Eugenia Butler: Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis College of Art & Design - Los Angeles

An artist who operated in the same late-'60s circles as Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner and whose work was included in early exhibitions of Conceptual and post-Minimalist art of the like kind as "Electric Art" at UCLA (1969) "Prospect 69" at the Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, and "Concept Art" at the San Francisco Art Institute (1970) Eugenia Butler has been as pioneering as any practitioner in her field. at the same time as curator Anne Ayres notes in this exhibition's catalogue, history has granted Butler les than her to be paid In a move toward a help Ayres, building on the research and cataloguing efforts of looks Angeles-based critic and historian M.A. Greenstein, brought together fifty-eight works as well as assorted ephemera and documents to overlook over thirty-five years of Butler's production.

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Butler's early text-based works appear to epitomize the notion--now in like manner fundamental as to be almost a cliche--of art as idea detached from sensual or retinal experience. Subtly emphasizing or calling attention to various phenomena was standard modus operandi for Conceptual, post-Minimalist, and Light and Space artists; Butler's short descriptive phrases or bits of body on paper, metal plates, and wall labels propose the presence of phenomena that simply did not exist. Works like Negative Space aperture 1967, Light Cloud Piece, 1967-68 and Static Electricity Piece, 1967-68 comprising sole the words that make up their titles, were oftentimes described as "invisible sculptures." notwithstanding that these early pieces might appear to privilege mind above body or content over form, they're in fact bottomed in the same attempt to fuse gut- and brain-centered experience that inspired many of Butler's contemporaries. As your mind's organ of vision adds a layer to your view of the space around you, Butler's "perceptual/conceptual fields" become almost palpable. When you read Butler's phrases you simply have feeling see, and think differently in the space.

Many of Butler's other works are in fact quite actual, retinal, and physical--assisted or altered readymades; three-dimensional geometric wall reliefs that exploit illusion in sum of two units dimensions--emphasizing formal, material, and optical play while still dealing in idea, suggestion, and implication. Consider Electric Cord Piece, 1967 (remade 2003) in which a doubly male electrical cord snakes across the floor to join sum of two units female outlets, and My Last Museum Piece (Flies to Honey) a 2003 reconfiguration of a 1969 throw that consists of a seven-foot-diameter inflated clear plastic ball whose inside has been smeared with honey and entertainers a swarm of tiny flies feeding from its gooey walls. These are works that invade our space, inflame bodily reactions, and invite a whole range of associations. They catch your organ of vision hit you in the intestine and leave you scratching your head. Butler makes clear that hers has been an agenda not of narrowing experience by dint of privileging one aspect or approach on the contrary rather of advocating a broad, multivalent engagement.

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