| On a weekday afternoon in January, Cynthia von Buhler is sitting in the window of Exit Art filling small plastic balls with her own menstrual blood. “It looks like candy!” she exclaims of the fluid, which is indeed a gorgeous crimson. The Massachusetts-bred artist is stocking her CYNTH-O-MATIC vending machine with bodily samples (pubic hair, eyelashes, fingernail clippings) to be sold for 25 cents per capsule. She is creating the piece—which, along with a few others, mocks the art world’s cultures of celebrity and commerce by proposing that adoring fans might buy her bodily waste… |  |
Cynthia von Buhler – Kate Lowenstein
On a weekday afternoon in January, Cynthia von Buhler is sitting in the window of Exit Art filling small plastic balls with her own menstrual blood. “It looks like candy!” she exclaims of the fluid, which is indeed a gorgeous crimson. The Massachusetts-bred artist is stocking her CYNTH-O-MATIC vending machine with bodily samples (pubic hair, eyelashes, fingernail clippings) to be sold for 25 cents per capsule. She is creating the piece—which, along with a few others, mocks the art world’s cultures of celebrity and commerce by proposing that adoring fans might buy her bodily waste—in full view of the pedestrians on Tenth Avenue, many of whom stop to look through the window at the tight, makeshift studio that von Buhler has set up for this temporary show, “The Studio Visit.”
Several months later, the machine makes another appearance. This time called PET-0-MATIC, its contents are being hawked to kids and their parents, in return for whose coins the machine dispenses pet treats. It’s September, and The Cat Who Wouldn’t Come Inside (Houghton Mifflin)—von Buhler’s children’s book based on the poignant story of a stray that she cared for several years ago and illustrated with photos of an elaborate claymation set that she created along with her family’s help—has just been released. This seemingly seismic career shift—from making edgy interactive sculpture to writing and illustrating children’s literature—is nothing out of the ordinary for von Buhler. She is a musician, sculptor, painter, illustrator, writer, curator and gallery owner—amazingly, all at once.
Much of the 41-year-old’s visual work, with its rich colors and a style that often recalls Renaissance art, is characterized by a weighty beauty that conveys more than just aesthetic appeal. Every piece—whether it’s a jewel-toned self-portrait of the artist as a cow or a life-size, talking sculpture of Uncle Sam—is utterly provocative. One cannot walk away from a von Buhler creation without having had a new thought or an emotional reaction. To achieve this combination of visual piquancy and depth of content, von Buhler frequently uses animals, both alive and taxidermied, in her work. “Animals are excellent performance artists because we identify so closely with them,” she says. “We project our weaknesses and strengths onto them much more than we do with inanimate objects."
The zoophillic artist employs her beloved creatures in a few different ways. In some cases, animals are symbols of spirit or personality, as in the three-dimensional portrait, Sir Repetitious, in which a pair of rats scurry around the subject’s transparent torso, literally acting out the man’s hungry ego as viewers drop in scraps of food through a hole in the painted man’s esophagus. Doves perch and flutter in Miss Ann Thrope, a full-length painting of a nude woman with gilded bars in front of it. The feathered creatures, unmistakable emblems of peace and purity, animate what would otherwise be a static picture, bringing the element of time, motion and constant change (the birds continually alter the piece by leaving feathers and waste in their wake) into the work. It is a performance piece, sculpture and painting all at once.
In other cases, von Buhler uses animals as stand-ins for people, anthropomorphizing them. A small rodent stars in To a Mouse, a three-dimensional collage featuring the tiny animal (killed by the artist’s cat) in the sorry role of suicide victim, having ostensibly kicked over a stool and hung himself in the little picture window that von Buhler assembled with scrap wood and parts from her childhood dollhouse. Among other anthropomorphizing works is the vaguely Boschian Heaven & Hell, a two-part painting in which the realm of the devil is depicted with three monkeys dressed as priests and the pope eating Jesus’s brain and heart.
In still other works, von Buhler herself interacts with the creatures: in the first panel of Heaven & Hell, heaven is represented in a self-portrait with cats suckling from the artist’s many breasts, which protrude, feline-like, from her chest and stomach. In yet another self-portrait, the artist uses less cuddly critters. She glued live roaches (which were temporarily put to sleep upon having been refrigerated) to her chest and face while posing in a regal dress crafted by her sister, fashion designer Christina Carrozza D’Alessandro. “I’m afraid of roaches,” explains von Buhler, “but I wanted to get over the fear.” The photo made it onto the cover of New York’s October 2005 Gallery Guide.
Unlike the majority of contemporary artists in New York, von Buhler isn’t seeking airtime in Chelsea. “I’d rather show in museums or other non-profit organizations—places where it’s not about buying or selling, it’s about displaying your work and reaching all types of people.” Not that selling has been difficult for her. She exhibits internationally, and her paintings have illustrated articles in Rolling Stone, The New Yorker and hundreds of other publications. The work has sold consistently; even Howard Stern owns a canvas: the one of himself depicted as a Jesus figure (brains intact).
Von Buhler describes her approach to art as continually expanding. “My work has become more dimensional over time. I am interested in trying to do things that no one else has done, to push myself—and my art—further.” She is rarely discouraged by the difficulties involved in her feats of creation. When asked about the logistical complications of creating such diverse work (isn’t it exhausting to figure out how to make a talking sculpture and publish a book in a matter of months?), she explains, “I’m not afraid of electronics or power tools. I find it empowering to be able to visually communicate using a wide variety of media.” And is there anything that this Renaissance woman isn’t into? Perhaps one thing: “I am not interested in creating works of art that are passive,” she says.
