A Quiet Necessity
of the saw on each piece of wood and that these sounds spread out across the surrounding land with the tran quillity and naturalness of a common, familiar noise. Yet, as I said already, this naturalness conceals something : that intimate uneasiness, the perception that not everything is in the right place and that, at any moment, something could disturb the unstable equilibrium on which we have constructed our lives. From his very first production, in the early 1960 s, Buedts declared that the corners – also the metapho rical ones – are never at ninety degrees : This was not about the sculpture, but about the furniture. Today, both the furniture he made as works of art and those pieces he made for his home are viewed as ‘functional sculptures’, and while there is really not so much
Landschap [Landscape], 2005 Es, potlood, acryl / Ash, pencil, acrylic, 16 x 27,5 x 31 cm Privécollectie / Private collection
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difference between one and the other, it is extremely symptomatic that, at the time, the artist saw himself as an artisan producing his own habitat. Perhaps we could overturn the concept and view his recent sculp tures as sublimations of that artisanal ‘status’ of which Buedts was so fond. It should be borne in mind that, at the time (the 1960 s), the concept of the ‘product’ – and even more of ‘production’ – was ideologically disputed all over the world in favour of the producer reclaiming the means of production, in accordance with an ideal inspired by historical materialism with a Marxist matrix. In this case, Buedts was entirely in step with his time, to the point where he now consti tutes a strong example of it … If only he had known of and desired it. Instead, Buedts’ production strategy