Upcoming events and such
Let's Don't Take No Chance
an exhibition of work by
Ben Hall
Opening Reception: Saturday, April 27, 7-10pm
Artist Talk: Saturday, May 25 6pm w/Sebastian Black
Regular hours Saturday 1-6pm, or by appointment, please contact edwin2739@airpost.net
Background
A good con man is always somewhat in earnest. The average con is engaged in accommodating every short-term enthusiasm. You could call this marketing. Buying the new thing displaces the old thing. Ideally the object/the thing/das dinge desired is the object obtained. The fact of an object should always, and by always I mean never, never ever, be what it’s expected to be. Or as Tupac put it, “I ain’t no punk. I ain’t gonna’ hide behind the facts.” We insist on the material because the world isn’t text based.
Let’s try it a different way.
It’s said that John Brown looked out on the assembly and commented to the hangman, “It’s a beautiful world. I had never noticed before." Sir Thomas More, for his part said, “Kindly see me up. As for coming down I shall shift for myself.” Brown and More, professional divers each.
There exists an imagined radical politics. It exists when we laboriously create the image of spontaneity or in our virtuosic performances of failure. A non-performance is still a performance. I’m exhibiting superficial manipulation of hard facts. Or maybe that’s just a condition of catastrophe, not being able to deal, or tell it like it is, or preach it like I feel it. The work should have the same fragility the ideas have.
FEMA will not respond to a slow-motion hurricane in a place hundreds of miles from sea. We do what we can but we have no post-war scenario in which the G.I.s come in and make Hamburg a great music town. It’s not quite fucked up enough.
Traditionally, thrown togetherness and fucked-uppededness show we don’t really care. It’s the idea of the jerry-built with all due respect to dudes named Jerry. Improvisation is just a fancy way of saying you have no plan. Siddhartha Gautama said, “All compound things are subject to breaking up.” He’s rapping about entropy, yeah? He also said the body is a cheap suitcase. Swami Muktananda called the body a bag of piss and shit. Come again? The only difference between New Age and Buddhism is whether or not you get yr prayer bowls from Amazon.com or Santa Fe, NM.
Robbery deterrents, the speculative plywood market, cowboy movies [in earnest and as send-up], Joel Chandler Harris’s update of African trickster escape narratives, modernist food production, supermarketing, the raps of Noreaga and Scaramanga, and big three showroom display methodologies are the primary drivers of this exhibition.
Biography
Ben Hall received his MFA from Columbia University and his B.A. from Bennington College, studying Quaker-based mediation, printmaking and improvisation. Hall is an advocate around issues of food, hunger and labor as a member of the Restaurant Opportunities Center which works towards improving working conditions and increasing opportunities for the advancement of low-wage employees in the service industry, as a fundraiser for Gleaners Community Food Bank, a volunteer at the Capuchin Soup Kitchen and as a chef/teacher for Cooking Matters/Share Our Strength, which develops cooking, shopping and nutritional skills in at-risk and low-income communities.
Other projects include Bap-Tizum.com, the largest internet survey of Black & African- American spiritual music. Exhibitions include Spatial City at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Indian Givers at Wake Gallery in Redford, and Outside Mediation at the Green Gallery at Yale University as well as receiving the EAF12 young artist fellowship at Socrates Sculpture Park in New York City in 2012. Recent publications include an interview in The History of American Graffiti and a profile in Behind The Kitchen Door focusing on restaurant workers rights and high-road entrepreneurship. Hall writes about music for The Wire and has performed at the Kunstcentrum Belgie, Hasselt Belgium, Instal, Glasgow, Scotland, and the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.