Ben Frost

Ben Frost is a superhero.  Or at least super cynical.  And his artwork is a mindfuck gangbang of pop culture demigods.





Chief Magazine: You strike me as someone who might harbor some resentment for being propped up in front of the TV set a little too much as a kid. Was that the case?

Ben Frost: Sesame Street was my surrogate family.  Big Bird taught me the alphabet and Mr. Snuffleupagus my first sexual experience.

In your piece “Devolution,” a human couple nurses an infant monkey. In “Mcwinter of Discontent,” a girl huddles beneath a McDonald’s logo. Just how cynical would you say you are, on a scale from “very cynical” to “very, very cynical”?

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If I were a super hero, I would possess the power of super-cynicism.  I would fly through the windows of families watching TV and blast their plasma screens with unnatural super-rays that would filter out all the lies and half-truths specially designed to sell them contradictory life styles and useless products with colourful packaging.  My kryptonite would be my alter ego, kind of like a Jekyll and Hyde scenario. He would be the total opposite of the "Super Cynic" - a mild mannered pop-culture junkie that would collect toys and watch Oprah and Dr. Phil obsessively. Hopefully no one would ever discover his secret identity or his painting sales would plummet.

Where did you grow up? How normal was your upbringing?

I grew up in Australia, in a country town that was predominantly fully of hippies and cow farmers.  It was pretty normal I guess.  My parents started a touring music hall company that would go from town to town presenting "enchanting evenings of dinner, song, and dance". So in between serving meals I would have to get up on stage and sing in some twisted barbershop quartet medley or perform in some whacky "I say, I say, I say... Guvnor" comedy routine.  I got into art and the creative side of things pretty early, which was good because I’ve always known what I wanted to do.

Where are you living now? What’s your take on the scene there?

I live in Surry Hills, Sydney.  Things are smaller, though there’s a healthy scene happening in Australia.  It’s been great on this trip to the US, just to get a better feel for what’s happening in New York and L.A.  There’s not much graffiti up in Sydney, everything gets buffed quick smart, which I think is a hangover from the 2000 Olympics.  I’ve got a cool warehouse space in Sydney, so it’s a good base for what I want to do.

You’ve collaborated with other artists, including Roderick Bunter on a piece that was big – like, nine meters long. What was that collaborative process like?

Yeah I think that painting was actually like 12 meters long – it was massive  It was a pretty full on piece at the time especially because the street art feel in art was only just starting to rear its head.  It ended up in an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney in 2002 and now it’s in the collection of a guy who owns a television network in Australia.  Rod Bunter is a pretty crazy guy, he pulled a knife on me during a fight while we were painting it.  The whole project was pretty out of control and every time it’s been exhibited the police have shut it down because there’s a little girl masturbating on it and some other mildly disturbing stuff.  I need to start doing more collaborative stuff, it’s such a good way to get into the head of other artists and see how they work.

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How long does it take to complete a work on such a vast canvas? Do you like working on a grand scale?

The really big ones take a couple of months, but it depends how complex they are.  Painting big is always what I want to be doing, but in my current New York show for example I was restricted by the cost of shipping the work over – so there was a lot of smaller work.  I really enjoy working on board too because I’m pretty aggressive with my surfaces, but it ends up being so damn heavy to transport.  It also works out a lot cheaper to make big surfaces on board rather than on canvas.

The canvas for “Final Days” is big too, and it’s fun to look at because there’s so much to absorb. It strikes me as a modern-day “Guernica,” where instead of an anguished horse, we get an anguished Teletubby. Do you feel influenced by or connected with works like “Guernica” that speak for a wartime society? Do you see a reflection of a troubled populace, particularly regarding the situation in Iraq, in your work?

Yeah I like the level of engagement when I’m in front of a painting, there’s so much information around us and so much to say all at once, that I find it really hard to engage with empty space.  I do feel connected to say the motivations of something like "Guernica" where a work of art is objectified as a reflection of a time in space.  As if the paintings are twisted inscriptions on the tombstones of the 20th century - zombie claws shooting up out of the graves, like the "Thriller" video clip, only the whole video is set in Toys R Us.

The Iraq situation is a symptom of our capitalist and consumerist retardation.  The obvious dementia that we are all walking around in is because of this snowballing advertising and infotainment monster that has replaced certain parts of our brains with cheez whiz.

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Do you see your work as satirical? Who do you see yourself targeting?

