Andrea Büttner: What Is So Terrible About Craft?

About

Hollybush Gardens is pleased to present What Is So Terrible About Craft?, an exhibition of new and recent works by Andrea Büttner. The exhibition includes two videos, shown in the UK for the first time, a selection of large-format woodcuts and a group of five hand-blown glass vases displayed on a wooden table. These works seek to question a reactionary legacy that craft carries in contemporary art. Probing the connection between design and politics, Büttner’s work here addresses the supposed human warmth of anti-modern aesthetics. 

Büttner’s videos Liberty and Morris: Simple Life and so on (2018) and Coventry Cathedral (2023), filmed in the UK and presented as a diptych, look at two instances within British art and architectural history that relate to contemporary thinking regarding the relationship between craft and cultural politics. Both works explore the paradigm that craft is seen as something that might heal the wounds of modernity.

Liberty and Morris: Simple Life and so on is dedicated to William Morris, a leading figure of the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain, which formed as a response to the damaging effects of industrialisation and machine-led production. In the video, Pauline Paucker, an artist, art historian, socialist and long-time customer of the London department store Liberty – an early purveyor of Arts and Crafts design – discusses the socio-economic context of the Arts and Crafts movement and her fascination with it.

Coventry Cathedral centres on the city’s modernist cathedral, a Brutalist structure designed by Sir Basil Spence and built between 1954–62 after the former medieval cathedral was destroyed during the Second World War by German air raids in 1940. Constructed adjacent to the ruins of the Gothic cathedral, the new Cathedral Church of St. Michael was built to serve as an offering of solace, and a global symbol of peace. Büttner considers the politics of the experience of beauty in post-war architecture: the video focuses on architectural details and artworks commissioned by Spence, including the stained-glass baptistery window created by John Piper and the large glass West Screen, hand engraved by John Hutton, which links the architecture of the old Cathedral with the new. The sounds of musicians rehearsing and the tuning of a piano audible in the background – which Büttner encountered while filming – allude to the idea that peace is an ongoing process that must similarly be practiced and rehearsed.

Büttner’s interest in the relationship between craft and solace stems in part from her longstanding use of woodcut. The woodcuts in this exhibition feature motifs which recur throughout the artist’s conceptual practice: potatoes, bread, a hazelnut tree and a woman at rest on a mattress – images and objects that are small and low.

The artist’s glass vases, a series begun in 2021, respond to the organic shapes of flowers. Their forms recall Delftware and vases designed to hold flowers grown from bulbs; one is adorned with spherical nodules which denote both the undergrowth of the bulb and the blossom above. Another vessel is appropriated from a still life painting by Claude Monet in which a vase decorated with a floral pattern holds a bouquet of gladioli, lilies and daisies. Büttner’s vessels are displayed on a handcrafted wooden table, an exact replica of those in the dining room at the Carmelite convent in Dachau, Germany, a modernist building which is sited on land that abuts the Dachau Concentration Camp memorial.