Discovering the work of Buford: a New York artist who has created public architectural sites in Berlin, Paris, Seoul, Beijing and Venice

Buford, Space is the Place, 2021, drawing, 8”x 8.5” inches

By EKIN ERKAN August 6. 2024

Gordon Matta-Clark’s public installations, like those of his compatriots Dennis Oppenheim and Robert Smithson, was formed outside the parameters of standard gallery presentation. Furthermore, like Mary Miss and Tadashi Kawamata, Matta-Clark appropriated public sites; his work engaged a sense of place, assailing existing buildings’ structural integrity. By cutting holes through walls, ceilings, and floors, Matta-Clark altered the space “to its very roots,” as he later explained, which "meant a recognition of the building’s total (semiotic) system, not in anv idealized form, but using the actual ingredients of a place”. As the carved houses were viewed from the sidewalk, Matta-Clark’s work was imbued with an affective phenomenology deracinated from the strictures of the insular artworld’s hierarchies—the percipient’s viewership in keeping with the outflows and ebbs of everyday life. Matta-Clark’s audience was comprised of everyday pedestrians whose art viewership eluded the artworld’s enclosures and its coeval ostentatious ambit; such passersby could receive and interpret the works with a certain liberty, which included the freedom not to interpret. One could appreciate these sites as merely sensuous structures. Others intellectualized the public installations, mapping meaning(s) onto the works. Others still found humor in it. Some, especially children, touched the works, treating their fingers to jagged concrete edges, thereby engaging a phenomenological key that would ordinarily be proscribed in the artworld. Others, culling the well-known case of Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc (1981-89), chided Matta-Clark’s chined buildings—some complained of deteriorating market values while others found the works to be optically offensive. Such earnest everyday reactions from everyday people are, as a matter of artworld principle, generally circumscribed, tempered, and silenced in the white cube’s halls. But here, on the street, they were encouraged, the public spatial setting of the works unspooling its own demands.
 

Buford, Gimme Space, 2023, (bubble), photograph
 

Matta-Clark’s works evince what is unique to public art installations—its egalitarianism. The public artwork treats each percipient as a bearer of cosmopolitan rights: principally, the right to react, unfiltered. The works, public and thus unmediated by artworld convention, are of a piece with the form of public right. They encourage reactive attitudes foreclosed not only by the artworld but by private property in general. This speaks to the cosmopolitan universalism of public art. In short, public art—like no other aesthetic genre—elicits public reactions and opinions, by specialists and non-specialists alike.

Of course, as with all art objects, the reactive attitudes and value-judgments not cleaved from the works’ embodied meanings. An austere, minimal work like Tilted Arc will, as articulated best by Anna C. Chave in her 1990 essay, “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power”, fail to emphasize relationality. Percipients’ reactions will make contact with the works’ plain, concrete forms that block off any subtending, contiguous environment. The viewer will react to steel rather than setting, or the steel as a barrier to setting. Writing with approbatory language, Chave describes the rhetoric of minimalist public art as an "exercise of power: as strong, forceful, authoritative, compelling, challenging, or commanding", emphasizing the "masculinist" vernacular that extols strength. Such strength-cum-domination is imposed over the environment. Implementing steel and opaque material, Titled Arc figured a form onto itself, obstructing travel—both optical and peripatetic. Thus, while approachable and viewable by everyday passerby, Serra did not make use of the latent universalism that public art can uniquely instrumentalize. In fact, he shirked it.
 

Buford, Pavilion for all, 2023_24, translucent acrylic panels, mixed media, 3 panel prototype _ work in progress, Triangle 1, (14’ x 14 x 10’ feet)
 

With projects like Splitting (1943 - 1978), the anarchitect Matta-Clark set his work within the public tribunal of everyday people's everyday experience. Unlike Serra and the minimalists, Matta-Clark’s installation made key transformations to architecture that de-segmented the relational environment—riven fissures, gaping holes, and partial demolitions serving as apertures. There was less “blocking off” and more licensing to “peer within”. Matta-Clark could almost be taken for artisan, positing windows where walls once were.

