Ben Young was born in 1973 in Amersham, England, to an American Mother and a British Father. He lives and works in San Francisco and London.

Ben Young

Age: 08/26/1973
Website: www.benyoungart.com
Medium: Oil & Spray Paint on Canvas
Location: London, UK
Influences: Pollock, De Kooning, Rauschenberg, Johns, Oldenburg, Baselitz, Basquiat, Meese, Kerouac, Nirvana, De La Soul, Lou Reed, John Coltrane
Education: Masters Fine Art, Central St Martins, London

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EVANICE HOLZ: You use oil and spray paint as your primary mediums on canvas or linen- I have read you state that you 'want to make spray paint more elegant, because it is brutal, savage'. In more recent years the emergence of street art as an accepted form of artistic expression has come to being in the art community. How would you describe the connection between the streets and fine art in your work?

BEN YOUNG: Artists get inspiration from everywhere. To some extent, art is just visual culture and taste, therefore whatever you see and wherever you see it may well affect your work and enter it in some way. My only problem with so-called 'Street Art' is that to me it often just resembles advertising. Often the image itself really isn't important so much as the place of its appearance and the fact of its repetition. Even the best street art just strikes me as solely attention-grabbing and nothing else. I actually prefer the more anonymous or inept spray paint scrawlings. They seem more genuine somehow. They have probably influenced my work more than the work of the famous street-artists. Artists were working with spray paint before the explosion of graffiti in the 70s and street-art in the 90s. I guess I take what I like from street-art. Some of it is very innovative, exciting and fresh. I just don't like the ego-surfing element of it.

EH: You state in a 2009 interview following your first solo show that 'post modernism is dangerous' and carry on how their constant need to deconstruct the oppositions of things basic, 'black and white...male and female' (in your examples). How do you feel you've contributed to the movement with your work, and in what direction do you see this post modernism evolving (or diverging) to in the next 5 years?

BY: My work is a mishmash of influences in the same way that po-mo privileges diverse viewpoints, voices and narratives over a single authoritative narrative. I don't necessarily privilege one influence over another - they just pop up, unbidden. In that sense I am a child of the postmodern, we all are. But what I meant in that 2009 interview about postmodernism being 'dangerous' is that in representing or trying to represent multiple realities and viewpoints in a work we are perhaps compromising our own relative, singular viewpoint. I mean, from my point of view, an individual suffers, and there's nothing multiple or diverse about that suffering - it's the undivided experience of the sufferer and no amount of sexy deconstruction or gender/identity politics can change that. Where my work has contributed to the vast field of the postmodern is that I am trying to do 'painting' and painting as the bearer of culture and the centre of art is dead and has been for a long time. I think all living painters are in an absurd position and if they're honest they know it. I approach all paintings as examples of the absurd, including my own. So perhaps I'm championing a marriage of the Absurd with the Postmodern. The absurd was big in Surrealism, maybe it's time for it to make a comeback.

EH: A Rembrandt piece is surely art, though it looks nothing like Warhol's Campbell's soup piece- which is also considered art. The broad description of art allows us to speak about it in the way we do. In this modern age do you see the necessity to define art, and why?

BY: These are hard times for art with a capital 'A'. On the one hand it's really important for human knowledge that the subject 'Art' is taught in schools and universities but on the other so much contemporary art is about taking the piss out of that kind of seriousness. And then when you enter the commercial art world you realise so much more that it is precisely that - commercial. There are zillions of huge art fairs full of so-called art - are we really meant to take all those crazy artifacts seriously? It seems beyond a joke. What was once seriously carried on by earnest men and women with a relatively small audience has now become a multi-billion dollar global business that annually attracts hordes of recently graduated, starry-eyed artist wannabes and legions of nouveau-riches, moronic 'collectors' eagerly jumping on the latest bandwagon. Again a total joke or what? Somewhere in all of this madness there surely must be something left called 'Art' but where is it? I guess it all comes down to the seriousness of the individual practitioner - what are they in it for? What's their message? There is indeed a bland, academic, vaguely conceptual way of making art these days but it's very formulaic. You see it everywhere, it's taught in all the schools but it mostly leaves me cold whenever I see it in institutions. There's something mass-produced about it. You're right, it's getting harder and harder to define art. I think what a lot of us mean by 'art' is something that's more akin to a movement, ie a movement forward - the shock of the new etc (to steal Robert Hughes' phrase). But maybe this linear definition, this forward movement is running out of steam. We've so undermined all the meanings traditionally underpinning our conception of art that the whole field has been hollowed out and is now collapsing. In fact, that's where all the material for contemporary art has been coming from anyway - from its own foundations. You devour, consume artistic styles devoid of their content and call it art (postmodernism) but in the process you undermine the very activity you're engaging in (art). The malaise is that we seem unable to create anything genuinely new - we're just feeding off the dead corpse of the History of Art. That's why spontaneous and ephemeral manifestations like street-art are so exciting. They seem to come from outside the History of Art - how refreshing! So to answer your question, probably the broader the definition of art now the better.

