DIANE BUCKLER

Diane Buckler’s photo-based work begins with a refusal of the conventions of the medium. This is the first of several liberations practiced in order to examine “the dichotomy between our experience of ourselves and how we exist in empirical reality.” The principal metaphor for this dichotomy is the figure, which in the dominant culture has been used as a vehicle for oppression/repression. Buckler posits a post-feminist rehabilitation of figurative reference as the best expression of our ability to imagine and reason and know. 

Conceived of as parts to a puzzle, Buckler’s dislocated images are sand-blasted onto polished granite fragments. Dreamlined juxtapositions operate poetically to suggest possible relationships. On a vast plain, for instance, zebras stand at a watering hole as deer pass by; above against a starry sky, a teacup floats like a porcelain moon. Or a hand extends a candle to tulips that droop toward it, as if lured by some irresistible yearning. In Beacon/Void an arm holding a candlestick enters the image from the left; in the middle of the image, nothing; to the right, a nocturnal city street,
lights flaring. 

Buckler engages our imagination, urging us to make our own connections and meanings. The fragmentation serves as a physical parallel to complex states of being. At the same time, the work operates deliberately against the conventions of photography without denying what distinguishes it from other media. Her ideas are conceptually provocative, thoughtfully executed, and visually compelling. 

Buckler works against what she calls “the flat death of a photograph…a condemnation of life, as if it were discovered later and photographs merely served as a proof of its existence.” This flat death is an inheritance of some of the conventions of oil painting - illusionism, transparency and the obsession with verisimilitude. 

Another body of photographic conventions targeted by Buckler derives from the traditions of printmaking. Printing on paper condemns photography to be judged by criteria based on line. These deny its authenticity, which is based on density of emulsion, and its uniqueness, which is its transferability to any given support. 

A third issue in Buckler’s work is photography’s ability to rearrange configurations, producing relationships with new potential for content, as in the work of photomontage pioneers like Raoul Haussmann and Hannah Hoch, enabling photography to mirror the processes of consciousness. In singularly appropriate ways, Buckler’s liberations both recapitulates photograph’s history and reassure its authenticity. 

Joan Hugo, LA Weekly, Critic's Choice

KRYGIER/LANDAU CONTEMPORARY ART

Black Absolute, Emerald Pearl, and Red Rose: these are some names of types of granite on which Diane Buckler’s apparition-like, floating images seem to be delicately etched. (Actually, they’re sandblasted into a photographic emulsion placed against the rectangular, picture-sized chunks of reddish or black polished stone.) Buckler’s unmoored, tilting, and levitating representations of classical statues and retiring nudes, her aerial views of cities and stone cherubs, are presented in gently tumbling, loosened hierarchies buffered by lots of red or black void-like space. These works have an expansive, nocturnal feel because of how strongly the black granite resembles a section of night sky flecked with stars. They might call to mind the gently swirling pre-sleep thoughts of some drowsing art historian, a dreamy synthesis of pictures she has pored over all day. The image fragments look both weightless, because they appear to be flying and are almost transparent, and weighty, because most of the images are of classical European sculptures, which are ponderous both in historical dominance and actual poundage.

Sometimes Buckler mixes antique images with more contemporary ones, causing old and new to rub shoulders, reflect on each other, and perhaps clash a little. In Aspiration, Divergence and Repose (all works 1989), two slightly tilted niche figures hover at different levels above a prone contemporary female nude. In The Introversion of the Niche Figure, two architectural flourishes appear above and below a contemplative standing female nude. The flourishes serve as her ornate doorsill and lintel, as though she were a door leading into some new territory. They make her seem bracketed by the past, about to cross its threshold. Affinities and contrasts between mediums and images reverberate quietly within individual works and from piece to piece. The relationships between stone and flesh figures, and between photographic and granite surfaces, bring up issues of what’s durable and what’s ephemeral, both as image (goddess, model, temple) and as material (paper, photo-chemicals, stone).

Buckler plays with inconsistency of scale in pieces like Gravity, Levity and the Inescapable, in which a pair of almost life-size hands and feet hover at the top of the work, while a small Parthenon lists to one side below. The piece gives the impression that some ghostly, perhaps dismembered beings are becalmed in the sky above the little building; it suggests myths about the origins of the constellations. Divine Benevolence is a haunting and somewhat humorous work that also pits bizarrely sized images against each other. In it, a giant nude male statue appears on the horizon of a dwarfed pastoral landscape, as though he were some kind of lumbering King Kong, lording over both the land at his feet and art history itself. Many of Buckler’s pieces convey a cool, melancholy air of lost utopias, as though symbols commonly thought to represent Western culture’s eroding ideas of civilization or beauty had grown incredibly light and begun to drift aloft and away.

— Amy Gerstler, Art Forum - 1990