Vagabond, kaleidoscopic Trojan Horse

62 October/November 2023 October/November 2023 63

irectly outside the Royal Hibernian

Academy (RHA) Gallery Dublin,

charity workers are talking to a

homeless person, who peeks out

from one of two tents snugly cradled

in a concrete elbow.

This is nothing new in a big city. Yet, it is a

strange epilogue to Alan Butler’s solo exhibition

We are now in the mountains, and they are in us

which, with a feverish funfair of colour, light,

sound, AI, and not to mention, tents, is currently

igniting the inner conﬁ nes of the RHA proper with

ironic glee.

Sometimes in their work, current socio-political

issues are intentionally addressed by artists, or

accidentally merge with the socio-political

motorway from some narcissistic backwater

source. Butler, as long as I have known him and

his art, has been one of the local artists to take

the path less ventured, materially manifesting

the internet as both art and socio-political

commentary in the public space of the gallery.

In Butler’s words: “The exhibition surveys the

history of image-making devices over the last

200 years and how they have contributed to an

objectiﬁ ed conception of what Nature is”. This

has the tone of tradition, but don’t let that deceive

you. It is all being done in an art institution where

painting has been primary for 200 years, and in

the same year the RHA celebrates and retains —

in some of its institutional rituals — 200 years of

cultish tradition.

Butler is not a traditionalist; he is a surplus

ironist. But if you approach this exhibition with

just irony in your eyes and smile, it’s going to be

an empty experience. Like the Greeks’ ironically

fated heroes on the road to tragedy, cultural

producers throughout time have used irony to

map the route to what they have already accepted

as same shit, di erent day.

On entering the main gallery space through a

heavy black curtain, a projection of the moon

darts here and there across the gallery walls and

ceiling. Then comes the kitchen sink, including

but not exhaustively: a rotating totem of TVs with

trope screensavers; AI generated and 3-D printed

gilt frames and corn-on-the-cob; an automated

window blind printed with an image of a painted

pastoral landscape that opens and closes to

Vagabond, kleidoscopic Trojn Horse

James Merrign on Alan Butler who is resurrecing

nd hen burying lndscpe r,  he RHA

images of oil rigs; and not to forget, the tents –

far fancier than the tents outside – with rotating

mirrors backed with encyclopaedic plates of

ﬂ ora, or something like that. It’s all too much and

too fast to capture as a description. This is not

tradition. This is not nature. This is history being

propelled forward at break-neck speed.

15 years ago Butler’s grafting of the internet

Butler is not a traditionalist; he is a surplus

ironist. But if you approach this exhibition with

just irony in your eyes and smile, it’s going to

be an empty experience

onto the art scene was received by most curators

as plastic surgery gone wrong. No one knew

where to place him. He was homeless and

transient; in the world and not in the world.

Especially in the non-existent reception from

commercial galleries.

Crucially however Butler’s work was viewed by

his peers as a tour de force and inﬂ uence. In a way

CULTURE

62 October/November 2023 October/November 2023 63

his art was too present, or not dependent enough

on tradition. Like when young Andy Warhol’s

screen-printed Campbell Soup cans were made

for consumption in the gallery, not the

supermarket. For example, in 2010 Butler

blatantly appropriated and exhibited a souped-up

version of the ﬁlm trailer of Sex and the City 2 and

took it for a joyride in a Dublin gallery.

The lack of commercial gallery eyes on Butler

— until he gained representation from Green on

Red Gallery Dublin after years of challenging the

status quo of painting — was due in part to the

artist’s then inability to make or package quality

art objects for an art market that values quality

over radical aesthetic gestures. He has since

resolved this issue, as evidenced at the RHA in

the framed and materially sensitive wall and

frame bound paintings and prints.

That said, I have never viewed Butler as a

commercial artist, even though you can purchase

his works in galleries and art fairs around the

world. Yet Butler’s craft is less about basket

weaving and homebakes, and more about

conceptual craftiness, and an awareness of the

tradition of art as something to appropriate,

torment and upturn.

At the RHA, Butler’s work is more vagabond

and ranging than a local commercial setting

could tolerate, as it visually and noisily hurtles

across the warehouse expanse of the RHA and

tradition. The concentric circles that emanate

outward from his stone throwing into the past

produce dangerous currents underneath.

