SKETCHBOOK PORN

By: Amanda Manitach

Christopher Buening‘s prolific work comprises a pied diary of personal experience and relationships. His materials are redolent of things rococo, glittering with heaps of oozing glaze or White-Off that form stalactite-like characters in his ceramics and create ghostly negative space in his paintings. 

In addition to sculpture, painting, and gallery installation, Buening has developed a unique practice of guerrilla ceramic installation in public spaces, arranging compositions made of hundreds of brightly-colored ceramic shards that amass to form figurative images or elaborate shrines tucked into urban wastelands. Other installations in the wild are composed of exquisitely sculpted ceramic simulacra—hand-painted objects like pills, cigarette cartons, and beer cans. Left to be found by passersby, they languish and erode: an ode to decadence, survival, pleasure, and indulgence.

“Sketching is just another function of my journaling,” says Buening. “My sketchbooks—I have probably a hundred or more—are writing and drawings all intermingled. It’s a stream of consciousness function and I don’t really use them for anything other than verbal, visual and mental diarrhea release. These are all mixed media on sketchbook paper, done at various times over the last few years.”

See more at: www.chrisbuening.com 

The Gay, Life-Affirming, Gun-Controlling Art of Christopher Buening

by Jen Graves • Jun 26, 2015

Seattle artist Christopher Buening's show at Gallery4Culture was called Hunter < Gatherer, as in hunter is less than gatherer, gatherer is greater than hunter. That's the opposite of what his father taught him when he was growing up in Northern Wisconsin. His father, who "rabidly supports the NRA and is a staunch conservative," initiated Buening into a super-masculine world of guns, woods, beer, and porn—but the son was gay. He liked his father's world, but not for the reasons his father hoped.

Back then, as now, Buening genuinely wanted to gather objects together. When he was supposed to be shooting and killing, he'd be picking up neat and pretty things instead, or building forts, or watching birds. He remembers a moment when a chickadee actually perched on the barrel of his gun (depicted in the sculpture above), "fluffed himself up, and just rested there for a long while." It was, he explains, "a defining moment in which I realized I was not really cut out to hunt and kill animals."

In It Was a Man's World, Buening used white-out to write those words in unmanly cursive on top of a found painting on a slice of wood. It was a man's world his father took him into all those years ago, so the piece is a nostalgic expression of a place from the past.

But I also read it as a wish for a time when that past tense will apply to the whole world. A time when the relationships between women, men, and other animals are governed more by love than by power and dominion.

I appreciate the way he pairs ink prints on wood depicting the men in the hunting cabin with etchings on mirrors that depict the innocence of his boy's world. They come into such close contact, it feels unsafe for the boys.

Now that Buening is older, he uses gathering to build bulwarks against sorrow. He filled a wall of shelves with rainbowy ceramic vessels painted in nail polish, spray-paint, and glitter. Each pot he threw was intended to be an urn for someone he loves who has died; they each felt so inadequate that he just kept trying, kept making more, pitting life against death.

In celebration of this morning's historic news from the Supreme Court that marriage is a right for all same-sex couples in all states—and as a remembrance of the violence visited on so many people by this "man's world" we live in—I offer Buening's message printed on found fabric.

You don't have to shoot. Even if you're being put up to it.

Christopher Buening: New Work (Guerrilla Ceramica) Tackles The Orange Menace

By Craig Trolli, Seattle Gay Scene

The artist, Christopher Buening has a new show at Soil Gallery for the month of June 2017
Photo: snagged off the artist’s FB page

Christopher Buening is a Seattle artist who has done everything from murals to designs made with white out.  In April he created weekly ceramic installations in various public spaces.  He’s a member of SOIL Gallery and you can check out his work at chrisbuening.com.  He will be showing at SOIL in June with some new ceramic and sculptural pieces.

Craig: OK, first off: please tell everyone how to officially pronounce your last name.  It’s not pronounced Björk, right?

Chris: Bee- Ū -ning. It’s German in origin, but was changed a couple of times when my family ancestors immigrated. 

(So, no: not bone-ing!)

Craig: Your work is autobiographical, with titles like “The First Thing I Ever Stole”, “HighSchoolHigh” and “Madonna Fag” and deals with subjects like being forced to try hunting as a kid and making urns for lost friends.  Is there any part of your life you haven’t used for inspiration yet?