EH: I see influences of Basquiat in your work in a way you mold to your own style rather than appearing emulative. In Basquait's work...his crude manner of painting was a reflection of his African American culture, and the way he saw people. How would you describe the reflection of your primitive paintings?

BY: For me, Primitivism is a recurring theme in art. It comes around again and again. When the mediaeval artists discovered the 'primitive' classical art it caused a renaissance and led to the demise of the ornate and flowery art they were making. The word 'primitive' has often just been used to mean 'older' or 'original' - not terms that necessarily imply a less evolved state. The Impressionists were initially seen as primitivists by their contemporaries. So I am just returning to a perennial source. I think many artists turn to primitivism out of desperation. Ultimately, I don't like the conceptual games we're expected to play as artists and I believe in non-ordinary consciousness and that art has big part to play in stimulating it. Primitivism is a tried and true way for the artist and his or her audience to reach non-ordinary consciousness. I would say that where my work might be similar to Basquiat's is that there is a kind of desperate urgency to it - the figures are painted crudely because what is being communicated is an experience of energy rather than the contemplation of a subtle and complex visual effect. It's Basquiat's communicative power that I admire and I hope that my work achieves this too. What's funny is that I really do my own thing but if it reminds people of Basquiat then I guess I'll take it as a compliment!


EH: Happy Nihilism, your current solo exhibition is now on view in Amsterdam, and you have another solo show at Gallerie Rigassi in Switzerland through July 30th. What can we as spectators expect in your new work? How would you describe your new direction?

BY: My new work is a bit more contemplative and perhaps a bit less urgent than what I was doing before. Actually the show at Rigassi in Switzerland will be of works mostly completed in the last 4 years with a couple of even older pieces, almost like a mini-retrospective, so it won't be totally representative of what I'm doing now whereas the Amsterdam show will be almost entirely of work made in the last year. I will have a few visually aggressive works in there but the things I'm working on now are more about playing with colour and form like a good old-fashioned art student!

EH: In the process of creation and destruction how does the chronology of your work flow come into play? Plainly, how do you draw the line between when to create and when to destroy?

BY: It's a very fine line because in the end I'm trying to create a painting. So no matter how many times I destroy the image I'm working on it won't necessarily make it better. It's a kind of dance I do with the painting - sometimes I get the steps right and sometimes I screw them up. But then you have to be careful because the screw-ups might be more interesting! I'm aiming to make paintings that have so many painted layers and therefore (hopefully) layers of meaning that they achieve a level of autonomous signification. I just coined that phrase and I think it's a good way of describing an interesting painting that works as a 'meaning generator'. In other words, the paintings are so thick with symbols (paint and its application is symbolic) that they take on a life of their own whilst still in the studio and exponentially so when they go into the outside world. It's the meaning-generating capacity of art in general and of paintings in particular that is so fascinating. People will get things from my paintings that I probably could never have imagined. Paintings that I thought were really threatening, some people thought were really fluffy and vice versa.

EH: What emotion best describes where you derive your inspiration- how do you react to it?

BY: You might not like this but probably anger. Anger at society and myself. I want to punch through all the polite restraint and repression and get to the nitty gritty. I believe that underneath my lame, repressed self is a true self trying to get out, a pure self, an original self. As such, my painting is really a personal journey, a quest to discover myself. I'm a believer in doing - it matters what we do and what we choose to do. But after the initial angry outburst onto the canvas there is fun, there is colour and joy too. Sometimes there is no anger but at the very least there is a kind of furious energy. I don't want to lose that energy no matter how old I get (I'm only 37).



EH: Any last words?

BY:What I feel closest to in terms of painting movements, more so than to Basquiat or Twombly, is Abstract Expressionism. I still think the best of the Abstract Expressionists have not really been superseded to date. For our lack of feeling they had an abundance - Pollock is my favourite. What else? Hmmm, I'm a huge fan of Kerouac too and 50s and 60s jazz. I guess I was born 40 years too late...

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