Whipped Cream Difficulties

Barton Lidice Benes died on May 30th, but his obit shows up in today’s NYT.

Mr. Benes was a sculptor “who worked in materials that he called artifacts of everyday life”. For example, he did sculptures using shredded cash. He also did a series of sculptures called “Flood”, using damaged property donated by victims of the 1997 North Dakota floods.

When friends started dying of AIDS, and Mr. Benes himself tested HIV-positive, he began working in everyday materials of the epidemic — pills and capsules, intravenous tubes, HIV-infected blood and cremated human remains.

One of the interesting aspects of this obit is the detail that Mr. Benes, who lived in Greenwich Village, apparently had a close relationship with the North Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks. NDMA exhibited his work in the 1990s, and…

…plans to build a replica of his apartment and furnish it exactly as Mr. Benes left it. Among its objects, many of them macabre, are a blackened human toe; a giant hourglass holding the mingled ashes of two of Mr. Benes’s friends, partners who died of AIDS; a gall stone removed from his friend Larry Hagman, the actor; and a stuffed giraffe’s head.

I’m curious how the relationship between Mr. Benes and NDMA developed. It just seems odd that he’d be that close to an art museum in what New Yorkers consider “flyover country”. It also seems odd that he had so much trouble exhibiting his “transgressive” art in NYC.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 19th, 2012 at 11:42 am and is filed under Art, Clippings, Obits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.