In stark contrast, Enda Bowe’s photographs in

the adjacent gallery feels like you just crashed an

afternoon tea party with the good delph and

cutlery, but minus the mad hatter, who is next

door, where we are all Alice in his presence. I can

imagine some of the RHA artist members

whispering: Kids will be kids… we need to let

them riot from time to time.

Against this context of whispering tradition

and history, Butler resurrects the landscape

painting, that most horizontally passive of artistic

genres, to then bury it with digital and robotic

verticals that raise two ﬁngers to tradition. In this

sense Butler’s work is a Trojan horse that stays

sleeping on its haunches, bringing forth digital

daydreams of revolution, with a warning if not

warring hand.

Like Warhol’s supermarket America, Butler’s

art is a kaleidoscope through which we can view

the world around us. In this sense the artist is an

indierent and robust receptacle, who can digest

all this information, recycle it, and spit it back out

as a glitchy representation. This is no dierent

than a nineteenth-century impressionist painting,

or a late 1960s photorealist one for that matter.

It’s just that the contemporary landscape is a

little more complicated or just weirder than

Monet’s Water Lilies, or John Muir’s Yosemite (a

central reference in this exhibition), who wrote: “I

was tormented with soul hunger… I was on the

world. But was I in it?”

The world that Butler reﬂects back is a world not

much dierent from the soul-searching one that

John Muir expressed in 1869. And yet it is a world

increasingly generated and experienced by virtual,

and now AI, means. Again, Butler is not a

traditionalist. In this exhibition he utilises the very

same AI technology that the world is fearful will

take our jobs, or, worse still, subjugate our natures.

In retrospect, Warhol’s world seems provincial

relative to the world that Butler holds a mirror to

today. It’s unsettling that the artist uses the word

“poignant” to describe his own mirror in the press

release, as if the future is already ﬁlled with

sadness and regret.

Over a decade ago, Butler pasted a giant text-

based work that read: BETTER LIVING UNDER

CRYPTO-FASCISM. Today, in the same part of the

gallery, the artist has installed a large TV on high

that screens a key video work, in which we are

presented with what Butler labels as a “Live

simulation of an audiobook reading by an Al

performer”. Simply put, an on-the-scene roving

reporter, dressed in a bright yellow raincoat,

narrates Muir-like poetic descriptions of a

landscape from the frontline of a storm that

threatens to envelop the reporter and her words.

While she battles the weather, a feed of online

commentary invades the screen. One

commentator with the handle @ArtisticSoul87

sums up the choir of apathetic reactions to the

spectacle: “in fact, can’t help but feel indierent

towards them”.

The one thing I get from Butler’s work is, there

is no hope. There’s fun, yes, but no hope. The

spool of the world’s predetermined destiny

towards fossil-fuelled and technological

obliteration is unwinding, and all we can do is

dumbly look into screens and watch it take place.

There is no redemption from indierence. As

David Foster Wallace foretold in Inﬁnite Jest, we

cannot help but be entertained by our own

demise. So this exhibition (to my mind) is about

and for the public. Its funfair antics and

amusements give the public enough surface

glitter to sprinkle on its more ominous

undertones.

In Germany in 1867, Karl Marx’s Das Kapital,

Volume I was published, expounding his theories

on the destructive forces of capitalism. A year

later “John Muir hopped o the boat in San

Francisco and asked a carpenter on the street the

quickest way out of the chaotic city. Where do you

want to go? the carpenter replied. Muir

responded, Anywhere that is wild”.

The dierence between John Muir — “the

gilded age ﬂower child” of Yosemite — and Butler

himself, is that Muir, as a young man, without the

responsibilities of family or ﬁnding shelter,

withdrew into Nature to seed his forcefully sincere

descriptions far away from the windy city of

capitalism, which he could no longer bear. Butler,

on the other hand, remains in the city, embedding

himself into the codes of culture, capitalism,

technology — within the eye of the virtual storm

— with a poignant and cracked mirror held ﬁrmly

in his hand.

Butler’s craft is less about basket weaving

and homebakes, and more about conceptual

craftiness, and an awareness of the tradition

of art as something to appropriate, torment

and upturn

Alan Butler’s We are now in the mountains, and They are in us are at the RHA Gallery Dublin until 1 October.