Installation view of John Buck’s “The Immigration” (2016), Jelutong wood, 114 x 268 x 168 inches (photo by Ben Semisch, courtesy of KANEKO, Omaha, NE)
OMAHA, Nebraska — Over the past decade, John Buck has been quietly honing his ability to breathe life into sculpture, carving automata of increasing scale and complexity. Kinetic, at the beautifully renovated warehouse space Kaneko in Omaha, Nebraska, is an expansive semi-retrospective of Buck’s career. Featuring 55 works it spans freestanding sculptures, wall reliefs, and woodblock prints. However, the focus of the exhibition is on Buck’s ambitious kinetic installations (15 are included), many of which are excoriating indictments of the current political administration.
John Buck, “The Immigration” (2016) (detail) Jelutong wood, 114 x 268 x 168 inches (© John Buck, licensed by VAGA, New York)
The ample main gallery, with its soaring vaulted ceilings, is a spacious odeum for Buck’s monumental contraptions. The Immigration (2016) is a loose riff on the Emanuel Leutze painting, “Washington Crossing the Delaware” (1851). Buck begins with the act of fording a river to get to the other side — but which side is the better? American history traditionally celebrates Washington and his fellow revolutionaries in their undaunted quest for freedom at all costs. But other historic river crossings are tinged with illegitimacy, such as crossing of the Rio Grande between the United States and Mexico: Today, Mexicans illegally immigrate north, but during the 19th century it was an escape route for Texan slaves heading south to Mexico, which had abolished slavery in 1828). This crossing illustrates a striking double standard of the American values established by the Revolutionary War.
For The Immigration, Buck portrays a troopship being rowed by five common men; at the bow is a character wearing a coonskin cap and maneuvering the vessel with a pike pole snagged on the crown of King George III, oppressor of the colonies. The “river” is strewn with detritus including discarded bottles, boots, an alarm clock, a trashed tire, and an outdated, television — the refuse of the American dream of unlimited consumerism.
John Buck, “The Immigration” (2016) (detail) Jelutong wood, 114 x 268 x 168 inches (© John Buck, licensed by VAGA, New York)
Behind the corps of men is an arched bridge encircling a tableau of two men madly paddling, each with human cargo on his back. One swimmer is towing a figure of Mahatma Gandhi, in a life preserver with his spinning wheel, while the other is dragging a boat containing Frida Kahlo, clutching a doll-size Diego Rivera and a dog, her head crowned by parrots perched on a steering wheel.
The bridge is peopled with other recognizable figures that endlessly cross it on dual tracks, which make the figures seem like targets in a carnival shooting gallery. Jesus Christ and the Devil, Marilyn Monroe, Osama Bin Laden (with a bullet hole in his forehead), a memento mori skeleton, Martin Luther King, Barack Obama, Donald Trump (clutching fists full of cash), the once-ubiquitous MTV astronaut, Queen Elizabeth, Albert Einstein and Hitler cross the bridge along with the figures of Nguyễn Ngọc Loan executing the Viet Cong prisoner Nguyễn Văn Lém from Eddie Adams’s infamous Vietnam War photograph, which defined the Tet Offensive, and a reproduction of the Marcel Duchamps mustachioed Mona Lisa, “L.H.O.O.Q.” (1919).
John Buck, “The Immigration” (2016) (detail) Jelutong wood, 114 x 268 x 168 inches (© John Buck, licensed by VAGA, New York)
On either side of the bridge are cages, one containing an inverted blinded Justice, wielding her scales and sword, the other an inverted Lady Liberty. These twin symbols of America, here incarcerated and impotent, suggest that either direction on the bridge leads to corruption. The face of the bridge is emblazoned with banners engraved with words from Emma Lazarus’s 1883 sonnet, written to raise funds for the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.” In the wake of Trump’s United States/Mexico wall and his threat to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, The Immigration is a poignant treatise on the absurdity of American politics today.
Another of Buck’s mechanical installations, the 24-foot automated installation Cat’s Cradle (2012), is the artist’s retelling of the discovery of the New World by European explorers, such as Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, Juan Ponce de León, and Ferdinand Magellan, all of whom are represented in the piece.
John Buck, “Cat’s Cradle” (2012), Jelutong wood, leather, motors, acrylic on canvas, 132 x 289 x 106 inches (© John Buck, licensed by VAGA, New York)
A boat itself suggests the barge of Charon, the ferryman who carried dead souls across the river Styx to Hades. At the bow is the Virgin Mary, crying an endless stream of tears and holding a cat’s cradle between her hands held in orans position. To the right is a pocked and bat-winged oarsman (Charon himself?), whose head is replaced with a wheel depicting a sort of medieval bestiary of “marvels.” Among these fantastic creatures are a “sciopod” shielding himself from the sun with his gigantic foot; a Cyclops; and a headless man with a face is on his chest. During the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, such figures were documented in illustrated manuscripts and were believed to exist. Fallacies taken as truth, they were akin to fake news.
John Buck, “Cat’s Cradle” (2012) (detail), Jelutong wood, leather, motors, acrylic on canvas, 132 x 289 x 106 inches (© John Buck, licensed by VAGA, New York)
To the right is a seated Jesuit. His arms — whirligigs holding crucifixes — seem to be flogging something, or is he self-flagellating? As his multiple arms rotate, they cause his eyes to flicker, in an almost smug wink at the viewer. A thought bubble over his head contains a keyhole, the suggestion of something waiting to be unlocked.
A cube floating above a model of a Spanish mission in the boat evokes the once firmly held belief that the world is flat, while a cut-out of the United States attached to a rocking cradle of bones presumably alludes to the adage “the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.” Another set of figures includes a small, seated skeleton wearing an elaborate feathered headdress, a reference to Mictlantecuhtli, the Aztec god of the dead. He is engaged with a female figure who appears to be thrashing him over the head with her torch. She is a representation of Columbia, the central figure in John Gast’s allegorical painting, “American Progress” (c. 1872) and a personification of Manifest Destiny. Columbia’s emphatic conviction is underscored by a thought bubble in the shape of an exclamation mark. At the stern, a seated figure, whose head is a globe delicately incised with images from an early Renaissance celestial map, impedes the boat’s progress by dragging an anchor behind him.
John Buck, “Cat’s Cradle” (2012) (detail), Jelutong wood, leather, motors, acrylic on canvas, 132 x 289 x 106 inches (© John Buck, licensed by VAGA, New York)
The mechanisms that animate Buck’s works are crafted by the artist, who fabricates interlocking gears of wood, driven by straps of buff-colored leather. As the sculptures operate, an audible clickity-clack might remind viewers of whirligigs or wooden toys. The Immigration and Cat’s Cradle are just two of the kinetic works in this ambitious exhibition; the other intricately mechanized dioramas are equally steeped in cultural history and acerbic social commentary.
These works, as well as the artist’s freestanding sculptures, wall reliefs, and woodblock prints, amply illustrate his tremendous facility with materials and imagery. Deeply reflective, Buck directs our attention to the beauty of the world and its distressing flaws. These observations are the artist’s obsession and triumph.
Kinetic continues at Kaneko (1111 Jones Street, Omaha, Nebraska) through October 14.