Chris: Yes! There are tons (I can’t tell you, you have to wait and see). And mining the past is never-ending because (until I die) more stuff keeps happening!  I jump around in time… doing work from various instances in life. And it isn’t all autobiographical. Sometimes I do political, social or ‘all-over-the-map’ work. It is rarely meaningless or purely visual though. There is usually some story or meaning behind it. Some of it may start out as a purely visual or media experimentation but as I get deeper into the piece a theme almost always develops.

Craig: I see a lot of teeth and skulls in your work, including a cast of your teeth from high school.  What’s going on there and also: how did you get that skull so pink (“Pink Skull, Gay to the Bone”)?

Chris: The teeth all came about because I was invited to be in a small group show called ‘TEETH’ at Soil (just about teeth!). The Seattle Times review is online somewhere. I had to make work about teeth and in working on that subject, it turned autobiographical. As for the skulls… the ones you are referencing are from my show “High School High”. I was a total hesher/burnout/biker-type dude in high school.  All a ruse of course. I thought the butcher I acted and the rougher the crowd I hung out with, then people might not figure out I was a homo. It was not cool to be gay when and where I was in high school. You faced daily torture. So I was a roughneck. I did like dark heavy metal music (which helped me fit in) and I was good at drawing and thought at the time that I might be a tattoo artist. I practiced drawing dragons, spiders, swords, skulls, stuff like that, and tattooed my friends. The skulls were a nod to that.

Recently, I have done a couple of installations around the theme of “Sticks and Stones may Break My Bones…..” (but names will never hurt me). So, skulls and bones are appearing in that respect.

How I got the pink you see:  I use various/multiple coats of spray paint and acrylic to get the color on my ceramics. I am new to ceramics so I am just starting to experiment with glazing.

Craig: Tell me about the ceramic public installation project you did during April.  I saw a photo of a family talking to you while you worked.  Was that fun to interact with people? And you let them take pieces?

Chris: It was fun. I did most of them in parks on nice sunny mornings so the people who stopped to watch or talk were relaxed and curious. Kids liked it a lot. Also- there were some people there because of my Facebook announcements, so I did know some of them.

The installations were made of many smaller ceramic pieces that came together to form text or an image. After they were complete, they were left there. So, over a week or so they slowly disappeared as people took pieces from them (or re-arranged them). Free Art for the People! It was nice to do a project outside the gallery and have the work be available and accessible to anyone.

Craig: How much correction fluid do you go through?  Who’s your dealer and how do you work with it?

Chris: I have slowed down a bit with that series (the Wite Out ‘portraits’). I still do them on occasion, but not as much. At the height of production I would go through maybe 20-30 pens per piece? I buy them in 4 packs online from Staples. They have gotten outrageously expensive lately. I guess hardly anyone uses Wite Out anymore.

Craig: Are these Trump heads going to be in your new show?  Is this their final look?  Did you have nightmares while working on them, or is that how you came up with them?

Chris: Yeah, the “Trump Heads” are in the show. The photo is of them in raw clay form. After they were fired they were just white so I have painted half of them ‘Cheap Gold’ and half ‘Cheeto Orange’.  “Trump Heads” can be purchased for $10 at Soil Gallery in Seattle in the month of June. 50% of all funds raised will go to a local LGBTQ charity helping at-risk youth (Lambert House). People may keep their “Trump Head’s” if they wish, but I hope they find something fun to do with it! Love Trump? Put him on a high shelf in your home. Hate him? Leave it in the urinal at your favorite pub! Smash it! Throw it on a fire! Get creative. I ask that you upload pics to my Trump Heads Facebook page or use #TrumpHeads. 

I made them all in the aftermath of the election when pounding his face into and out-of clay was a nice, constructive release compared to what I wanted to do.

Artist Chris Buening’s “Trump Heads” will be sale at Soil Gallery in June with partial proceeds benefiting Lambert House.

Craig: When I walk into an art supply store, it’s the same as if it were a hardware store: I have no idea where to begin.  How do you find your tools and mediums?

Chris: That’s pretty straightforward:  Either the idea for the piece dictates the media (what is the best media to carry this idea out?), or a particular media I am curious about and want to try dictates the ‘look’ of the piece.

Craig: I like your piece Faggot, which involves rainbow colored sticks.  It seems very calming despite the name, is that because I’m colorblind?

Chris: LOL! I forgot you are colorblind!! I often wonder what that is like. I suppose that’s what drew you to the more graphic style of art (with your comic strip [The Adventures of Em’ma Gawd! & Anna Rexia]and graphic, black and white pieces)?

