Somebody's Got To Do It: Selected Writings by Pavel Büchler Since 1987

This volume presents the first comprehensive collection of writings by expatriate Czech artist, Pavel Büchler alongside extensive contextual material. As a teacher, critic and occasional curator Büchler has made significant interventions into debates about the history of photography, theories of media, the paradoxes of art education and artistic research, the peculiarities of art as a form of work, and the politics and poetics of ‘making nothing happen’. Spanning three decades, the selections are pooled in three parent sections that together cover seven thematic areas: Section One – includes a sample of Büchler’s exhibitions, book reviews and a spread of his more systematic writings on analogue media and their afterlives in our digital age. Section Two – gathers articles and lecture scripts on the topic of teaching art and design and interventions into cultural theory with a small ‘t’. Section Three – presents a selection of more discursive, formally playful contributions to catalogues and artists’ pages as well as an extensive new interview prepared during winter 2014–15 for this book. Between each of these sections are Editor’s Notes, which focus on the poetic status of language in the foreground of Büchler’s gallery works, to loop attention back to the interplay between what he writes about art and what he writes in his art. Bracing the whole collection are an extensive introductory essay and complete bibliography.