Jack the Pelican presents "Mother Door Spirit Level," the first North American solo of important Australian artist Guy Benfield.
Benfield exploded onto the Australian art scene in 1991 and ever since has been exporting his signature good-vibe brand of ritualized mumbo-jumbo performance-installation and video throughout South East Asia and Europe.
In this exhibition, Benfield makes a spectacle of himself making giant pottery. He will perform at the opening and the aftermath will remain for the duration of the show. Benfield first made pottery last year in Maximum Commune (Ugly Business...on the basis of disbelief) at Artspace in Sydney. Critic Edward Scheer in Realtime Magazine compared the work to Paul McCarthy's Painter (1995). Indeed, the effort is clumsy. Benfield was thinking Buster Keaton. --And messy. The artist is an aficionado of mess. Ultimately, however, Scheer notes the Benfield's connection to own developing oeuvre:
The humour and energy of this piece reminded me of Benfield's French Pup/live action (2001) a video work in which a long-haired rock guitarist dips the head of his guitar in paint and smears the walls and a canvas with it.
Autobiography runs through Benfield's work. Much has already been made of this. Ashley Crawford in his catalog essay for "Om Supreme Bhagavon" (at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 2004) puts it this way:
It is 1979 and Guy Benfield is 15 years old as he watches his mother, resplendent in hippie caftan and mascara, chilled glass of chardonnay aloft, as she pours paint from the balcony of their Paddington terrace in an act of bon vivant defiance: a suburban bourgeois action painting straight out of a J.G. Ballard novel. Benfield cringes in the background, wondering why his parents can't be like other kid's parents. He retreats to his bedroom, back to the world of those strange European comics like 2000AD with their buxom heroines and the cover art of Yes albums, Roger Dean's gentle surreal-organic world; a far safer place than the post-disco, post-alternative lifestyle world around him, of jarring colours, afro haircuts, bizarre sunglasses and flares.
Benfield is preoccupied with the 1970s. In Suburban Australia, the New Age was in full bloom. Creative expression and self-discovery became national obsessions. In one fell swoop, Tony Tuckson (1921-1973) arrived as the preeminent genius of Australian modern art. Benfield often references him. He slips between homage and parody.
Benfield is known for cannibalizing long-expired tropes. (Some use the word "deconstruction.") Other oft-mentioned stylistic references/influences include the art informel of Georges Mathieu , the Japanese Gutai Group and Yves Klein. Benfield's absurdist spectacles are spontaneous with unexpected and bizarre acts of making. The ethereal trance soundtrack sets the mood. In combination with the constant repetition, it induces the meditative absorption of a quasi-dream state. The works that spring forth--droppings he calls them, in dual allusion to Drop City rhetoric and excretory leave behinds--are absorbingly spontaneous bursts of buoyant color.
He often dresses the part of an early 70s suburban shaman in colorful but ungainly costumes of mumu, afro wig, unflattering sweat socks and uggs or other assorted period fashions--always, a bit adorably ridiculous. Similarly, he alters the interior space of the gallery, reframing it with the utopian structures of the hippie-era.* Also in Benfield's sites are other quintessentially iconic love-generation building forms--the pyramid and all things Logan's Run. His renditions typically are perhaps as home-made as they were originally meant to be and filtered through and sometimes scrawled over with decades of cultural autobiography.
Last year at the Shanghai Biennale, Benfield presented "Institutional Critique Boutique/ Failure Without Fluro (Markus Lupertz in China)"--a tomb/homage pavilion dedicated to the myth of the 80s Cologne art scene and the painter Markus Lüpertz. Critics such as Jürgen Bock see Benfield as critiquing myths of modernity. Benfield, however, playfully notes that few in attendance even knew who Markus Lüpertz was. Similarly, when in reference to Tony Tuckson, he dons an afro wig and mumu, few pick up on it. That's all right. The work is rife with allusions--Theosophy, esoteric science, early 70s electronica and fashion. Even if you miss them, the overall cohesion is spellbinding and poetic.
THE LONG COMMUTE George Barber
The dry wit of acclaimed British video pioneer George Barber reaches a new level of understatement in "The Long Commute." Projected onto a modernist sculptural form, a lone auto makes its way endlessly around and around. It moves as one drives on the way to work, with quiet resignation.
On one level, this is the quotidian reality of a middle class very British 'anybody.' The simple workman-like aesthetic stands in stark contrast to YBA flamboyance of the Thatcher era. Writes Barber:
Visually, the work is highly pleasurable and though the initial impression is one of graceful simplicity, the work has a mesmerizing quality, as the car in each piece works it way around the track, the repetition becomes comforting, as if the viewer is watching their own lives, draining away on each lap of this senseless journey. The piece has a timeless quality, as if the driving is a ritual or fact of life, as if the car is striving for more meaning, some spiritual road sign that will magically take it to where it really wants to park.
On another level, Barber plays with modern art, as he did for example in Automotive Action Painting, 2006, shown last year in "SingleShot" at the Tate Britain.
Barber—declared "The Henry Ford of independent video" by UK's Art Monthly magazine—was a leading figure in British Scratch Video, a hugely influential movement of the 1980s and a founding member of the influential critical journal ZG Magazine. —Read Jeremy Welsh's "On scratch video: One Nation Under A Will (of iron) (The shiny toys of Thatcher's Children)"
Barber went on in the early 1990s to produce a significant new body of lo-tech work that helped to define the emergent Slacker aesthetic. Since that time, his tireless experiments continue to push the language of the medium. Read an extensive essay on the subject by TimeOut London's Gareth Evans.
George Barber studied conceptual sculpture at St Martin's School of Art and The Slade School of Fine Art, London. His output is a mixture of sculptures, paintings and video art. He was accepted at St Martin's when he was 19 by presenting a motorized wedding cake at his interview.
Barber has had work shown at The Tate Britain, ICA, Anthony Wilkinson Gallery, The Whitechapel Open, National Film Theatre and many international venues, including the Museum of Modern Art, Barcelona, The World Wide Video Festival, Holland, The Kitchen, New York and Pompidou Centre, Paris.
