A Hand in Time: The Art of Ben Butler
November 20, 2012 - December 15, 2012
Location: The Museum of Work & Culture
42 South Main St., Woonsocket, RI, United States, 02895
The Museum of Work & Culture proudly presents A Hand in Time: The Art of Ben Butler, an exhibition of over thirty pieces of three-dimensional work by award-winning Newport, RI sculptor Ben Butler. It will be on display from November 20 through December 15, 2012. An Artist’s Reception for the exhibit will be held Sunday, December 2nd from 4 to 7 pm. In conjunction with Butler’s sculptures, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth faculty member James Alan Edwards’ documentary film Ben Butler Sculptor: Objects from Oblivion will be screened throughout the exhibition. The five-minute trailer may be seen at YouTube here.
For the past fifteen years Ben Butler has been refining the idea of combining readymade and found objects – objects from New England’s past and recent history ranging from farm implements to nautical hardware – to create new sculptural forms. Gesture, shape, humor and spirituality are all evident in the resulting forms; his sculptures are a clean and masterful intersection of former functionality and purely abstracted form. They are the luscious tone of patina itself. “Each sculpture lives on and stands by itself,” says Ben, “but at the same time echoes out a feeling of a collective past.” In Ben Butler Sculptor: Objects from Oblivion, filmmaker James Alan Edwards has done a remarkable job of showing both the free-ranging energy of Ben’s creativity and capturing the artist’s work process from initial inspiration to the final completion of the contemporary object.
A Hand in Time not only explores the notion of the artist as worker, but also conjures narratives of the history of labor, as it has been articulated by different bodies and implements through time.
Ben Butler received an undergraduate degree in Art Education from Penn State University and studied jewelry making at Massachusetts College of Art. He co-founded the Orson Welles Film School in Cambridge Massachusetts (1969‐1971), worked as sound director for the film Godard in America (1970), and studied with Geshe Rabten, guru and Buddhist scholar and spiritual advisor to the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala India (1971‐72).
By 1986 he had finally settled in Newport, RI (living there periodically since 1975), transitioning to working (two and three dimensionally) as full-time artist and sculptor. His works are in private collections and are often shown at galleries in the area. Ben maintains a working studio and hideaway gallery at One Casino Terrace in Newport.
“Objects from Oblivion”
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0RaiMsTPOg
“Objects from Oblivion” is an independent documentary of Newport RI Artist, Ben Butler. This master sculptor provides a studio Q & A of inestimable magnitude. His works are essentially an amalgamation of antique tools yet are timeless in their disguise as primitive totemic offerings. Butler articulately presents his process, artistic lineage, social significance, personal motivations, mythologies, local industrial era history and much more with a charismatic stage presence and a commanding yet gentle voice. Though recorded with low technology, his luminescent studio, the objects, and the field work come across the barrier of the digital domain with a high level of beauty and clarity. His captured dialog and insight spans well beyond the act of sculpture, but into the realms of all the arts.—Anonymous
The opening salvo to my video documentary of Newport Artist, Ben Butler. This master sculptor has provided me with a studio Q & A of inestimable magnitude. His works are an amalgamation of found 18th-19th Century tools for the most part yet are timeless in their disguise as primitive totemic offerings and are just perfect. The project has far exceeded my every expectation, regardless that I went into knowing that it would be just great. Frankly, and without boasting (well maybe a little), I am blown away! He articulately presents his process, artistic lineage, social significance, personal motivations, mythologies, local industrial era history and much more with a charismatic stage presence and a commanding yet gentle voice. Though recorded with low technology, his luminescent studio, the objects, and the field work come across the barrier of the digital domain with a high level of beauty and clarity. His command of art history and his ability to tie it into his life's journey and work is truly inspirational. As many times as I have gone over and over again the clips and sound bites in editing, I remain enlightened by his wisdom. The general effect of the document is that you are a welcome guest and colleague and that you are presumed to be equally imbued, as he, with the totality of the artist spirit. It has been confirmed, by those whose opinions I trust, that his captured dialogue and insight spans beyond the act of sculpture, but well into the realms of all the arts. I am eager to share my current director's cut, but first the tease of the trailer.
Produced, directed, and filmed by: James Alan Edwards
Butler Did It: 10 Years of Sculpture
By Newport This Week Staff | on October 16, 2014
By James Merolla
“I’m making ceremonial art for an unknown ceremony,” laughs Ben Butler on the eve of his latest art exhibit which will have its opening reception on Saturday, Oct. 18.
The line comes from a James Edwards documentary film on Butler, entitled “Objects from Oblivion,” five minutes of which you can see and hear on YouTube.
Butler, 71, of Newport, has been a filmmaker and artist. His work has ranged from chronicling the Orson Welles film school in the late 1960s in Harvard Square, to examining filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard’s presence in America, to living in India among Tibetan refugees, to working at UMass Dartmouth.
A former antiques seller, he was once described as “King of the Pickers” for his ability to pick out ancient and unusual objects from flea markets and yard sales. As a sculptor, Butler fuses those objects together into sculpted pieces. “I take everyday objects, and create totems out of them,” said Butler. “I’ve been hard at it in Newport, playing around with this for a long time.”
