Graham Budgett is a British-American conceptual artist and educator whose socio-politically engaged work includes photography, sculpture, installation, spatial practices and new media art.Kent, Sarah. "Machine Dreams/Photographers Gallery," Time Out (London), October 10–17, 1989, p. 47.Williams, Richard. "Blood on the Canvas," The Guardian, August 4, 1995, p. 18.Arendt, Paul. "Brainwaves: The Kiosk of Regrets," The Guardian, November 10, 2005, p. 21. Retrieved January 15, 2020.Harper, Richard H. R. "Enchantment with Computer Reason," Lancaster University, 2016. Retrieved January 15, 2020. Budgett explores systems of image production and display, the discourse of media and capitalism, human subjectivity, and the interaction between theory and practice.Hope, Karen. "A Mischievous Glance Sideways," Ten-8 International Photography, No. 34, 1989.Kent, Sarah. "Graham Budgett," Time Out (London), January 29–February 5, 1992, p. 38.Titterington, Chris. "Review: The message divorces the media / Review of 'Machine Dreams,' an exhibition at the Photographer's Gallery, London, until 4 November," New Scientist, October 21, 1989. Retrieved January 22, 2020.Faculdade de Belas-Artes de Universidade de Lisboa. Post-Screen: Device, Medium, Concept, Lisbon: Faculdade de Belas-Artes de Universidade de Lisboa/Centro de Investigacao e de Estudos em Belas-Artes, 2019. His work has been exhibited at Tate Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum, Beaconsfield, Centre for Contemporary Arts (Glasgow), Alvar Aalto Museum (Finland), Ars Electronica, and Santa Barbara Museum of Art.Ford, Colin. "Larger than life," The Observer (London), November 27, 1988.Gill John. "Boxer," Glasgow: Centre for Contemporary Arts, 1995.O'Brien, John. "Ars Electronica 2006," Circa, August–September 2006. Retrieved January 15, 2020. It has been reviewed in The Times (London),Craddock, Sacha. "Boxer," The Times London, August 8, 1995. The Guardian, The Observer, The Face, and Time Out.Kent, Sarah. "Graham Budgett," Time Out (London), January 3–10, 1996, p. 46.
Critics such as Adrian Searle describe Budgett's earlier photographic images as "tragic dystopias" recalling the social criticism of Walter Benjamin, George Grosz, Jorge Luis Borges, and Wim Wenders;Searle, Adrian. "Graham Budgett," Time Out (London), September 30–October 7, 1992, p. 40.Gonçalves, Diana. 9/11: Culture, Catastrophe and the Critique of Singularity, Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, p. 48. Retrieved January 15, 2020.Haddock, Phil. "Framed," Berlin Bel Nacht, Berlin: Künstlerhaus Bethanien, 1987. his later work explores the construction of identity, public space and artwork through transitory installations, public projects and digital and code-born new-media that largely function outside the art market.Beaconsfield. "Windauge – Mulfinger & Budgett I Giorgio Sadott," 2016. Retrieved January 21, 2020.
Budgett has been based in Berlin, London and the United States and has taught at University of Westminster and the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is married to artist Jane Mulfinger and lives and works in Santa Barbara.
Life and career Budgett was born in Manchester, United Kingdom in 1954 and studied sculpture at Trent Polytechnic (BA, Fine Arts, 1977) and St. Martin's School of Art (advanced diploma, 1978). He continued his studies at Stanford University in California (MFA, 1981), where his work became more politicized during the era of Reaganism and Thatcherism. After concluding at Stanford, he taught sculpture at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and produced humorous, politically charged assemblages, whose recontextualized manufactured products played associative games and punctured cultural pretensions.Duncombe, Betty. "Local Art," Sundial, August 2–10, 1984.Schimmel, Paul. Competition, Santa Barbara, CA: Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, 1984.
In the mid-1980s, Budgett moved with Jane Mulfinger to Berlin, where both became friends with Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz and Budgett received a residency at the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien (1986–7); while there he gained attention for the photomontage work "Berlin bei Nacht" (Berlin by Night). From 1988–94, he lived in London, exhibiting at venues such as The Photographers' Gallery, Watershed Media Centre and Camerawork, and teaching at the University of Westminster and Middlesex University.The Photographers' Gallery. "Exhibition History, 1971 – Present." Retrieved January 20, 2020.Independent Media. "In a Right State," Independent Media (London), No. 66, 1987, p. 10–2.
After moving back to the United States in 1994, Budgett served in several capacities in the Department of Art at UCSB over two decades, including lecturer in New Media and Acting Head of Digital Media Media, before retiring in 2015. He has largely sought to publish and exhibit his later work in public spaces, including the Web, in addition to exhibition venues such as the Trondheim Art Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and Beaconsfield.Palagret, Catherine Alice. "Les arts numeriques reinventent la ville: confiez leur vos regrets: Regrets, une oeuvre conceptuelle interactive de Jane Mulfinger et Graham Budgett," Archeologie du futur/Archeologie du quotidien, June 7, 2008. Retrieved January 15, 2020.
