Anyone who has spent time chewing through dense chunks of philosophy can sympathize with artist Andrea Büttner's complaint about Immanuel Kant's "Critique of the Power of Judgment."
There aren't any pictures.
There he was, the high honcho of the Age of Enlightenment sitting in his study in Konigsberg, Germany, in 1790 and nattering on about the good, the beautiful, the sublime and how to tell the difference. And nary a picture to tweak the imagination.
It reminded her of the way books change between childhood, when primers are deliciously crammed with colorful images, and adulthood, when you're lucky to get a mingy clump of photos midway through.
Setting out to fix the problem, Büttner pulled together "Kant's Pictures," hundreds of old and modern images of things he wrote about — buildings, women, wallpaper, sculpture, kids, trees, songbirds, the night sky. Her "Judgment," a visually annotated version of his text, was published last year, and 11 big panels of the pictures fill a long wall at Walker Art Center. They're one of many intriguing elements in "Andrea Büttner," a new show running through April 10.
German intellectual
A German-born artist who now divides her time between London and Frankfurt, Büttner, 43, comes by her interest in philosophy naturally, having studied it in Berlin before earning a doctorate from the Royal College of Art in London. Although her work is widely shown in Europe, this is her first U.S. exhibit.
Besides the frieze of images, the display includes woodcuts, a bench covered in hand-woven fabric, a moss-covered boulder, abstract etchings and stereoscopic slides. Together the unlikely objects make up a contemporary wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities. In Kant's time, the heyday of such collections, scientists and aesthetes mulled over exotic shells, rare plants, art and antiquities in an effort to understand and intellectually order the world around them. Like Kant, some Enlightenment thinkers worked from theory while others, like Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (who also figures in the show), worked from observation.
Now we google the info we need with the swipe of a forefinger, replacing our predecessors' analytical gymnastics with cloud computing. Büttner wryly alludes to this in 5-foot-tall etchings, shaped like cellphone screens, on which she's reproduced the smeary fingerprints left on her own phone. Vastly enlarged, the marks are imbued with her DNA and personality but read as arty abstract-expressionist gestures.
