DAVID BUCKLAND
During the 80’s, David Buckland collaborated with dancer and choreographer Michael Clark on a substantial body of work. The work addressed the lineage of artistic endeavor that spans the moment in time of the diversified punk subculture of London, right before the culture became coarser and more reactionary. It was a time of social, cultural and political counterrevolution, during which the underground was a catch-all sobriquet for a community of likeminded anti-establishment, anti-war individuals.
The artist’s work stems from a profound complexity of vision with each image tending to represent and project, all of the things it preceded. This results in the viewer becoming simultaneously aware of putative causes and particular results.
The artist's astonishing black and white portraits of Clark, Muse es Sein and Es Muse Sein from 1984, omit a striking tenderness. Isolated, intimate, naked, they often reveal an ambiguous relation to time as well as to space. Each in a different way are considered as flexible and indeterminate. Buckland's photographs imply the entire continuum of movement from which the chosen images emanate. To a large extent, the intensity of the work arises from the contradiction between dance - kinetic, operational, self-consuming - and the image - permanent, fixed, non-evolutive. The first is process, the second is completion.
David Buckland (born in 1949, London) is known equally well for his stage designs and innovative photography. He has had numerous international exhibitions including solo exhibitions at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, The National Portrait Gallery in London and the Espace Photo, Paris. His work is included in, amongst others, the permanent collections of the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of New York.
In 2001, Buckland created the international Cape Farewell project, which brings artists, visionaries, scientists and educators together to build an international collective awareness and the cultural response to climate disruption. He produced the films Art from the Arctic, 2006 for the BBC and Burning Ice, 2010 for Sundance.