By Margarita Osipian
When I first set eyes on Benjamin Oakley’s work at the Gardiner Museum during 2007’s Nuit Blanche, he was creating an installation: a large drawing of a cabin on the museum’s wall using only black tape. It was fascinating to watch the image grow and take form. Almost exactly a year later I met with Ben in his studio, armed with an old tape recorder. The following is part of our conversation.
MONDO: I don’t want to limit your work, but what are your main interests?
BEN OAKLEY: I’m interested in both photography and painting, and I would say equally. The dialogue they can have with each other. Paintings that talk about photography or use it rather than mimic it. That real nice interplay between them, that kind of bouncing back and forth — that’s nice. I think that Gerhard Richter did that really well with some of his early painting. Pushing paint to create an out-of-focus image is interesting. A technical photographic element in a completely different medium. I like that. I take more photographs than I make paintings. In the last while I’ve done only three larger paintings. They happen a lot slower, and photography is quick. It’s immediate.
MONDO: When photography came along, what painting was aiming to do with realism had to change since photography was usurping that space. It’s cool that you are working within that interesting shift.
BO: It’s a real active time right now, because even traditional photography (or what we knew as photography) is, some say, suffering some technical death throes. The reality of photography certainly is not dead or dying. And the same can be said of painting. We create and gather images more than ever. The obsession of documentation through photography is stronger than it’s ever been.
And new relationships between the two are being formed all the time. So as long as you keep exploring those relationships, nothing can really die.
MONDO: You have a lot of images of sky in your older and more recent work. What is it about the sky, or the expansiveness of the sky, that draws you?
BO: I don’t know. If you go through art and all of its different histories, even photography, the landscape and the sky has always been a real muse for a lot of people. It’s been a real focus, so that interests me. Also for my own relationship with it, after a while of looking at it and thinking about it, questioning how to even look at it, how to think about it. You begin to watch it change. It becomes a bit meditative. You begin to realize why it’s been so important for so long. It’s a constant.
MONDO: The sky is just very large and takes up a lot of space. But I guess that’s just the reality of what it actually is, the sheer size of it. You can’t pinpoint it. It’s not static or planted in the ground. It seems to go on forever.
BO: You can add to it and you can take away from it. For a long time I was downloading a lot of photos of forest fires. I’d just google forest fires and print out all these images of really, really chalked-out skies. That interested me, the idea of adding, adding, and adding, until it became completely muddied and distorted. The images are great. I have a big stack of them and I still look at them when I do paintings. For a long time I was painting nice blue skies, and I’m not saying that they were boring or empty, but I guess they were empty in the sense that there was room for addition. I wanted to put something in the air. I thought smoke was an attractive and fitting solution. So, that’s what these new paintings are: like these weird forest fires, smoke and the cropping and isolation of those smoke-filled sections.
MONDO: You were telling me about the work you were doing using transparencies of multiple photographs layered over one another. I know it was more about the process for you, but what is it about this creation of a fictional space versus a pure photograph?
BO: I was thinking about media images and the truth of the photograph today, even the truth of my own photographs. It kind of came about when I’d taken some photos and I had them in the computer. I was going to print them out and there was some odd little thing in each photo, that I kind of thought, I don’t really like that. So I photoshopped it out, cleaned everything up and I kind of felt self-conscious for doing so. I told a friend of mine that I had photoshopped out a bubble gum wrapper from the background of the photo. He told me it was really silly, like what was the point of that. There is nothing wrong with an honest image. So I wanted to think about the fiction of the image and the ability to be able to edit as much as you want and whatever you want. That attracted me. Also the marrying of two or more photos to create one new, believable image. So I took separate photos, three or four, from different sources, and then combined them. Printing them as transparencies and stacking them on top of each other. Some of the images were really convincing. They didn’t look like fractured clips. It was about breeding imagery.
MONDO: You have several country landscapes, like cabins and trees. What’s the relationship between the countryside and your existence as a person living in an urban space?
BO: A lot of the photos are taken from cars. I’m never really out for a walk in the countryside. It’s always going from point A to point B, going from the city to usually visit family. To pass the time, I put the camera on the windowsill and shoot photos and look at them later. Sometimes it’s a really nice drive; it’s enjoyable. I’m not pursuing [the image of] a nice perfect barn, or anything like that. I’m not going to the county fair and trying to sell them. I’m sort of looking at those traditions and seeing if you can mimic them easily, and pass the time doing it. It’s a real lazy man’s tourism. You just have to sit and it all whips by. With a nice fast shutter speed, you can get these photos. It’s kind of like watching TV with a pause button.
MONDO: It’s like a way of documenting something that you almost never experienced.
BO: Yeah, it’s like documenting something I’m not part of. It’s all about fiction. The merging of all these images was to create fiction and doing these country landscapes is more fiction. If a songwriter was to just write about only familiar things, he might be a really dull songwriter. If he can branch out and speak of things he doesn’t know of, it can get really interesting.