“Faggot” was a piece that involved painted sticks and painted ceramic ‘sticks’ held up in a set of forked natural branches that lean against the wall (or wherever). It’s a play on the old meaning of faggot (a bundle of sticks) and the new meaning (via Hitler’s concentration camps where piles of dead homosexuals and Jews looked like piles of sticks). I left that piece in Volunteer Park, leaning against a tree in early April.

Note: There is some disagreement over where “faggot” as a derogatory term came from. The Hitler thing is what I have read/heard in the past, but some say it is from the Salem Witch Trials where it was said that the only way to burn a witch was to burn her with the flames of a homosexual (!?). There are a few different stories and myths.

The terms ‘Fascist’ and ‘Faggot’ both derive from the Latin for ‘bundle of sticks’

Not very calming?

Craig: Didn’t you DJ in Wisconsin?  Any good stories there? 

What music do you listen to while you work on your art?

Chris:  Actually, I started DJing here in Seattle. I was the first DJ at the Cuff when they opened their new Dance Floor area. I amassed a pretty good record and CD collection between London and continuing to collect here in Seattle. At the time I spun mostly progressive house and trance (at least- for the Cuff’s dance floor). I eventually quit because they wanted me to play top 40 remixes and “More Cher!” and I just couldn’t…. I think the highlight was DJing to a packed house for NYE 1999/2000. I also DJ’ed Nike’s international fashion show in Vancouver in 2000. That was fun.

But I honestly don’t listen to as much music anymore. On occasion I will throw on something new I am into, or some down tempo stuff, but mostly I listen to the news or talk radio in the studio…. I know… BORING! Maybe I kind of burned myself out with all the years of thudding beats at a loud volume, late nights and constant partying.

Craig: You’re a member of SOIL Gallery…that means you’re rich, right?!?

Chris: Oh for fuck’s sake. No. But I am married to a guy who does pretty well and is smart about money. Thank goodness. I am hopeless when it comes to the financial world. I am a good saver, but I don’t make much. Without my husband I probably wouldn’t be in Seattle. I’m not sure I could afford to live here.

I love SOIL though! It’s a lot of work, but I think it’s one of the best galleries in Seattle. We don’t operate for profit. We are a group of artists with a gallery space and we strive to promote new, important, out-of-town, under-represented artists and unique shows that maybe an artist couldn’t do in another gallery. If you don’t have to worry about sales you can really push the envelope.

Craig: So your favorite animal is…the earthworm?

Chris: Yes! Growing up in Wisconsin, my first job was picking night crawlers in our big yard at night in the Summer. The best was when you would catch them mating and grab them where they were joined and pull two out at once. There were thousands back then… some of them 8-10″ long. I sold them to the neighbor across the street who ran a bait shop out of his garage. Hey- it was a different time.

Craig: You’ve used airsick bags as canvases.  Were you worried an art critic would write that into a review, like, “I needed an airsick bag after staring at his art”?  

Chris:  Yes. Unfortunately, back then I was still pretty much completely ignored as an artist. I certainly wasn’t on many critics’ radar.

Craig: Have you had any bad reviews and how’d you deal with that?

Chris:  A bad review is no review. And yes, I have had tons of that. All artists have.

Craig: And finally: what do you miss most about working with me at the video store?

Chris: Everything! That job was awesome. I saw Pat at the Giorgio Moroder concert a couple of weeks ago! You know…. I miss the gossip and cruising hot guys and waiting to see what porn they were going to rent from the back room. “He’s straight, Craig! Dammit”  or… “Total beefcake, but he seems to only rent skinny, young Asian-boy porn… I guess he won’t go for me” Remember the little black and white spy (security) cam trained on that porn room!?  Lol. Also- wasn’t it just a little bit fun when there was a line of people and some guy or girl at the counter would say, “What Late Fee’s!?” and we’d have to start listing them: “Anal Vixens 4, Sluts On Parade, Deep Throat Sorority, Pete’s Dragon…..”

So- did you ever have sex in the porn room there? Be honest, Craig!   😉

Craig: Hey, when did the interviewees start asking questions?!? (Actually, I love it!) I do miss the sign for the porn room that had a mysterious dripping stain running down over the words “Adults Only”: very artistic!

