BENJEANSHOUGHTON

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

Blinks slow like hands clapped, time is collapsed and these moments are visible.

For me Art is a means of discovery, a way to dive into the gloaming deep, the dense strata of existing human knowledge and experience, returning with a thing to be seen in a new light. My practice is polymathic, explored and delivered in various media including sculpture, installation, film, photography, drawing, performance and writing. I see my work as a research practice discovering and disseminating information through new visual synergies; employing entrenched or paradigmatic systems of understanding and taking them beyond themselves in order to uncover other possibilities and alternate ways of understanding the world and human experience. My practice is located within an extensive and ongoing discourse on the role and potential of art as a fluid and empirical system to explore, discover and unveil poetic or ‘Ecstatic Truths’ (Werner Herzog) i.e. truths which may be suffused with subjectivity, mystery and uncertainty.

At the heart of my practice is an investigation of the objects and ideas from the phenomenal world which surrounds us and the narratives or conceptual frameworks by which we attempt to decode, rationalise and understand them. My work manifests in various forms according to the inherent properties of the ideas pursued; taxonomy through collections; On The Ark And I, the nature of perceived reality through film; Yugen, historicism and narrative through text and images; Black Cloud. Throughout my investigation of all these ideologies and modes of communication there is a consistent endeavour to rupture the finite boundaries of those concepts; an inquisitive undoing of explicable reality in order to creatively reveal something outside of both language and explanation, to articulate what can fall between the lines and to give platform to the ineffable things that maintain our interest in being alive. My work is not an interest illustrated but a means to afford others different ways of seeing beneath, beyond or within received and axiomatic understanding of reality. I work to puncture the habitual momentum of perception and to reveal the wonder, oddity and lineage of the structures we rely on; our senses, our cognition, our knowledge.

Core to my practice is the use of art as a means for underlining, stretching or compressing the viewer’s experience of time in order to invite contemplation and an awareness of the present moment and themselves within it. This serves to affirm the reciprocal relationship between artwork and audience and the individual viewer’s relationship to the work as active agents in the construction and translation of meaning. My aims are equivocal to those of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Chris Marker and Werner Herzog; seeking perpetually to abate apathy, to reveal elements inherent in each chosen subject that may at once confound and shed light on something fundamental and to offer a reflexive experience of understanding.

EXCERPT

Alongside Theandor, amongst the Sundews’ saccharin saliva and the moss's wet mass, so do arcane Gods and listless spirits reside, mingling with those buried here by Iron Age hands. Those unfortunate souls who incited and or seeded fear in the community. The misunderstood, the seers of things unseen. Loathed in life and paused in death, unable to disintegrate, to rot, atoms denied their migratory rights. Others murdered for favour; to appease some imagined being, a problem manifest, given a bloodied and terrible face. All part of a desperate struggle to sate an appetite that has no tangible name nor language nor taste, a mouth like the sun.

Let us name the askers of Bogmun, the scientists, the Archaeologists. Let them be known from here on as 'The Wantant'. Like a maggot in fat, they would fidget and fumble through Theandors remains, claim their own discoveries in the body she once called home, but at the cost of mold and the re-ignition of decomposition. She would be branded in shades of black Times New Roman inkjet print "A true testament to Iron Age rituals; a key to the time just before and after Christ". We should note here the doubled diss service dealt Theandor, primarily at the hands of her killers and latterly at the hands of The Wantant. This is a bad thing, a twinned piece of rotten luck.

Whilst in recent years Democracy has become a dirty word and an illusive (often contradictory) concept Superconductor aims to reclaim the original meaning of democracy through work and events which are accessible, decentralised and which offer a platform of direct representation for different groups and communities. From open discussions on “The Role of the Artist in Society” to Occupy Newcastles' workshop on “Direct Democracy” Superconductor is an invitation for anyone and everyone to engage in the critical dialogue surrounding art supported by the wider programme of events and discussions within the gallery space itself.

The artists involved in Superconductor offer various new ways of experiencing and engaging with the world as epitomised in the uncertain destabilising of historical 'fact' stirred by Ove Kvavik's work Beyond the Limits of Control. Overall Superconductor underlines the social significance of art production, reception and effect. The show emphasises the unity between art and life as a means to create one's own cultural conditions and to affect social change. Both through the works in the show and through the programme of satellite activities, the exhibition becomes a hub for the generation and cross-pollination of new ideas and approaches to contemporary life and interaction. Superconductor invites engagement, contemplation and open-endedness over detachment, entertainment and the unequivocal.