Unfortunately, little of Matta-Clark's public installations remain today, archived solely via video art documentation and black-and-white photography. Ghostly whispers murmured by those who were fortunate enough to see his work in situ attest to what was once a venerably universalist project. Granted, it is not entirely clear that Matta-Clark fully realized the universalist ethos of public art, leaving facets of his project incomplete. Splitting and other such works were intended to recall the private lives of those who had inhabited these spaces, allotting glimpses at interior wares and relics that metonymically captured whole families and ways of life. This aspect of Matta-Clark’s project remained impenetrable for most viewers, as the buildings’ interior rooms either remained blocked off or, more frequently, they crumbled during construction. As memorabilia slipped into refuse and detritus below, Matta-Clark’s work found itself unwittingly in continuity with the aforementioned minimalist tradition of “blocking off”.
 

Buford, Gimme Space (5th ave), 2022, photograph, c-print
 

Granted, Matta-Clark progressed the public art project of beyond Minimalist rhetoric by descrying universalist possibility, doing so via material choices—or, in this case, the negation of material. Although blockages remained, the presence of gaping apertures licensed percipients to think about what lies beyond the barrier. One of the related interesting facets is that Matta-Clark’s works were provisional. Matta-Clark dubbed his installations "non.u.mental", speaking to the role of mentality and imagination as it concerns the envisaging of what it is that lies beyond the barrier. He filled in the buildings’ interiors with personal belongings before they were, inescapably, razed, leaving behind an urban reliquary. Matta-Clark’s choice domiciles were located in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods like Harlem and the Bronx, where the buildings had already been slated for demolition. In his choosing such condemned spaces, Matta-Clark interpolated architecture as a reflection of the dominant modes of social foreclosure, attempting to make materially manifest the ruptures and clefts that were already at play in civic life. Yet what he made perceptible came at the cost of transience: the works, understood as moving sites, were short-lived and their public nature was foreclosed by this temporality. That is, what Matta-Clark espied was blinkered.
 

Social Contract, 2008, acrylic paint on card board, 17” x 27” inches
 

Buford, a New York artist who has created public architectural sites in Berlin, Paris, Seoul, Beijing and Venice, can readily be understood as a scion of Matta-Clark’s “non.u.mental” project. Buford has also advanced Matta-Clark’s universalist mode. Buford—an elusive artist with a clandestine history, whose name and persona has gone through myriad changes—is a mightily intelligent figure; he is one of the few conceptual artists I have met who is truly fascinating. His forthcoming public art projects, which I have slowly gained knowledge of through a long-term research project, fully make use of universalism—Buford betrays universalist thinking in his construction, composition, setting/relationality, and material choices.

Universalism and public ways of being have long interested Buford, as has the leitmotif of luminosity/aperture versus barrier/blockade. Yet he is also a rigorous, deep research-based conceptual artist.

         This coterie of themes is attested to by his 2016 stereoopticon I + II project, a doubled bronze prism made in collaboration with a now defunct art space. The duet of floating prisms is the concrete actualization of Duchamp’s Handmade Stereopticon Slide (pencil on gelatin silver prints mounted on black-paper-surfaced board; 1918-1919). Duchamp’s unrealized project, itself, was the byproduct of Duchamp's interest in n-dimensional and non-Euclidean, metric geometry. The work Duchamp was working on when he died was also involved with stereoscopy, Cheminée anaglyphe (Anaglyphic Chimney), which was intended to be included in the deluxe edition of Arturo Schwarz's The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp. In a 1968 letter he wrote to Schwarz, Duchamp mentions Handmade Stereopticon Slides and writes that:

"Regarding the French edition (deluxe)—I have thought of making an anaglyph (red and green) apropos of a Spanish chimney of which I have made a sketch in 3 dimensions, for the mason who is executing it in our new summer home. The handmade anaglyph (like the Handmade Stereopticon Slides) should produce a three-dimensional effect when viewed through a pair of spectacles with green and red colored filters”.[1]

         In another, related letter from the same year, Duchamp writes:

"Just imagine, I have found the book on the anaglyphs in the same bookshop where I had bought it around 1930, while taking a walk on the boulevard St.-German following a very vague memory—the Vuibert bookshop is still at the same place and the book is still on sale (4th edition)”.[2]