Christopher Buening: New Work (Guerrilla Ceramica)

June 1 to July 1

See a selection of brand-new drawings, paintings, and ceramics by artist Christopher Buening, much of which will be from his project Guerrilla Ceramica (a street art take on ceramics). Buening had a thoughtful, vulnerable show called Hunter < Gatherer at 4Culture in 2015. Jen Graves described one of the featured pieces:

“In It Was a Man’s World, Buening used white-out to write those words in unmanly cursive on top of a found painting on a slice of wood. It was a man’s world his father took him into all those years ago, so the piece is a nostalgic expression of a place from the past…But I also read it as a wish for a time when that past tense will apply to the whole world. A time when the relationships between women, men, and other animals are governed more by love than by power and dominion.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: CRAIG TROLLI

Craig Trolli is an actor who performs as both a boy but also in various states of drag, including his version of Melanie Griffith, Meredith Baxter-Birney, and Sophia in Golden Girls Burlesque. He’s hoping to one day do a show called "Craig: a One Women Show", which would hopefully explain why he thinks any of this is a good idea. If you have an opinion about that, send us your feedback!

Cross-dressing the gendered gesture

By Amanda Manitach for City Arts – November 27, 2012

Fetish in the form of cloth cut from second-hand clothes is found in multiple pieces, including Chris Buening's It's All Drag, which conjures the primitive assemblage style of Surrealism and the fetishistic flourish of Louise Bourgeois. His sculpture is composed of cone-forms and blobby bottles that call to mind isolated body parts or oversize, sexualized chess pieces. They’re painted, powdered, dolled up, bound and draped in cloth cut from suits, baby blankets, party dresses, scarves and kerchiefs. He refers to them as "mannequin" sculptures in drag, since he’s put male garments on female forms and vice verse. Buening says he solicited the help of an actual drag queen—an expert seamstress—to help complete the piece.

By bringing drag into the mix, Buening approaches the subject of gender (and of being a male, hence conversationally “compromised” by privilege) in one of the only possible ways: he metaphorically tucks. Buening drapes his work (by extension, himself) in the fetishized trappings of the feminine and enters the conversation in a way that subverts the gender binary. "The artist, regardless of their sex, will create," he says. "It's a primal urge. But we drape examination, ritual, decoration and deeper meaning over that primitive framework like the clothes on our bodies. It helps us identify and categorize."

Four artists at Seattle's SOIL Gallery explore the world inside our mouths in "Teeth"

By Michael Upchurch for Seattle Times - October 14, 2012

Why is it that whole portions of the human experience are sometimes overlooked in art?

For instance: teeth.

These little sculptures in our mouth are both durable and perishable. They can be neatly aligned or a crooked mess. They give us pain when infected; give us bliss when we chomp into something good.

In a new show at SOIL Gallery, straightforwardly titled "Teeth," four local artists investigate what our gnashers are all about...

Christopher Buening's "Front Tooth Fail" is a comical multimedia shrine to a tooth that was never meant to be. (It kept getting knocked out, Buening explains, during various boyhood accidents.) Buening's nearby installation, "31 Tin Foil Teeth and One Gold One," is clearly indicative of the tooth obsessions triggered in Buening by his inability to keep that one tooth intact in his mouth.

IN THE STUDIO: A VISIT WITH CHRIS BUENING

Words and images by Amanda Manitach for  New American Paintings
September 27, 2012

Chris Buening’s (NAP #85) three large pieces at Prole Drift weave in and out of themselves, mesmerizing snarls of color and line and coiling worms. Illustration of Events Happening is the title of the show, as well as the name of a diagrammatic installation on one wall that consists of 29 resin and plaster discs connected by a network of brushstrokes. Embedded in each disc, like fossils trapped in translucent bands of sedimentary strata, are layers of correction fluid drawings, rainbow foil, glitter and Sharpie. To either side of the installation are two large paintings on paper. One of the paintings has been meticulously cut out to form a hydra-like lacework of earthworms (as colorful as Gummi Worms). Facing it is a prismatic, molecular abstraction pulsing with bright spots and worms. Worms are everywhere.

As the title suggests, Illustration of Events Happening sheds light on some recent events in Buening’s life. I met him at his studio to discuss it. – Amanda Manitach, Seattle Contributor

Buening’s studio is just like his work: oscillating between chaotic and orderly. A dozen rolls of artist tape are neatly hung on nails from a ceiling beam. Bulk packages of Wite Out pens are tidily stocked on a shelf. Yet the walls are graffitied with a confetti of paint drips and messages scrawled in pen. One portion of wall has been precisely cordoned off and threatens to burst its perimeters with a bricolage of dog tags, plastic dolls, scribbled notes, doodles, magazine scraps, matchbooks and splashes of neon paint.

Amanda Manitach: What is this wall about?

