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Daniel Noonan and Guy Benfield
Both Guy Benfield (GB) and Daniel Noonan are Australian artists based in New York.
Guy Benfield, Mother Door Spirit Level (performance/ video production still), 2007. Photograph by Rima Nassar.Attempting to interpret GB’s work literally or linearly is redundant. Working in multiple media including painting, sculpture, collage, performance and video, GB’s methods seek to deform his experience of reality as well as disturb a mimetic representation of the “real”. Mother Door Spirit Level, his most recent performance-installation-video work presented in the winter of 2007 at Williamsburg’s Jack the Pelican Presents Gallery, was developed using the cultural model of the “pavilion” in juxtaposition with modernist architecture, faux ceramics, sculpture, painting, collage, hand-built alternative Zome housing, and references to alternative collectives such as Drop City. Influenced by the West Coast Funk Ceramic movement of the late 60s, this work investigates pottery as an expressionist dialogue or theatrical/ filmic device within performative and sculptural scenarios. He is both a literal and metaphorical scavenger in his approach, picking through the remnants of the history of modernism, and salvaging ideas from a bygone era like a boho nutcase in well-worn desert boots. His chameleon identity slippage from man/person/artist to deranged actionist highlights the transformative agency in his work.
These actions are intended to re-animate tropes that were once declared obsolete, including rituals of all kinds, but more specifically the live action painting of the French “art informel” artist Georges Mathieu, and the Japanese actionist painting of the Gutai Group. Quoting a range of modern myths related to the idea of the genius of the author, he executes these situational episodes by reconsidering such historic performance practices. He reinterprets the aesthetic and conceptual threads of his predecessors through appropriation. A certain kind of Absurdist Theater is at play. The simple act of mark making is transformed into varying levels of obfuscation, interlocking narratives, and evocations of a utopian hell. Like de Kooning and Morris Louis, artists who subverted the notion of the mark and replaced it with the pour, GB’s mark-making process becomes an all-encompassing veil.
In Mother Door Spirit Level, the result of making the pavilion structures is the performance of a series of actions and situational episodes utilizing the forms he has created. He terms these actions “Droppings,” a dual allusion to the rhetoric of Drop City as well as to the happenings of Alan Kaprow. Through this process he aims in a curious way to permanently impoverish his own paintings and sculptures. He reduces them to a state of object-hood –rendering them as the mere result of performance – undermining discourse from the 80s, which favored the deconstruction of the art object and presenting it as a fetish for the audience. The videos serve not just as evidence of the “Droppings,” but also as a counterpoint to them. Unlike most performance art, GB’s performances are conceived of and presented as video throughout the run of the exhibition (although in some cases the work is presented as both a live experience and a taped one.)
Like a rock singer whose performance sits on the cusp of the intimate act of art making and the extroverted essence of rock and roll, GB explores the disjunctions between public and private. Substituting reverb and feedback with poured paint and mimicry, he ascends beyond the everyday in an attempt to emphasize futility, pain, pleasure, and the multiple combinations of these states inherent to the human condition. Drunk, deranged, and outta control, GB’s transgressions are hard to define as singular acts. His reliance on the absurd and the abject cloud all reasonable evaluation. Through his eccentric investigations of the histories and relationships between painting, sculpture, performance, and video, he aims to blur the boundaries between artist’s studio, theatre workshop, and para-cinema, resulting in works can only be described as medieval kinetic kindergartens.
