Скачать или смотреть Peter Buggenhout, "I am the tablet", at Axel Vervoordt Gallery, Kanaal

That reality, in a perpetual state of transition, which cannot be grasped despite the sum of gestalt moments, is what the works in this exhibition – and those from Buggenhout's entire oeuvre – share. It is also why Buggenhout works with different materials and colours, to signify the totality of that complexity. In summary, his materials are ‘abject’: in their original existence (waste, dust, blood, or guts); others in their use or application – so is the application of paint. Although a synonym for wretched, Buggenhout uses the word ‘abject' explicitly referring to the French philosopher Georges Bataille. In the shadow of the burgeoning war and power struggles of the 1930s, he used the word abject to describe “the dehumanisation of labour, the class struggle, mass fanaticism”, which is the coercive force of sovereignty, an edifying exclusion that turns a section of the population into moral outcasts, as also later described by Hannah Arendt. Buggenhout's upcoming book Erotism also refers to Bataille's L'Erotisme, his main philosophical work. In it, he explores the concepts of eroticism, violence, prohibition and transgression, continuity, and discontinuity. It is only through transgression that a prohibition acquires meaning, through the revelation of its sacred nature. In an ever-evolving society, man finds himself straddling – on hold – between extremes, and here too: between order and enforcement on the one hand, the urge to transgress boundaries on the other.
But man is blind, Buggenhout says, just as he is blind in making his works, although each step follows one another with an intention. “The process has become the content of the work. When I start making a piece, I take one element, then I add a second one, and a fourth, and a fifth. So, this complete unpredictability, how it's going to look like in the end, is very often a blind way of working.” Not knowing where to go, is why Buggenhout named his most iconic series after a painting by Pieter Bruegel, The Blind Leading the Blind. Ongoing since 2000, examples from this series can be found in the collections of Centre Pompidou, Paris, and MONA, Tasmania. As hermetic constructions, they reveal themselves as bodies from another era, perhaps even the future. The layer of household dust Buggenhout adds at the end of the production process literally ‘shrouds’ the work in a haze of ignorance. To quote the Bible again: “Let them. They are blind who guide the blind. And if a blind man guides a blind man, they will both fall into the pit.”