Frank Benson at Sadie Coles

Frank Benson at Sadie Coles

21 July, 2008
by: Claireflan

With two disappointing and frustrating chocolate fountains, two furling gym mats and one photograph of a manipulated readymade, Frank Benson's current exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ leaves a dismal first impression. However, I strongly believe that somewhere between Wittgenstein's four hour long studies of art works and the swift dismissal of the fervent contemporary art detractor lies an acceptable amount of time to spend with an art work. Thus I enlist the help of the experts – the gallerist and the artist – and endeavour to cast my scathing first impressions aside and to reassess these objects of frustration as highly produced works instilled with artistic integrity.

The notion of seeming motion and fluidity thwarted through the static reality of artifice is one moderately interesting aspect to Chocolate Fountain #1, 2008 and Chocolate Fountain #2, 2008. The bendy wooden boards, constructed and manipulated with industrial machinery and marked here and there with spray paint, are strengthened somewhat in artistic substance by the interplay between the incidental and the orchestrated, and, like the chocolate fountains, by the concept of distilling movement. The tentative idea that these wood sculptures, MDF, 2008, and MDF, 2008, are in some way in the process of being returned to their original shape, that of a tree, curving and rounded, is appealing, but, as I say, highly tentative and perhaps even barrel-bottom scraping in terms of interpretation.

The photograph of the multiple CD-changer, Untitled, 2008, my personal greatest hit or rather the only hit, was described by the gallerist as the crescendo of the exhibition. Transformed by Benson into 'an architectural monument' by up-scaling it to fit neatly into a metre high rectangular frame, the image is unrecognisable as a small mundane piece of digital machinery. The all too subtle perversity, which Benson insists pervades the show, is most apparent in the nipple-like manipulation that perforates an aperture in the CD-changer and the burnt, molten plastic triggers associations with PVC. The unfortunate consequence of the CD-changer's success, however, is that it highlights the disappointing reality of the other four pieces.

The verticality of the chocolate fountains apparently warrants a reminder of the phallus and masculinity in the press release, which Benson states was mostly written by him. The geometric and totemic shapes of the fountains are cited as 'clear' references to Brancusi. Even the mere mention of a fountain and you can't help thinking of the omnipotent Duchamp. The platformless wooden sculptures point to Carl Andre. The list goes on. This quagmire of references and nods to the canon of modern and contemporary art, tiresomely encountered in today's art and the equally hackneyed alchemistic pursuit of transforming banal objects into transcendental art frankly leave little room for Benson himself. The question therefore is whether, beyond the viewer's hardened struggle to engage, there actually is all that much to Benson's work? Perhaps it is true what they say about first impressions.


Click here to see what's on at Sadie Coles HQ.
Click here to see all London Exhibitions.
Click here for things to do in Mayfair.

Claireflan