ecuador and traveled
in South America, where she studied shamanism and other religious
traditions.
It's therefore not surprising that social interaction
and collaboration played an important role in her work. With
The Book of Lies, Butler acted as both curator and artist,
soliciting and choosing works to be included, as a curator might,
but insisting upon being billed as the artist. “This object
is my work of art which is made up of other people’s works
of art,” she said in a 1998 Artweek interview.
True to Butler's conceptual approach, The Book
of Lies can be exhibited in multiple formats. Since many of
the works are two-sided or involve opening an envelope or book,
they are perhaps more engaging when viewed as portfolios, which
is how I saw them. But when the project was shown at Santa Monica’s
18th Street Arts Center in 2007, the small works were hung close
together, framed on the wall, suspended from the ceiling, and perched
on pedestals. During the exhibition, Butler held a series of sit-down
dinners in the gallery and posed two questions to the diners: “What
is the lie with which you are most complicit?” and “What
is the truth that most feeds your life?” The resulting conversations
(video clips can be seen at www.myspace.com/3liesdinners) often
sound new age-y—“The true body is the body that is loved,”
“Peace is when we don’t exist”—but they
boldly insert spiritual ideas into a contemporary art discourse
that typically shuns them.
Curator Anne Ayres, in the catalog for Butler’s
2003 retrospective, described her work as “…early modernist
in spirit (the tie between abstraction and spirituality or metaphysics
is strong in her coloristic works on paper) but never formalist
in intent. It is postmodern in its far-ranging diversity but never
ironic.” From this in-between space, Butler mined the neglected
vein of spirituality in art while continuing to probe the limits
of artistic practice. As The Book of Lies attests, she
was well aware of art’s inability to communicate a straightforward
truth. But she never gave up on its potential to indicate something
else—a numinous presence perhaps, or the shared roots of consciousness—that
was worth pursuing on all fronts: intellectual, physical, emotional,
and spiritual.
This feature originally appeared
in the July/August 2008 issue of art
on paper. Reprinted with permission.
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