Graham Budgett

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. Budgett explores systems of image production and display, the discourse of media and capitalism, human subjectivity, and the interaction between theory and practice. 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. It has been reviewed in The Times (London), The Guardian,

Graham Budgett, Devil in the Details, Vernacular English and WebGL-based interactive audiovisual (still image), 2014. 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; 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.

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). In the latter half of his career, he has divided his efforts between new media, installations and public artworks. 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. 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. 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.

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." 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. "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";

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.

Jane Mulfinger & Graham Budgett, Regrets (detail), interactive archive, public conceptual artwork, action-research study, 2005–2008. Cambridge, UK, 2005 (left), Paris, France, 2008 (right). Additional stagings in Linz, Austria (2006), Santa Barbara, California (2008). Three site-specific installations reflected on the passing of time, changing architecture and urban-scapes, light, and surveillance by using video projection, sculptural elements and architectural interventions. Weltanschauung (Trondheim Art Museum, 1990) projected panoramic, rotating views of a displaced exterior—not its Norwegian surroundings, but the distant Potsdamer Platz in Berlin—around a space centered by a circular bench and column. Hanbury Terrain (2005, with Mulfinger) explored a single intersection in London's East End, combining projected images of present-day street activity, etchings on glass of historical maps, and a sculptural object representing plans for future displacement. Windauge (Anglo-Saxon for "wind-eye" or "window"; 2016, with Mulfinger) used a small circular window high on a back wall of Beaconsfield Gallery as a camera obscura whose long-neglected view of the surrounding neighborhood was projected onto the floor. The street project featured a private kiosk/"confessional" and five roaming custom backpack input/display units with computers that suggested the metaphor of offloading one's burdens (regrets) onto the back of another; they connected to a central database that reciprocated participants with five algorithm-determined, similar regrets in a show of solidarity. REGRETS was staged in Cambridge, Linz, Santa Barbara, and Paris;