Iris Aspinall Priest

SUPERCONDUCTOR
Curated by Iris Priest

Ove Kvavik, Edwin Li, Kate Liston, Ben Jeans Houghton & Matthew Giraudeau

“The atomic individualism of patriarchy destroys much of the fabric of the human community. Such a damaged community is incapable of understanding the needs of its own members, much less of the nonhuman world.”

Michael Zimmerman

“The collective task of “reenchanting” our whole culture is, as I see it, one of the crucial tasks of our time...”

Suzi Gablik

In primeval times and tribal societies the stratification of art from life may not have always been so absolute. The creation of images and artefacts has been, throughout history, a necessary aspect of everyday life for many cultures; whether as a channel to communicate between other realms, as an agent for the divination of knowledge, for healing individuals and the wider community, or as an act of dedication to appease the spirit realms.

Superconductor seeks to usurp the antiquated paradigm of the autonomous artist loner, practising at the periphery of society. Instead the show suggests that - like the shaman of primitive cultures who connected communities and who traversed the Axis Mundi between the divine and earthly worlds - the artist of today is central for reinvesting everyday life with magic, mystery and meaning from Ben Jeans Houghton's dream like and labyrinthine films to Kate Liston 's evocation of the magical sensation of synchronicity.

Superconductor proposes that, rather than extraneous to everyday life, art is essential for connecting us imaginatively to the world in which we live and to one another. The show departs from Suzi Gablik's call for the imperative liberation of art from the disenchantment of materialism and the technocratic culture of disconnection and instead posits that Art is a lens through which we examine our own society and innate assumptions or prejudices, a mirror which reflects the myriad of wonderful and terrible aspects of life – as in Edwin Li's dystopic vision of future society - but also a locus for the exchange of ideas, participation and cultural democracy.

YUGEN 2012
HD Digital Video
Archival footage
Duration 13 minutes

The United States of America
Sculpture Commission for the National Building Museum Washington DC

Ben has been chosen as one of the 25 participating Artists for the DCAHH 5X5 Public Art commission to coincide with the Centennial anniversary of 5000 cherry trees being gifted to Washington by Japan. Ben was chosen by curator and producer Richard Hollinshead of Grit & Pearl.

5×5, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities’s new temporary public art project, will result in twenty-five groundbreaking temporary public art installations that will be installed concurrently throughout the District of Columbia alongside the National Cherry Blossom Festival. DCCAH has commissioned five highly-experienced and innovative contemporary art curators to select and work with five artists or artist teams to each to develop and present exciting, temporary art works in public spaces throughout the District. The resulting twenty-five projects will activate and enliven publicly accessible spaces and add an ephemeral layer of creativity and artistic expression to neighborhoods across the District.

From biophilia to bibliophilia......
and then back again.
Contextualising The Ocelli within ecological and archival discourse.

Vanessa Bartlett

Cinema often uses very specific narrative tropes to describe humanity’s relationship to the natural world. The apocalypse narrative has been popular of late, perhaps galvanised by civilisation’s precarious and sometimes threatening relation to its natural environment and the spectre of climate change. In Lars Von Trier’s recent film Melancholia, a cataclysmic collision takes place between the Earth and a mysterious planet. The catastrophe is prophesised by a female protagonist, who is engaged in a unique psychic bond with the natural world. Her character represents a biophilia that is openly ridiculed by the film’s more pragmatic characters, building an allegory around discordant relations between the human race and other universal ecologies. Melancholia’s apocalyptic narrative might be interpreted as a descendant of the historical discourses of romantic painting, that depicted lone figures dwarfed by threatening natural landscapes or ships cast adrift in tempestuous storms.

Human relations to the natural world are an on-going concern in the films of the ARKA group. Their 2011 work EXTRAMISSION recounted one biology professor’s enamourment with exotic landscapes and his attempts to commit the perfect portrait of their topography to film. As a consequence of his obsessive quest to capture ideal nature, he descends into frustrated insanity. Likewise The Ocelli tells of a man who becomes infested by the spores of Armillaria, a three-mile wide mushroom composed of a web of rhizomatic white fibres. Based on the cordycep mushroom that penetrates the skin of insects and sprouts through their skull, Armillaria bewitches and consumes the body of the unnamed male protagonist, enveloping human flesh with her fungal form. Her level of agency in this process is difficult to read, for we are made to understand through the film’s narration, that Armillaria is slowly becoming sentient.