Gimme Space, (bench #2), 2017, photograph, c-print

This book that Duchamp is referring to here is French mathematician Henry Vuibert’s Les Anaglyphes geometriques (1857), a treatise on the use of anaglyphs. Summarily put, the anaglyph is a type of stereoscopic image where the image appears to be three-dimensional when viewed, though it is really two-dimensional. Vuibert’s book considers how anaglyphs might be utilized to represent solid figures in science.  The original anaglyph concept is credited to Joseph D'Almeida, who in 1858 used complementary colored images and filters to project three-dimensional images with a “magic lantern” projector. In the 1890, L.D. DuHaron patented the printing process of the anaglyph, adapted it to printed media.[3] I mention this research history to illuminate just how intricate a genealogy Duchamp’s draft was steeped in, let alone Buford’s actualization of it. Buford’s realization of the pencil pyramids that Duchamp sketched is imbricated in Duchamp’s optical, illusionistic images anchored in a desire for the transcendental, thus Duchamp’s interest in the fourth dimension, though it also culls a history of mathematical research on projective geometry. Like Barry X. Ball, who recently realized Umberto Boccioni's Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) in the golden-patina bronze that Boccioni intended, Buford’s seminal work (now in a private collection) can be read art historically. Yet its tortuous optical-mathematical discursive genealogy is as much a part of the work as is the immediate reference of Duchamp. Like the artist william cordova, Buford’s work embraces many deep histories.

The term “stereopticon” thus indirectly also engages the late 19^th century projector consisting of two complete lanterns, arranged such that one image appears to dissolve while the next is forming. As an article on Professor George Reed Cromwell, an early innovator of the "magic lantern"—an early type of image projector—published in The Magic Lantern Gazette recalls:

"The real story begins with the earliest use of the term ‘stereopticon’ in America to describe a powerful magic lantern used to project photographic slides. In 1860, newspapers in Philadelphia announced the appearance of ‘The Stereopticon’ exhibited by Peter E. Abel and Thomas Leyland. After a long run in Philadelphia, Abel and Leyland’s Stereopticon moved to Boston and several other New England cities. This lantern, which was imported from England and was capable of showing dissolving views, actually belonged to John Fallon, superintendent of the Print Works at Pacific Mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Abel soon went off on his own business ventures, while Leyland continued to show lantern slides throughout the Northeast, using the name “Fallon’s Stereopticon.” During the early 1860s, several different people were involved in operating Fallon’s Stereopticon and providing lectures to accompany the photographs. Then in 1864, all mention of Fallon’s Stereopticon disappeared from the newspaper."
 

Stereoopticon I + II, 2016, bronze work _ sculpture (cast bronze), 60” x 7” x 1.5” inches
 

In 1892, Charles A. Chase produced in Chicago a panorama that he named the “STEREOOPTICON-CYCLORAMA”. Chase projected a continuous image over 30 feet in height via eight double-arc projectors; notably, the Lumiere brothers created a similar form of optical theater—specifically, a continuous panorama—which they termed the “Photorama”, debuting it publicly at the 1900 Paris Exposition. The Photorama premiered alongside Raoul Grimoin-Sanson's "Cinéorama", an immersive 360 degrees panoramic film which made use of ten synchronized projectors. Buford’s stereoopticon I + II, in its title’s spelling, most readily references Chase’s 1892 invention whilst also speaking to this collaborative genealogy of optical invention. His use of a mirrored pair of floating (yet heaving) skeletal vessels, however, makes static and metaphoric the dynamic, optical image.

He has executed a number of public and private artworks, ranging from the circulating neon installation, ellipse (2024)—which the artist installed and de-installed in a number of Lower East Side bar bathroom corridors—to tring pong (2014-24), a triangulated ping-pong station constructed in translucent acrylic the artist posits in various outdoor parks. In his private art endeavors, like gimme space, Buford photographs makeshift vessels that homeless men and women have constructed for their own reprieve; careful not to present the subjects, themselves—which would risk subjectivizing what is at its core a universalist project—Buford here deals more squarely with public space and its universalist core.
 

