| Description |
This book explores the work of multidisciplinary artist Robert Beck / Robert Buck. In 2008, American artist Robert Beck changed his surname by a single vowel to Buck. This act of artistic self-nomination was precipitated by what he had achieved as Beck, an oeuvre often autobiographical in content and persistently diverse in form. Working in various mediums (drawing, sculpture, photography, and video) the artist has returned repeatedly to the universal themes of family, memory, identity, authorship, and loss. While his own experiences are central, the artist deliberately withholds information to solicit the viewer's own unique associations. He has described his work as a way to "create an index by which I could make sense of earlier, often traumatic experiences so to transcend them. Evidence of this riddles my work: bodies, holes, camouflage, mimicry, memorials, erasure, guilt, corruption, sex, and death." Several works discussed herein are again relevant in the wake of recent shootings in the United States, with the images of teen shooters in Beck's Thirteen Shooters, 2001 echoing Andy Warhol's 1964 mural Thirteen Most Wanted Men. |