Frank Benson
Essay by Alessandro Rabottini
Long before the critical terminology of contemporary art began to misuse the concept of the “end”— the end of modernity, the end of the organic body, the end of reality—the language of art discussed representation as a space rife with enigmas and formal substitutions, a domain of visual perfection that had little to do with things human and organic.
Before we became convinced in recent decades that the “post” condition—postmodern, post-human, post-historical—was permanent and irreversible, visual art had already gained centuries of experience in surmounting nature and sublimating and replacing reality and history. From classical sculpture to pop art, through the baroque, Surrealism and neo-geo, art has attempted to defeat nature and reality, especially when they seemed to be amplified by their likenesses. The greater the verisimilitude, the more nature ended up collapsing into its opposite, crushed by the weight of an unlikely and unnatural hyper-realism.
The sculptural and photographic work of Frank Benson—born in 1974, he lives and works in New York—dialogues with this ever-present resource of art: the idea that representation and figuration are the places of maximum abstraction and radical artifice. While Benson's photographic works have a clarity that gives the images a nearly tactile quality, his sculptural works travel along the same trajectory in the opposite direction, so that they seem to be beamed in from the domain of images, occupying an ambiguous space between objects and surface, maximum definition and maximum density.
This dialectic between the space of the photographic image, be it analogue or digital, and the space of sculpture has recently become an extremely productive field of interest for artists from Benson's generation. Albeit with different approaches, in recent years artists such as
Elad Lassry,
Giuseppe Gabellone,
Seth Price, Trisha Donnelly and
Roe Ethridge—to name only a few—have produced works in which two-and three-dimensionality seem to merge; surfaces, depths, visual patterns and volumes appear to exist in state of osmotic flux, as if there were a constant process of digital morphing among objects, images and materials. Filming techniques that permit ever-greater definition of images and sophisticated postproduction software have not only made us more familiar with the processes used to tweak images, but they also allow for the extension of these very processes into production of spaces and objects. Editing a picture with photoshop is now akin to constructing, shaping and assembling, whereas certain properties of the digital image—flexibility, mobility, the speed with which it can be transmitted and adapted to different formats and media—have now been extended to the processes that build the real and analogue world.
Today it seems that the fully-integrated nature of image-making devices—on which one can not only create an image, but also edit, manipulate, and transmit it—is destined to influence a mature, mannerist stage of artistic object production, which will redefine the parameters of the objects we still perhaps too simplistically refer to as “sculptures.” See, for example, Human Statue (Jessie) (2011), which is Benson's most ambitious work to date, and the most profound synthesis of his visual and conceptual universe. This female figure made of bronze and noir belge (black belgian marble) has the presence of a Greco-Roman sculpture, but its visual relationship with classicism is not purely based on the simple quotation (or the mimicking) of classical elements. Each part is also not simply “contemporary,” but is forever tied to a particular fashion popular when the statue was made: the hairstyle, the sunglasses that conceal almost half of the woman's face and the cut of the dress represent the “circa 2010/11” re-issuing of the forms that defined the fashion of the 1980s— and in a matter of months they will be obsolete.
The outcome of stylistic revival, these elements define a period in which we had a hard time finding an “original” look. Soon they will remind us of just how weak these years were in terms of iconic invention. Accordingly, Human Statue (Jessie) is so closely tied to a particular, popular moment of recent style that it appears to be a fashion photograph transferred to the noble materials of sculpture, an internal contradiction that pits the fleeting nature of stylistic trends against the obdurateness of marble and bronze. A similar absolute adherence to present time, style and form can be found in works such as Fall '91 (1992) by charles Ray, and some of the images from the Made in Heaven series that Jeff Koons made with cicciolina in 1989. In both we find the perception of time present so exaggerated and flaunted that it almost becomes a form of abstraction, a quality that Human Statue (Jessie) shares.
The hairstyle, the heavy makeup and the suit worn by Ray's oversized woman are so rooted in the late 1980s and early '90s that they now create the immediate and inevitable effect of “a blast from the past.” Furthermore, the sculpture's faithful material likeness to a commercial mannequin is powerful, as it goes against the parameters of traditional sculptural language and presents what might seem to be a contradiction in terms: a readymade with altered dimensions.
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