Gimme Space, (pieta), 2021, photograph, c-print
 

In the mixed-media stainless steel construction, broken pavilion 101 (2016), Buford’s contraption recalls Bernard Kirschenbaum’s 1966-67 collaboration with the Park Place Group, where Kirschenbaum—influenced by Buckminster Fuller’s designs—executed several geodesic domes made of aluminum, Masonite, and Plexiglass. Specifically, the triangulated pieces in Buford’s sprawling, motile cherry-red metal work keenly resembles the poster Kirschenbaum designed for his 1967 exhibition, “Tamara Melcher Paintings/Bernard Kirschenbaum Domes” at Park Place Gallery. The poster itself may have gone on to inspire Roberto Matta’s poster for “Matta: Le centre du milieu”, a 1967-68 show at Galerie Alexandre Iolas, Paris; Matta was working in Paris at the time and, given his New York artworld connections, may have received the Kirschenbaum poster. Fuller, Kirschenbaum, and the elder Matta are some of the key influences on Buford’s spatial construction, which evinces symmetrical patterns of diamonds and triangular shapes radiating from the center. Another enigmatic work from this period is Buford’s plywood barrier re-do (anche io sono architecto) (2017). The structure, placed in an abandoned upstate New York building, both serves as a ready reference to Serra’s Tilted Arc and frames it: in the abandoned, de-peopled space that Buford has selected, such an edifice can no longer function as an optical or peripatetic barricade. Instead, it illuminates the dialectical history of barrier-aperture sewn within the plexus of public art.

“pavilion for all” 2016, translucent acrylic, 3” x 3” x 2.8” inches
 

Buford’s forthcoming project, the pavilion for all (which I enjoy the special privilege of announcing to the world) furthers the spirit of collaboration but is undergirded by a more humanist, if not utopic, vim. The project is the apotheosis of Buford’s engagement with public architectural sites, this one making materially manifest his universalist ideals. With the pavilion, Buford advances a Kantian picture of architecture qua cosmopolitanism where nature and reason are enjoined, driving the human being forwards as a cognitive, social, judgment- and value-conferring creature of reflective reason who enjoys the capacity for universal aesthetic assent, unrestricted by heteronomy and liberated by inherent autonomy. This is evident in the pavilion for all’s construction, or its structural anatomy: a series of inviting, semi-translucent triangular panes will be constructed in a New York City public space (I do not have permission to announce which, yet) and a foundation in Venice, Italy. The panels are to be arranged into perpendicular axes that readily permit entry, play, interpretation, sedentary meditation, and conglomeration. The cuneate, crystalline structure harkens back to the structures of the World’s Fair and the New York Crystal Palace—public arcades culling passersby to reprieve, permitting intentionally communal experiences that prod reflection. Buford’s structure is fit for a range of activities including individual self-reflection, group meditation, yoga, book-reading, study, to list a few. In turn, the installation also goads individuals into a shared phenomenology. Wittingly or not, those inside the pavilion for all structure also become collective participants fettered into a collective way of being. The glass-like acrylic surface—curious, lucid, inviting, at odds with the Minimalist tradition’s blockages and “rhetoric of power”—does not foreclose its relationality to nature. Despite the obvious dichotomy between organic surroundings (viz., grass, plains, fields) and inorganic construction (viz., pellucid acrylic panels), the structure is an interstice made material. Our view of the piece inevitably becomes a view of its surroundings. This is quite fitting, given that the acrylic material for the pavilion is the very same as that which was used for the façades in architect Jean Nouvel’s “Jane’s Carousel” in the Brooklyn Bridge Park, a welcoming humanist project commissioned by the late Jane Walentas, who also encouraged Buford’s project during its early stages.

Buford’s pavilion and its polysemous metaphor is relieved of heavy-handed domineership, in keeping with that which is arguably medium-specific—or, rather, relationality-specific—to public art: its universal, communalist principle. This principle has taken time to reveal itself, though I have argued that Matta-Clark played a critical role in its concealment. But where Matta-Clark utilized the oblique porthole, palming light through a passage, Buford’s pavilion is made up of triangular facades, reminiscent of spire lights that pool light in a material vessel. The triangle, since the epoch of the Pythagorus and his heirs, the mathēmatikoi, has been heralded as an ‘idealist’ shape, flouting structural strength and serving as an architectural-symbolic key to understand nature’s fundamental constitution. Buford’s interest in the triangle also relates to Lygia Clark’s “bichos”, which Clark also dubbed "critters"—thin, hinged metal triangles that are fully manipulable, suggesting the dormant possibility of movement. Although differing in scale and use, Buford's pavilion and Clark's "Bichos" are similarly replete with potentiality that actualizes only via tactile engagement taken up by outside participants. Buford triangulation of interior space advances Clark and Matta-Clark’s projects by way of public situatedness/relationality and material composition, transitory inhabitants prodded into intimate contact with one another, less inclined to remain cleft and distanced from one another. WM