Work and reception Budgett has worked in a wide range of media, producing work united by concerns with image production and display, sociopolitical critique, human subjectivity and identity, public space, and the melding of theory and practice.Budgett, Graham. "Flags," AND Journal of Art & Education, No. 23, 1991, p. 17. He began his career as a sculptor, initially producing large, minimalist constructions, installations and architectural interventions, before turning to readymade assemblages. He shifted to image and text works in the mid-1980s, influenced by the critical photomontages of Dada and John Heartfield's anti-Nazi works while seeking a more accessible medium with reach beyond galleries to public space.Leston, Kimberly. "The Happy Dissident," The Face (London), October 1986, p. 32–3.The Herald. "Rubbish or art - it makes you think," The Herald (Scotland), March 22, 1990. Retrieved January 15, 2020.Performance Magazine. "Projects News," April/May 1988, p. 5. In the latter half of his career, he has divided his efforts between new media, installations and public artworks.
Pre-digital image & text works Budgett's early pre-digital photomontages have been described as "amalgamations of image and performance in front of the camera."Ashwell, Jon. "Shadow of Darkness," Impact, 1987, p. 14–5. They draw on appropriated sources—which he altered and blended in-camera with live models, props and sculpture, text and his own photographs—and the bright colors, gloss and fantasy of advertising aesthetics; the juxtaposition of recognizable, inviting visuals, darker stories and critiques of political myths and consumer capitalism create an intentional shock or defamiliarization effect to provoke viewers.Chandler, David. "Graham Budgett – Lost Charms," Lost Charms: Graham Budgett, London: The Photographers' Gallery, 1991. Budgett ultimately judged as too alienating early work such as "A Brief US History" (1985), a series featuring iconoclastic, caustic montages and text that unequivocally counter official narratives on topics such as foreign interference by the CIA, atomic testing in the South Pacific, abortion and the Ku Klux Klan.
For "Berlin by Night" (1987), he took a more open-ended approach, creating text, glossy Cibachrome prints, and a boxed set of "tourist" postcards depicting scenarios at famed sites that critically engaged Berlin's 750th anniversary.Budgett, Graham. "About Berlin bei Nacht," AND Journal of Art & Education, No. 13/14, 1987, p. 35–6.Kent, Sarah. "Berlin Bei Nacht, Time Out (London), June 22, 1988. Individual works such as [Zoo] Logical Garden and The Void featured fig-leafed, fleeing Adam and Eve figures and a diving man frozen above the liminal space of the Berlin wall; in The Angel of History (a play on Paul Klee's Angelus Novus), an angel is propelled backwards by the force of a catastrophic atomic-like blast. Writers describe the urban-scapes as confrontations with "the unholy communion of entertainment and self-destruction" that recall the haunted visions of Bosch, George Grosz and Walter Benjamin.
In his Lost Charms series (1992), Budgett combines words ("Prescience," "Sensibility") and large diptychs pairing found/recovered objects (a crumpled engagement ring, an extracted tooth) with common advertising motifs to trigger a dialogue lamenting irrevocably changed values or, in critic Sarah Kent's words, "the loss of innocence in a media-saturated society" focused on stimulating appetites. He created the blue-toned silver prints of Visible Cities (1992) in the wake of Berlin's reunification, blending images of the city with three-dimensional constructions of plastic consumer goods and text that merge space and commodity; reviewers such as Time Out'''s Adrian Searle call the series an unreal, fragmented "city of the mind" alluding to "the terror and ironies of our social aspirations" and recalling the dystopic meditations of Wim Wenders, Borges, and Atget.Lillington, David. "Zeit-Mauer/Goethe Institute," Time Out (London), March 25–April 1, 1992.Evans, Graham. "Visible Cities," Art & Design Magazine (London), September 1995.
The show "Them That Trespass" (1996) heralded Budgett's shift toward exploring the paradoxes and opportunities of digital imagemaking. He appropriated small, Sunday-paper color ads for show homes, then digitally enlarged and bubble-jet printed them to achieve what Sarah Kent calls "the hazy, chocolate-box beauty of impressionist paintings."Bate, David. "Them That Trespass – Graham Budgett," Creative Camera, March 1996, p. 44. Superimposed, hand-lettered text that overran the images onto gallery walls—and suggest aggressive fantasies, vandalism, and rebellion against dispossession, bourgeois conformity and property—undercut the picturesque visuals and speak to a recession's destabilization of home ownership at the time.
Digital and code-born works Much of Budgett's post-1995 output is focused on online, often transitory, digital and code-born work. Several projects focus on the human face, as a representation of the psyche and identity or site of human engineering.Graham Budgett website. "Surfacing the Soul". Retrieved January 21, 2020. "Surfacing the Soul: a Visiognomy of Ignominy" (1996) digitally hybridized actual and mediated portraits to examine the media-influenced nature of expressions and critique the notion of portraiture as a "window to the soul"; AURORA (2003) and Imaging the Metahuman (2012) explore applications to iterate composite representations of diversity.Dietz, Steve. "Into the Streets," The Projection Project, Antwerp: MuHKA Museum, 2006.Graham Budgett website. Imaging the Metahuman. Retrieved January 21, 2020.
In several series, Budgett used probabilistic (as opposed to deterministic) algorithms, which reinterpret object, form and color inputs to create iterative, transitory digital "paintings" and audiovisual works. His "Ideas for Painting" project (2008–13) features series engines based on art-historical abstract-painting influences; they include: Sketches toward a fresh NEO-GEO canvas every 5 seconds for the duration of Western culture (2008); AROTHKOBOT (2013), which generates works reminiscent of Rothko color-field paintings; and way2go (2010), which produces an evolving Op art-like work.Graham Budgett website. Retrieved January 21, 2020.