Chris Buening: It helps my OCD about being a pack rat. I just contain it to that wall. It’s things I find on walks, scraps and remnants in my studio that I can’t throw away.

AM: It looks like a shrine! So what’s your process?

CB: I start out with a blank piece of paper and I start painting on it. Spray paint and acrylic usually. It gets my need to throw paint around out of the way. Sometimes I’ll see the suggestion of a thing in the paint, a random image will start appearing in it, it will spark an idea…Sometimes I just like the amalgamation of colors and then I’ll start drawing on it. Usually about halfway through the piece, when I’m starting to draw, a specific event or a person will come to mind and it revolves around exorcising that thing. It becomes a meditative process. This one [Dolly’s Demise] is about my friend Teda. In high school she was a severe drug addict, a gas huffer. She got pregnant and she was doing so many drugs she lost her baby and she later committed suicide.

AM: Wow, I wouldn’t have guessed that association was embedded in the image. Your work is so beautiful and bright. These lips could simply be a kiss.

CB: A lot of it is dark and extreme memories that I put away or white out (chuckles). I guess it’s a little therapeutic. I like the dichotomy of the loose, nothing-on-your-mind type of painting, splashing colors around, then switching to the detailed, disciplined over-drawing. It satisfies both of my impulses.

Chris Buening | Triangualation, spray paint and correction fluid on cut paper, 44 x 36 inches.

AM: The drawn portion has the look of chemical or geometrical structures. Does sacred geometry factor in?

CB: I’ve read a lot of Fritjof Capra (laughs) so yeah it’s definitely something I’m aware of but it’s not something I’m thinking of here. Although I would say that mathematics and string theory factor into this work, thinking of how the universe functions.

AM: Psychedelics….at all?

CB: Mmhmm. A lot of my work is definitely influenced by psychedelics. I certainly did enough of them. But I stopped taking all that stuff quite a few years ago. I’d taken so much of it and it wasn’t quite the revealing experience when you start. I don’t have a religion, so for a while psychedelics were my little window into the universe.

AM: The works at Prole Drift have to do with a hospitalization?

CB: I was in the hospital earlier this year with potentially life threatening pancreatic necrosis. It was most likely brought on by over-consumption of alcohol. The work at Prole Drift is a meditation on the interconnectedness of the decisions we make in life and their consequences lead us to certain experiences, which in turn present another set of options. Each decision and action, hundreds per day, influenced by and connected to the previous or present circumstance. Some lead to regeneration and spawn a whole new direction. Some just peter out and wither in importance. Others lead to sickness and death. I suppose they all lead to death in the end, don’t they?

AM: Artists and alcohol…it’s a complicated relationship to say the least. I love to drink.

CB: I used to professionally DJ too. Lord knows, I’m no stranger to the party scene. I have lost more than a few friends and family to addiction and overdose. More specifically, I lost an uncle and a best friend to pancreatic necrosis (due to alcohol) when I was in my late 20’s/early 30’s. Lying in the hospital, thinking I might die that way too was a serious wake-up call.

Buening’s studio (Illustration of Events Happening installation in progress) Image courtesy of the artist.

AM: You have this drawing of an earthworm on your wall that says “MASCOT OF MINE.” And the earthworm keeps making an appearance…

CB: Worms are a favorite for me. They are symbolic of both death and regeneration. Also, my first job (when I was a kid) was catching “nightcrawlers” in my yard and the surrounding fields in Ashwaubenon, WI. Huge, long, slimy worms that my sister and I would hunt at night with a flashlight and a bucket during the Summer. We sold them to an out-of-home bait shop that the neighbor was running for five cents a worm! We always spent the money on candy.

AM: What are you working on next?

CB: In November I’ll be showing with Joey Veltkamp at True Love Art Gallery and also at Cornish College of the Arts. That show will be a response to Elles: Women Artists from the Centre Pompidou that’s coming to Seattle Art Museum. I have some ideas about a new body of work…but it’s all still coming together in my mind. Some new work in clay and further foray into sculpture and installation….
________________________________________________________________

Christopher Buening graduated from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design in 1997 and currently lives and works in Seattle.  He is a member of SOIL Gallery and shows his work throughout the United States, most recently in the Northwest at Greg Kucera, Seattle/Tacoma Intl. Airport and Prole Drift. He was featured in New American Paintings #85. 

Amanda Manitach is a writer and artist based in Seattle.

Standing Tall

by Rebecca Teagarden with photos by Benjamin Benschneider  for  Northwest Living Magazine
July 10, 2011