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| | | Ben Frost Interview
Some art is created for profit, some art explores ideas, other art simply tries to capture a scene or moment. Some art is intended to jump out, spit in your face screaming think damn you, think! Please meet Ben Frost. This Australian artist has been surrounded by controversy his whole exhibiting career, and you get the impression thats just the way he likes it. However he isnt just shock tactics he thinks deeply about his art and life, pondering the deep stuff - then taking it deeper. We caught up over the net.
How old are you?
28
Where do you live?
I currently live in Tokyo.
Where are you from?
Australia.
Confessions
Are you delivering a message or more exploring the power of art to raise a response from its audience?
My stance is to make artwork that reflects the nature of what is around us and what we all are a part of. People who are shocked are to some degree either naive or are trying to deny their own indirect participation in our own perverse technological and consumerist evolution. I think a lot about what I'm trying to say in any particular piece and I feel a strong desire to push the envelope on what is or isn't bad taste to engender discussion. This level of reaction has lead to official intervention on many occasions - I have had work stolen by right wing groups, complaints from the Australian Broadcast Tribunal, 'Where Do You Want to Go Today?' has been investigated by the police everywhere it was shown, and then the slashing incident at the IMA.
I faked my own death for the exhibition - 'Ben Frost is Dead' which incensed a lot of people a few papers accused me of a lot of things, but the effect brought about discussion concerning the role of the artist and this idea of message versus response.
When I look at your works I find many of them have a lot to take in - I feel I need to spend time in different parts of the canvas to take in the whole. However some of your other works I can take in the whole without having to explore the canvas so much. Do you have this in mind when planning your work?
I try to plan my works as objectively as I can. My very first experiments with painting involved making surfaces with curved edges. I wanted to make huge totemic end-of-the-century tablets, that could be unearthed by future zombies long after World War 3, showing the sugar coated horror that we were immersed in before the end time. I think about the bolder work such as say AMERIKA or Westworld to be icons that are in fact smaller parts of a bigger picture. I want the congested paintings to be torrents of consumer filth, glutted with vitriolic logos where the bolder works could easily exist within. For me, the resonance for an entire show needs to have an overall balance between instant gratification and further reading.
Gentle Laxettes
In 2000 your exhibition with Rod Bunter (Colussus) resulted in the vandalisation of work at the exhibition. While I believe it was not your work vandalised, if it was would you feel more angst at the destruction of the work or more interest in the reaction it provoked?
Rods painting Never Mess With Lassies Close-Up was destroyed by someone who entered the gallery while no one was looking, and slashed the canvas right across the middle with a knife. The work was suggested to be paedophilic even though it actually was actually not relating to such an issue at all and so I think it was more a statement on the show as a total because it was less provocative than most of the other work. Response is always more interesting, because a canvas is only a surface to put your statement onto defacement is evolution.
Spiders Chandalier
A lot of contemporary art has a very street-style edge to it - collage based with little depiction of subjects in their literal form. What global / cultural influences do you think are driving todays young artists in this direction?
Current hysteria similar to the cold war in the eighties drives us to look at defacement and more extreme methods of expression, but I see technology and its availability as another major influence in current art movements. When we got our fast home computers in the late nineties, we all found we could create these amazing looking things, but printing processes and the internet couldnt keep up in its dissemination. By using the framework of design provided by illustrator and Photoshop the streets became the canvas for which anybody could state their message and in the current climate the message is highly relevant. Some old school writers were kind of upset because someone with a computer and a Stanley knife could produce very clean and highly detailed pieces without any background of living within or being a part of street culture. Now walls (and canvases as its comodified result) have become reflections of our computer screens - stencils derive from vector art, collage is a reaction to layering in Photoshop, and graffiti can be seen as an extension of typography and logos. I think the next movement will see a refocusing of the further possibilities of the internet, now that broadband and digital cameras are more readily available.
