Ken Butler's Hybrid Visions
Characterized by his obsessive desire to re-use and re-order the world around him, Butler’s multi-disciplinary creations can be difficult to describe as they bridge the visual arts, design, music, and performance in unusual ways. Ever the urban bricoleur, the artist is a resourceful improviser committed to exploring and re-imagining our relationships to the ideas and objects around us.
Hybrid Instruments
Ken Butler’s hybrid musical instrument sculptures explore the interaction and transformation of common and uncommon objects, sounds, and altered images as function and form collide in the intersections of art and music.
Created primarily from urban detritus, the hybrid instruments express a poetic spirit of re-invention and hyper-utility as hidden meanings and associations momentarily create a striking and re-animated cultural identity for common objects. String instruments become body, tool, weapon, toy, symbol, machine, phallus, creature, sculpture, icon, and voice. Pianos and keyboards become cybernetic and symbolic architecture. Anxious objects speak in tongues.
Bridging fine art, craft, and music, the hybrids exist as ergonomic functional musical instruments as well as sculpture; they are constructed from readily available consumer objects designed to perform a different function, and when amplified are shaped with cutting-edge sound processing allowing artful musical sounds and expression. Note that not all the works are intended to produce sounds.
The guitar most specifically can be viewed as a potent social (and even religious) symbolic icon linked to much of the psychic upheaval in our culture; It has a persistent presence in popular and experimental music and is a potent androgynous image for the female form, male phallus, and hand-held weapon. Sex and death, and a formula for a post-apocalyptic reconstruction.
The playable hybrid instruments are amplified with small piezo transducers (contact microphones) attached to the instruments. It is because of these mics that resonating chambers are not always necessary, although the resulting sound is influenced by the acoustic properties of the material of the body/neck. A pre-amp, guitar amplifier, and various sound processing effects are used to manipulate the sounds. The entire body of the instrument becomes touch-sensitive enabling the player to pluck, tap, stroke, or bow the various parts to create a variety of percussive sounds as well as those produced by the vibration of the strings. As far as the music itself, most of the material was derived from the "feeling" of the initial sound of each piece when it was first plugged in. Within certain simple structures, the music and the playing methods are improvised (as is the creation of the instruments themselves). Musical themes have evolved.
Interactive Installations
An interest in systems of control and the animation of light and objects stems from the artists experimental film-making work from the mid-seventies - essentially putting into motion two- and three-dimensional photo collage works by pixillation. A desire to be free from the fixed speed of a finished film led to the use of multiple slide projectors eventually controlled by one of the hybrids to enable synchronous improvised sounds and images. This led to the construction in 1983 of a two-octave keyboard controller with a 60-foot cord to a remote 24-outlet electrical box. Operated by this keyboard, the installation works are essentially an "audio-visual piano" that creates a room-sized kinetic sound and projection environment as the viewer triggers a diverse group of devices including radios, tape recorders with loops, mechanical objects, slide projectors, light and kinetic shadow projections, and self-playing hybrid instruments. The largest version of this work, "Object Opera", was presented at Thread Waxing Space in NYC in June of 1995. The piece incorporated numerous hybrid instruments that were activated by small fan motors with “weed-eater” fish-line strummers or auto-strum devices made from LPs rimmed with guitar picks (with specific rhythm patterns) powered by gear motors, along with hundreds of other sound, light, and motion devices.
Collages
Collages and other flat-works, made principally from altered photos of the artist’s hybrid musical instrument sculptures, further re-configure and amplify the head-neck-body ergo-iconography of string instruments, pushing it into the realm of abstraction and color-field painting. The hands-on physicality of these works echoes the improvisational sensibilities of making live music and creates a reliquary of silent sound shapes that reflect this transition from found object to body to instrument to abstract icon and architecture. Proportion, balance, harmony, texture, scale, tension, release, dynamics, and resonance aptly apply to numerous art forms.
Artist Statement (1983)
Contemporary urban life is a bewildering collage of multiple images, ideas, sounds, and objects in a constant state of flux as information overload becomes the touchstone of our age. As we move from the mechanical to the electronic, this churning mass chews up and spits out material with re-assigned priorities and updates. The resulting detritus is a living corpse - a random and chaotic body of juxtaposed and deconstructed items and associations. From this storehouse of forsaken objects and hardware I, the urban bricoleur, further dismantle and reassemble the consumer society into assemblages in the form of musical instrument/objects, then coax them them to sing for their supper.
The Performance: Voices of Anxious Objects
The artist-musician performs mesmerizing world textures and driving melodic grooves with passion and purpose on an amazing arsenal of amplified hybrid string instruments made from household objects and tools. Duchampian Dada meets Hybrid Hindu Hendrix as function and form collide in an environment of hyperactive hardware.
Butler blends aspects of Mid-Eastern, Indian, Flamenco, and Roma modes with jazz, rock, funk, and blues, all held together by an open, edgy "downtown" improv aesthetic. Virtually indescribable and unclassifiable, Butler mixes high and low technology and audio-visual antics to create an ancient/future music that forms a provoking cultural portrait of human / machine adaptation and transformation.
Assemblages of hammers, hockey sticks, tennis rackets, golf clubs, and brooms become (when amplified) violin, guitar, and cello-like instruments with multiple playing surfaces and a diverse range of percussive (and assorted odd) sounds as well as those produced by the strings. A performance can also include interactive hybrid audio-visual keyboards powered by motorized strummers which control lights, animation, motion, and video projections.
Larger Assemblage Works
The body of work, “Vibrating Body”, 20011-12, are diverse assemblage on large panels. These works could be called “paintings”. Echoing the artist's hybrid instruments and collages, these works further abstract and transform the human-figure-instrument-body iconography he is known for and push it further into the realm of pseudo-mechanical bio-structure and abstraction. In addition, these works also imply a sacred altar-like meditative space and reference the cycle of deformation and re-formation inherent in other of his works. Constructed primarily from consumer detritus, social discards, and other urban flotsam and jetsam, these works become inter-woven cyphers of the new resonant technological “body” of modern existence, with it’s ever-complex “control systems” to regulate desire, at times referencing traumatic memories and turbulent meanings in the artists life.
The works that encompass "Lost & Sound", 2000, reference the formal dialogue of the transformative deconstruction of the string instrument body with the new technical electronic soundscape. Found object/instrument forms combine with arrangements of hardware and machine parts to create a reliquary of silent sound shapes that reflect this transition and pay homage to Cubist still life. The iconic, symbolic, and ergonomic guitar/violin/cello/bass body, a mainstay of musical/visual form and function for hundreds of years, is now being replaced with the inevitable playback device/black box as sound samples replicate the physical vibrating object. A spirit of re-invention and hyper-utility attempts to reveal the hidden meanings and associations of common objects, momentarily creating a striking and re-animated cultural identity. What is a musical instrument?
Drawings
In addition to the collages and assemlages, a series of complex and detailed pencil drawings from 2004-05 illustrate envisioned and often elaborate audio-visual sculptures and installations that further extend the formal dialogue of art forms and the transformative deconstruction of musical instruments into surreal realms of high and low technology and invention. Bicycles, pianos, projectors, musical chairs, exotic racing cars, and dinosaurs are subjected to transformation and re-construction.