Film UbuWebRobert Beck (b. 1959)
Nine Years Later (Panic + Bigmouth Strikes Again) (1996)
Nine Years Later (Girlfriend In A Coma) (1998)
Robert Buck, born Robert Beck in Baltimore, USA in 1959, now lives and works in New York. In 2007, the artist undertook a change in surname to mark a departure in his artistic practice.
Buck's body of work stages encounters between objects and viewers. His work is poetic, engaging, visceral and sometimes violent. Buck uses a myriad of materials including wound filler, skulls, film, lithography, paint and photography. In an on-going series of drawings he uses text and imagery from personality assessment tests and psychological case studies. The incorporation of previous drawings and the use of latent finger print powder evince palimpsests of poignant or troubled psychologies.
Buck has described his artwork as having been a means to create an index by which he could make sense of earlier, often traumatic experiences that at the time he could not bear, symbolise or make legible so as to endure or transcend them. Evidence of this struggle infuses the work in the form of bodies, wounds, holes, camouflage, mimicry, memorials, erasures, guilt, corruption, sex, and death.