Loan Ranger
You are currently exploring performance art, do you see its possibilities and role growing with technologies powers of dissemination? Or does restricting the audiences experience (of performance art) to sight and sound reduce its impact too greatly?
It changes the impact, but I think documentation and seeing something first hand are two different beasts - both to be understood as parts of a whole. I saw Coldcut and Hexstatic the other night here in Tokyo, two electronic/DJs that use visuals as an important part of their show. On four massive screens was projected video of various 'found' segments that was exactly synchronised with the music. Each musical beat was imitated by an action on the screen, and reflected the nature or sound of each beat. It was so amazing, but if you are to segregate the music (documented on CD for example) from this experience it is a progressive sound but not as groundbreaking as the role of the VJ - a new visual avenue brought about solely in its application by technology.
I think by true definition of what 'performance art' is it can only ever exist in its physical viewing. For example when you see those people who stand like statues, painted silver, busking for money - actually seeing them is quite captivating - there is someone doing something strange in the context of normality. If you take a photo of them, they then just look stupid and generally speaking they are. So performance art essentially has no tangible quality to be disseminated and to have any impact in documentation the medium has to evolve into something more accessible.
The television series and movie 'Jackass' illustrates this and is probably the single most influential statement of the new century - both because of its 'performance art' leanings and because of its ability to have reached the mainstream from home-technology beginnings. The static image has no real meaning other than its recontextualisation into a mostly necrophilic trawling of an endless jpeg graveyard.
Vanishing
If the role of performance art does grow with technology, will these advances bring performance art and more conventional art forms closer together?
In mentioning technology I suggest dissemination through digital reproduction and information exchange on the internet, as well as the ability to record such information on high quality equipment that was previously out of reach to the normal person. 'Performance art' plays a very small part in the impact of any of this, but can be included because the moving image plays a big part in this technology growth.
I think 'performance art' is a loaded 20th century term suggesting banality and elitist poncing - dry expression that is more often than not self indulgent and incomprehensible. The term 'happening ' better defines the physical act of doing it, but I think ultimately the whole medium needs to be re-evaluated and represented separate from its original context such that 'performance art' can include more of a 'theatrical' or pop angle.
David Cronenberg's 1996 film 'Crash' has an amazing scene in it where Vaughn recreates James Dean's fatal car accident with stunt drivers before an audience of a handful of underground car crash enthusiasts. The 'performance' is outside at night and he narrates the background details before climbing into the car and recreating the head on collision with another vehicle and then climbing out of the wreckage to finish his narration. This essentially is the medium of film, but Cronenberg in this example has brought it together with a scripted happening in a manner that is both compelling and accessible - which we can see in the work of many of the outsider artists and directors working with the moving image.
Xray boy
What ties exist between the two currently?
Bizarre non-linear mutating memes appear and dissect all mediums. When I see people burning effigies in protest rallies I think this is as close to the everyday person making physical statements of abstract ideas in real time. It exists everywhere and doesn't necessarily have to be pigeon-holed as having to be something other than what it is, but I think there is room to explore some of the more abstract representations possible between these mediums and to try and define them as being apart from any one of these mediums.
While on one hand you describe technological evolution as perverse on the other it plays a major role in furthering and shaping yours and other artists work do you see yourself as dancing with the devil in a sense?
I'm a total contradiction. I think most people are. It's very troubling for anyone trying to make sense of the world. Any participation in technology, capitalism and consumerism and there is blood on your hands. How else can you look at it? Most people choose not to look at it, or only look at it when it's forced upon them. I would rather dance with him than sleep with him - and it feels mildly satisfying that I can see that option.
Any words of advice for aspiring artists struggling to get somewhere with their work?
The medium is the massage.
Zombie Warhol
Where would you like to be in an art sense in five years time?
I hope Im not still doing art in 5 years time.
Interviews Editor: Jason Arber Interviewer: Daniel Stevenson
This interview is used with kind permission from © Pixelsurgeon.
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