Butler is not a promoter. He doesn’t even have e-mail or a website. But documentarian Edwards builds him up, saying “His works are amalgamations of 18th and 19th century tools for the most part, yet are timeless in their disguise as primitive totemic offerings and are just perfect. His command of art history and his ability to tie it into his life’s journey and work is truly inspirational.”
Though his exhibit is entitled “Ben Butler, Ten Years of Sculpture,” he has been linking objects since 1988. “The ‘Ten Years’ refers to stuff I’ve made over that time,” said Butler. “I put a lot of effort into them and I’m dragging it out again.”
Butler’s three-dimensional art will pack One Casino Terrace. “There will be 200 objects on exhibit,” said Butler. “It will be like a forest. Tell people to go down the long hallway in the back of the building to find it.”
“Ben Butler, Ten Years of Sculpture,” opens with a public reception on Oct. 18, 5 to 8 p.m., One Casino Terrace. 401-675-7653.
Original synergy
Caroline H. Goddard | Mercury
August 7, 2013
The Newport Daily News
Regarding the book PASSIONS written by Susan Dye (poetry) and Ben Butler (drawings). Library of Congress
Ben Butler is an artist known primarily for his sculptures, which bring purpose to forgotten things assembled in new forms. He laughs that he is making ceremonial objects for an unknown ceremony. But few people remember that he started off as a painter, and he continues to produce two-dimensional works with a curious, brushless technique that involves cutting the corner off the flat end of an acrylic tube and squeezing, smudging and scratching the medium into the paper.
Susan Dye is a poet who has written over 1,000 poems, but to date, has only shared 18 with the world. “Nobody knows I write, not even my friends,” says the former owner of Armchair Sailor, who is an avid mariner and has published many articles on topics nautical, but never her poetry. Dye is meticulously critical of her work, thus a poem finds a swift end in her garbage pail if “it doesn’t meet the muster,” as she wryly remarks during an afternoon conversation at Butler’s Newport studio.
The space at One Casino Terrace, jammed between a hardware store and an aerobics studio, is itself unremarkable, although it does boast double-high ceilings and a bank of northern facing windows. Yet it is a beautiful and otherworldly landscape of Butler’s psyche and craft; sculptures stand on every available surface, walls are hung with a smattering of paintings, inspiring images and objects from travels, and a spindly, exotic tree angles towards, and overtakes, the patch of ceiling broken by a skylight. Butler jokes about his fear of dropping leaves, borne of the suspicion that the tree’s death will herald his own.
In this space of filtered light and curling cigarette smoke, Dye and Butler sat in mismatched chairs and talked about “Passion.”
The collection of work, which consists of 18 pieces, is currently on exhibit at the Redwood Library and Athenaeum and represents a brief but fruitful period of collaborative work between the two in 2001. Dye said the project came about because “I wrote a poem, and I usually show poems to no one, and I showed it to Ben. So that was unique right there. And I think it evolved from that, you know, we both had the idea simultaneously… Our idea initially was: he is what he is, and I am what I am, and yet, there’s a closeness between poetry and art.”
An intense bout of research into the history of collaboration between poets and artists followed the initial spark of inspiration. Though there is a longstanding French tradition of artists illustrating poetry, and snippets of written word have of course been incorporated into collage style art since the early 20th century, there is no documentation of collaboration like that of Butler and Dye ever.
In the space of two months, Dye wrote nine poems, which she then gave to Butler to produce companion paintings while he painted nine paintings, for which Dye then wrote poems. They say the paintings are not illustrations of the poems, and the poems are not about the paintings.
“You don’t want to be too explicit, then…you don’t leave room for the imagination,” Butler explains.
That neither of them can remember which pieces they did first or second is a testament to the fact that this was not an exercise in mimicry. “That’s what’s so cool, they are totally interactive” says Dye, lacing her fingers together.
The work was produced on high quality, deckle edged watercolor paper and framed in a series of 18 diptychs, though only 12 are on display this summer. Butler painted in a monochromatic palette of black and white acrylic, and Dye’s poems were letter-pressed by an artist in Pawtucket. A barely discernable blood-red line separates the works. Eventually, the two hope to fund the production of Giclée prints of the whole collection.
The show originally hung on walls in a gallery space shortly after the completion of the project in 2001. But at the Redwood, the pieces are in wooden museum cases that usually house the open pages of rare books, and this blurs the boundary between art and object.
“They’re in cases, they’re under lock and key, so that gives you the synthetic idea that these are valuable, almost like artifacts,” remarks Butler.
Moreover, the format of the Redwood show doesn’t just allow the viewer to have an intimate experience with the work, it requires it, because it’s impossible see the pieces at a distance.
“I think people in a gallery are afraid to get up close like that, and these demand up close, so it really worked out well,” says Dye.
Adds Butler, “Nobody’s crowding you or looking over your shoulder or anything, I mean you experience the thing one on one.”