excerpt
Crash-landing the psychopter
(p. 4-7)
Arthur M. Young, the inventor of the popular Bell 47 helicopter, was also an accomplished student of the paranormal. He regarded the helicopter as a mere vessel for something amorphous and celestial, the secret of consciousness itself. “I am working on the psychopter within the helicopter,” Young wrote in the 1940s. “The psychopter is the winged self. It is that which the helicopter usurped.” Sometimes he felt that his deepest ambitions were at the mercy of his greatest creation, as “the many-headed dragon of the helicopter seemed to be growing more heads all the time.”
Helicopters are ubiquitous in Steve DiBenedetto's drawings, and they are always, in their way, sprouting more heads, and more bodies and limbs to boot. Purulent, sinewy limbs, the cloven hooves of cattle; conspiratorial bodies, edgeless inkblots on the smudge of the horizon; heads on the verge of exploding, bound up in tentacles, the snarl of chaos and disorder. Even glancing at DiBenedetto's work, you can see the ominous sound of these helicopters on the page. That dense, dull scrawl, that fog of charcoal curlicues, is the vortical churn of their blades destroying the air. And the helicopters have not come alone, I regret to inform you. They are in the company of octopuses, themselves creatures of the hub and spoke—like cousins of Young's psychopter. An octopus has a brain, a “winged self,” in each of its eight arms.
As DiBenedetto found these motifs, he was spurred on by the work of Young, Terence McKenna, and other psychonauts, and also by the detritus of America's counterculture: old postcards, obscure ufologist journals, cyberdelic magazines like Mondo 2000 and Reality Hackers, reams of drug lore. When the phenomenon of cattle mutilation—about which more soon—began to preoccupy occultists and UFO researchers, he grabbed a copy of a bovine anatomy book and began to draw cows, sometimes assimilating them into the iconography of Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. From these disparate elements, a slanted perspective came into focus. Just as Young was always looking “within the helicopter,” DiBenedetto found that drawings could function as packages of a sort—“containers,” as he put it, “for shit we can't explain.”
In the later twentieth century, people were looking for answers in vanishingly esoteric places, hoping to reach some cosmic understanding. These drawings preserve the questions they were asking, even as those questions led down ever-darker paths. Think of the cows, so elegantly brutalized by some alien race; the choppers hovering overhead, hoisting their doppelganger octopuses as an ambiguous threat; the crystalline architecture of cities calcified by wealth; the almighty dollar sign and the unsightly rash it leaves on whatever it touches. In essence, the drawings served as long-term storage solutions for the toxicants of wayward New Age thought. Each work is a trough of post-hippie radioactive waste. They beg to be stored deep underground in some geologically stable substratum, quietly disintegrating; signs in every language of the world urge intruders to turn away before they, too, are infected.
Early on, DiBenedetto embraced what he calls “nonofficial art materials,” the same graph paper and ballpoint pens you'd find at an Office Depot. These afforded an escape from the dubious formalism of the art world. The graph paper, in particular, contributes to the diagrammatic quality of the earlier drawings, in which blooms of pattern and texture burst out of containment, jockeying for space against the fascistic rigidity of the grid. This is “the experience of the accelerated world,” DiBenedetto has said, a way of “negotiating the idea of the movie running too fast.” Rife with moiré patterns and forms of interference, they have the air of jammed signals, failed communiques to someone or something that was probably never willing to connect in the first place.
Stare into those early drawings long enough and you'll see which way the wind is blowing: toward the cows. And with them, the copters and the aliens. If the bond between these things isn't immediately apparent, turn to the Associated Press, who reported in a 1974 item: “Mutilated livestock, unauthorized helicopters and unidentified flying objects have residents wondering and worrying in some areas of Nebraska.” Throughout the Midwest, heads of cattle, many of them “full of maggots and decay,” had had their sex organs excised, maybe as part of a cult ritual, or maybe by visiting extraterrestrials. The mutilations continue to this day. In the summer of 2019, five maimed bulls turned up in Oregon, their blood drained. “A lot of people lean toward the aliens,” the area's sheriff told NPR. “One caller … said that the alien ships will kinda beam the cow up and do whatever they are going to do with it. Then they just drop them from a great height.”
In the drawings, this violence is unstated, looming, an assumption in the shadows. Mute and guileless, DiBenedetto's cows emerge from scrims of charcoal, their leaden flesh carrying a grim promise. Their snouts, he noticed, resemble the faces of the archetypal grey aliens who supposedly abduct them, with the cow's nostrils doubling as the creature's large, dark, probing eyes. This alien-face–cow-snout was a “key appearance,” DiBenedetto said, a sign of his fluency in a kind of programming language. Then he wondered: “What if some consciousness fused cows and people?” Before long, the cows' hooves go beyond mutilation, to mutation: they become human heads. Some sordid intelligence is wreaking havoc with us. In a place past understanding, genetic material, the ultimate information, has disintegrated and run amok. There's nearly a legible narrative here, as those in power begin their shambolic containment operation; helicopters appear on the horizon and splinter on the ground. Meanwhile, in cramped interiors, octopuses ooze and alien transmissions continue to be disseminated on television.
What is life like under the reign of the helicopters? In later drawings, the architecture warps and destabilizes. The world comprises sinuous networks of metallic cobwebs, suppurating tendrils, jellied muscle, broken rotors, a labyrinth of spiky pipes. The sense is of being trapped in the plumbing of some vast pneumatic system—under the dilapidated big top of a defunct amusement park, maybe, a place condemned and patrolled by the helicopters. The tents and striped umbrellas of the midway merge with rusted Ferris wheels. You are caught in the concentric layers of alien malware, hurtling inward and outward at the same time, merged with a machine so elaborate in its dimensions that it exerts both centrifugal and centripetal force. Are you an exsanguinated bull? Are you a dollar bill? Whatever you are, do not be alarmed. You must relax.
The anthropologist Mary Douglas famously defined dirt as “matter out of place.” By that rubric, these drawings are filthy. Nothing in them belongs. And yet I feel an intense affinity for them, for all of DiBenedetto's work. He's said that he learned to embrace “making a mess.” The drawings collected here attest to the great care with which he's dismantled our reality. He's climbed inside the helicopter, assumed control of the psychopter within, and piloted the whole contraption into the ground—tracking a signal audible only to those who would drown it in noise.
