Riot
Butterfield, Deborah, American sculptor, born 1949
1990
steel
F. V. du Pont Acquisition Fund, 1991 © Deborah Butterfield

…the horse has been enshrined in imagination as the one living organism that cannot be completely broken in and down. It seems to retain its power of organic reaction even after it has been domesticated, disciplined to human use, become a prosaic instrument.

Art Critic Donald Kuspit
From Horses: The Art of Deborah Butterfield

Horses have been a life-long fascination for artist Deborah Butterfield. In a recent interview the sculptor proclaimed "I've been a horse girl all my life”. This statement is clearly borne out by the artist’s work over the past 24 years all of which has focused on equine subjects. During the 1970s, when Butterfield began her career, feminism was an active influence on her psyche and helped her explore the opposition of the mare with the traditional war-like stallion:
I first used the horse as a metaphorical substitute for myself--a way of doing a self-portrait one step removed from the specificity of Deborah Butterfield.. These first horses were huge plaster mares whose presence was extremely gentle and calm. They were at rest, and in complete opposition to the raging war-horse [stallion] that represents most equine sculpture.

Later in the decade, when the artist turns to natural materials in her “Dry Fork” series, she once again uses the horses to explore personal reflection and identifications:
The next series of horses were made of mud and sticks and suggested that their forms were left clotted together after a river flooded and subsided. They were dark and almost sinister, reflecting the realization that I was perhaps more like the war horse than the quiet mares. For me they represented the process of attitudes and feelings taking shape after a flood of experiences. The materials and images were also meant to suggest that the horses were both figure and ground, merging external world with the subject.

By the 1990s Butterfield’s creative odyssey was still defined by her intimate relationship with the horse, On her Montana ranch she became even more familiar with the gestures and rhythms of her six steeds and her artistic thrust moved in a new direction. Where before Butterfield had explored the horse as a personal manifestation of self through which she might convey her own ideas and world view: she now becomes ever more interested in her audience moving into the form of the horse itself attempting to experience the world from the horse’s perspective. Employing a constructivist vocabulary and found materials such as scrap metal, steel, or iron. Butterflield began exposing the interior of her horse sculptures allowing the viewer to move into the body cavity of these animals visually.
I'm trying to get the viewer to project himself or herself into the form of the horse. I want people to actually be able to crawl into that shape and inhabit it and to perceive in a different way. Even when content isn’t specific, that act of getting out of oneself and making that transference can be earthshaking...” The monumental scale of her works with their quiet gestures and realistic forms achieved through abstract assemblage were designed to enhance the viewer’s experience of “feeling” the animal as opposed to merely seeing it.

Butterfield’s 1990 sculpture Riot is a successful realization of her goal to have her work ‘feel more like horses than even to look like them”. Looking at the graceful slope of the horse’s neck and the gentle curves of the hind legs, it is possible to feel as well as see this animal as it pauses to drink or explore. Contrasted with the sleek treatment of line on the horse’s exterior are the steel block letters and weighty forms which take the eye through the horse’s opened interior. True to Butterfield’s mission of bringing the viewer into the inner space of the animal, the eye is taken through the belly of the horse here affording the viewer a point of access into the great internal engine of this powerful creature.

Even so, the massive internal organs which are at the center of this work do not dominate the overall identity of this individual animal. Butterfield notes of her work during this period,
I always work to make the personality of each horse dominant and overrule the identity of its sum parts. These horses are rarely hollow shells, but are built up from within and reveal the interior space. The gesture is contained and internalized while the posture is quiet and still…each horse represents a framework or presence that defines a specific energy at a precise moment.

Further enhancing her attempt to create a dialog between subject and viewer. Butterfield has positioned giant block letters throughout the physical framework of this sculpture, which often delights viewers as they visually decode the word “Riot” in the midst of her abstract elements.

Over the course of her career Butterfield’s horses have conveyed a profound political message albeit quiet and graceful like her subjects. Through her riding and training of horses she began to understand the presence and intelligence of a different species and its orientation to the world in which we live. Butterfield’s career to date has in large measure been a process of presenting that experience artistically while at the same time subverting the Western dogma of “man as the measure of all things”
I don t buy the whole thing, the basic premise of the Bible, which is about 16th century European writing; I don’t believe that man has dominion over all things. I don’t start from that basic premise. And from that point of view on my work is very different. I guess that’s where the real horse is important to me, because while I feel that horses are not intelligent at doing things that people do or that dogs do, they’re very intelligent at doing things that horses do, and I’m interested in another species’ perspective on the world, and that starts to get political.

Butterfield’s art over the past two decades has made powerful, if indirect, argument for the rights of animals by exploring the intelligence and unquestioned dignity of those she has come to know best. Riot is a fine example of Butterfield’s continuing mission to help us see and feel our world from a fresh perspective.