In his essay Robinson in Ruins: New materialism and the archaeological imagination Paul Dave draws on new materialist philosophy to expose alternative paradigms for the depiction of the non- human in film; that often specifically address the issue of distributed agency. He is concerned with “mutual entanglement between nature and human life”1 as an alternative to conventional dichotomies that tend to embody hierarchical or emotive constructs of

civilisations under threat from vengeful nature. This equivalent distribution of agency suggests a point of biophilic contact that might recall Armillaria’s fibrous intertwining with flesh. It is the viral spread of an ecology that draws together human and non-human matter as co-dependant agents. The film’s male lead appears so enchanted by the glistening black objects that Armillaria deposits at the surface of the soil, that we might imagine his integration into this conjoined ecosystem as the merging of two complicit parts. According to new materialist philosopher Timothy Morton’s vision for the future of interspecies relations: “being a person means never being sure that you’re one. In an age of ecology without nature, we would treat many more beings as people while deconstructing our ideas about what counts as people.”2 Armillaria is a porous and prolific natural form that expresses a base material contingency between human and plant matter.

It should not escape our attention that Paul Dave’s essay on new materialism in film takes Patrick Keiller’s Robinson in Ruins as his primary case study. Keiller‘s sedate narratives and predilection for long static shots dampened by melancholia have been hugely influential on the filmmaking of the ARKA group. Stylistically The Ocelli’s mellow trajectory and disembodied narrative voices are used to conjure the same dreamlike state of detachment that is so integral to Keiller’s cinematic oeuvre. While The Ocelli is laden with found imagery and sounds from diverse cultures appropriated from external sources, Robinson in Ruins is an exercise in methodological realism that takes a singular approach to a specific perspective on British culture. This divergence of approaches underlines The Ocelli’s status as a complex assemblage of overlapping meta-narratives that breaks with the linear forms of more traditional filmmaking.

Fundamental to the ARKA group’s approach to film is a desire to implicate their audience as active participants in the process of constructing meaning. The central narrative of The Ocelli is interwoven with footage collected from the archives of the now defunct charity Sightsavers and closely cropped shots of a group of school children exploring the Sir John Soane’s Museum in London. As with all archival collections, these materials represent subjective spaces where information is collated in order to advocate a predetermined point of view. Sightsavers’ depictions of adults and children enduring blindness, photophobia and cataracts would have been generated as fundraising tools to galvanise a perspective of Otherness and encourage sensations of pity and fear. As an archive they perform the function of an instrumentalist body of knowledge that Jacques Derrida referred to in Archive Fever as: “a single corpus, in a system or synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of the ideal configuration.”3 While working with the archive, the ARKA group occupy a place within

this hermeneutic manipulation of subjects. Yet the pictorial body of The Ocelli is regularly punctuated by cavernous black gaps where no images appear. From out of these empty spaces a disembodied narrator reminds the viewer that: “you are present and active, in fact you play a larger part in your experience than anything you will see on this screen.”4 Using the power of suggestion, The Ocelli seeks to position the viewer as sensorial and critical collaborator in the creation of meaning. In doing so it attempts to flatten the hierarchies of knowledge interpretation and to redistribute agency between artist and audience. Recalling Armillaria’s voracious webbing with human flesh, the film returns to the theme of cohesive joining.

In spite of this commitment to usurping the principles of knowledge, it is easy to identify a scholarly love of research and a bibliophilic engagement with the minutiae of scientific meaning in The Ocelli. The narrative is densely packed with informational addresses to the viewer such as “the area that your nail covers is the same size as the central point of focus on the back wall of your eye.”5 Indeed the ARKA group often collaborates with scientists, psychologists and experts in other disciplines during their working process. This parasitic borrowing of formalist and positivist knowledge is part of an open-ended and organic process that characterises the ARKA group’s dialogical approach. Yet their primary concern is not with information itself, but with creating a framework for the viewer to reassemble the material on their own terms.
When watching The Ocelli you are invited to become part of a circular conversation; to reconfigure the beautiful and surreal images that are imparted to you as they dance against the back of your eyes.

.1 Paul Dave, ‘Robinson in Ruins: New materialism and the archeological imagination,’ Radical Philosophy (Sept/Oct 2011) pp.31
.2 Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Harvard University Press, 2010)
pp.8
.3 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression
(University of Chicago Press, 1996.) pp.10
.4 Quote from the script of The Ocelli .5 Quote from the script of The Ocelli