MONDO: Do you have ideas for projects that turn out to be too large? I decided one night that I was going to make a bird and I was going to cut all the feathers out individually out of paper. After ten feathers I gave up because it was so laborious.
BO: Yeah, large projects usually involve lots of money. When it came to the Nuit Blanche installation, I did it with masking tape because I can afford that. That’s something that I can just go and buy. I don’t have to apply for a grant; I don’t have to rely on anyone else. If you want to make something out of cardboard, you’re a genius for picking cardboard. If you ever want to make small art, you’re a genius because it costs you nothing to ship it. If you find ways to work big with small means, you’re going to make something happen. So when I wrote the proposal for the Gardiner, I knew it would be totally possible. It was funny: they came back and asked “What are your material costs, what’s your budget, how much money will you need?” I emailed back and I said, “I think fifteen dollars.” They just laughed. But it’s true, I made it with fifteen bucks, and I still have a lot of the tape too. That sort of self-reliance is important to me.
MONDO: Really cheap art.
BO: Costless art.
MONDO: I guess that’s like using found objects. That plays into it.
BO: Yeah. It’s impermanence too. Even if it was to stay up, it wouldn’t be able to. The glue would corrode over years and it would all kind of fall off the wall. It would be like leaf litter. The idea that what goes up comes down, it becomes a big ball of nothing.
MONDO: We’re living in a disposable society in terms of our consumption and there is really not a lot of preservation. Yet there is a need to preserve artworks and historical artifacts.
BO: I see it everyday. They’re insane over it.
MONDO: The world always functions on these weird polarized lines that seem to not make any sense and you’re addressing that by making disposable art.
BO: You go to some artist’s studios and you’re hanging out and they’re getting stuff ready for a show. And it’s on the floor and they’re blowing smoke on it, walking on it. So it’s part of their life for a time, whatever it is, object or image, who knows. Eventually it ends up in a gallery or museum and it becomes instantly babied for the rest of its days. I guess that’s what some artists strive for, for their work to not just be conceptually respected, but physically as well. Just cared for. It’s sort of a nice idea. There’s stuff in the AGO’s collection that’s 80s work and it’s really falling apart. The 80s was all about synthetics, new glues, new mediums, acrylic paints and stuff like that. The pieces aren’t standing up at all, they’re totally crumbling.
MONDO: The idea of the art gallery in itself is a very strange and complicated one.
BO: Galleries will always approach art and artists differently than artists will approach art. Always. That’s just the nature of it.
MONDO: It’s also the construction of the artist, in the same way that we construct the author. There is this idealization, putting artists on pedestals. They move beyond being human beings. When you first meet people you have idealized images of them, but this deteriorates over time. I think the artist lives in that idealized space permanently.
BO: They like to roll around in it. Play the role. It’s a bit much. But it’s that sort of economy and the gallery expects that attitude because it seems to work. So a lot of times the artist says “okay” and they oblige. Then you have this relationship where the gallery gives the artist money and exposure and the artist gives them a character.
MONDO: When you get a grant from somebody, whether you’re an artist or a non-profit organization, it alters what you’re doing. You were saying that it’s really good to do cheap work because you can fund it yourself. You’re not relying on someone else.
BO: That’s exactly it. And that’s a nice feeling, too, to be a do-it-yourself person. If you can fix your own deck when a board breaks, you’re better off. If you can do a piece in a museum that seems to work on a budget of ten dollars, that’s also better for you. There are people doing things fabricated out of every high-end material you can think of. Made for them, shipped for them, set up for them. That whole exchange amazes me. Burning money. Seems very arrogant.
MONDO: You’re more intimate with your work.
BO: Yeah. That was the whole thing with the Nuit Blanche project. The act of drawing it live, freehand, the progression, and letting people be part of that progression is important. It couldn’t have been done beforehand and just have had people show up. It would have lost everything. It would have looked like a vinyl cut-out.
MONDO: It’s hard for people to think about art as disposable.
BO: There can’t be a value on everything. And that’s again where we’re falling short a lot of the time. Where musicians make music to sell and artists make art to sell. That’s the wrong bottom line. And so a piece like the tape piece is not meant to be sold and it’s not meant to be put on a pedestal.
MONDO: The basic essence of its construction is that it can’t be taken by people and bought.
BO: I like the idea of a creative gesture just being for that sake only.
MONDO: So if an artist made art in their home and no one saw it, would that be okay?
BO: Yeah, I think it would be great. Henry Darger was a total shut-in and when he died the people downstairs went into his place and found a huge stash of decade’s worth of drawings, collages, and watercolours. They are really good. He lived his whole life and when he died no one had ever seen his stuff. Now there are major retrospectives of his work, it’s kind of weird and I wonder who’s capitalizing on that. He has no family, he has no heirs. His stuff is so weird, unedited, and no one was meant to see it. That’s interesting, because we all operate for the public, all of us.
Benjamin Oakley is represented by LE Gallery and pays the bills working as an art installer for the Art Gallery of Ontario.