I see the contrast and opposites in everything.  Satire and irony are a big part of my work.  I just can’t look at Ronald McDonald without seeing green pus oozing from his mouth or Astroboy flipping the bird to all the suckers who forked out money for cheap crappy t-shirts with his face on it.  It’s hard to believe that anyone actually believes the spin and hype that is fed up to us every day, or at least can’t see what’s actually in the motivations behind every jingle or half-price offer.  There’s always an element of preaching to the converted, but I enjoy getting people’s feedback in exhibition situations to arrive at new dialogues and readings that are evident in my work that have different meanings to different people.  I did this painting called "Fuck" a few years ago which had that word written in the style of the "OMO" washing powder packaging, which is really poppy and bright.  At the opening, someone saw it and told me this story about how it was commonplace in the fifties for lonely Australian housewives to put a box of OMO in the laundry window when the husband was out and it was safe for the milkman or plumber to come in for some frisky action.  That reading of how the powder relates to sex was totally not my angle, but such a rewarding exchange when it comes to actually putting the work out there.

Not a Fox News fan, I gather?

Bill O’Reilly is satan.

Some of your earlier work, such as the “Untitled Green Fonz,” shows an influence from Warhol, or at least an allusion to him. In your more recent work, while the pop culture images still remain, your paintings have taken on more of a collage effect, and the tone is especially biting. How have you seen your work evolve over the years?

My earlier work was definitely a lot cleaner and not as busy.  I was really into Julian Opie’s flat use of colour and vector shapes and how art could be made without any kind of obvious relationship to human markmaking which was an element of Warhol’s work. But then I came across graffiti and aerosol paint and I moved more into ways of ‘vandalising’ imagery and icons.  I lived in Tokyo for a couple of years ending in 2004, and the sense of chaos and visual overload that I experienced there spilled straight into my more recent work, and it’s that sense of overload that I find most satisfying in how I reflect my own life and world experience.

Do collage-style paintings represent the direction you are continuing to move toward now?

Yeah the idea of the "collage" is so pertinent to today’s world, and I see a lot of it in art as much as I do fashion, music and the western post post-modern obsession.  I feel like everyone is made up of the most far reaching and disparate of ideas and styles like Frankenstein creations all stitched up and oozing Google pus.

Do your most recent paintings contain characters that you have drawn and created, or are you more interested in using existing characters, like Disney animals?

I appropriate quite heavily, but I’m always changing things around and adding extra eyeballs or legs or huge, throbbing Disney penises.

Why do you choose green for certain people’s faces?

It’s like in Rowdy Roddy Piper’s 1986 film They Live when he puts on the sunglasses he finds in the laneway and discovers that half of the people around him are actually aliens (and all the signs and billboards are by Shephard Fairey).  I mean you can’t honestly believe that Britney is human. I know there’s green skin under all the makeup.

What painting of yours do you feel the most satisfied with?

I really like the body of work I did straight after I got back from Tokyo, but I’m always most satisfied with what comes out of the studio most recently.

You incorporate advertising logos into your work, especially in anomalous ways. You’ll conceal a vagina with the word “Lego.” How do you feel about current advertising methods today?

Advertising is a form of violence.  Our personal space is constantly violated by logos, slogans and insidious jingles that are virtually impossible to escape.  If you take a second right now to look around your current environment, whether it’s your bedroom or wherever, the surface of everything is covered in logos.  Our shoes, our clothes, our tools, even the shape of our food has had millions of dollars poured into its presentation to make us buy more of it and to unwittingly then influence others to join in a collective clan of banal "off the shelf" lifestyles. The Lego symbol over the vagina kind of enforces this sense of violation, a raping if you will of the innocence of where we came from and the homogenization of where we are going.

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In one piece you use the word “Pfizer” where Warhol might have used “Tide.” I am also reminded of Larry Rivers, particularly in the way that popular culture converges with references to the government. And then there is a surreal current running through your work as well. Which artists do you see as influences?

Julian Opie, Warhol, Jamie Reid, Ron English, Robert Williams, all the Judge Dredd/2000AD comic artists – there’s so many artists I’ve been inspired by that I can’t think of right now.  I think deep down it was the tone of the cold war 80’s that was around me when I was really young that had a lot of impact.  Especially the political reaction within art and in comics that wasn’t so obvious on the surface but had this real sense of vitriol towards Reagan and Thatcher and the beginning of the whole Neo Con situation.  Like the tone of the Young Ones, or late Monty Python with Mr. Creosote vomiting in the fancy restaurant.  I think that’s kind of where my creative schooling is from.

There must be artists whose works you’ve grown less fond of over time. I used to like Renoir, but now each time I see one of his paintings, it makes me want to vomit. I mean, that might be a little extreme, but it at least makes me want to dry heave. I guess it’s the result of having had to flip through one too many Impressionist books on other people’s coffee tables. So who makes you want to dry heave, or is at least a little overrated?

I vomit quite a lot actually, just like Mr. Creosote.  I hate artists that are just ripping off other artists. It’s just pointless and I don’t really get how they can live with themselves.  Maybe art niches are so few now that making headway is super difficult – I don’t know.  If I see another Miss Van or another Doze Green or another Giant rip off I’m going to grow a beard and live in a cave.

What has been the most memorable reaction or comment from an audience member that you’ve received about your work?

It’s always good when someone has constructive criticism.  It really sucks when you spend like three months painting a show and then at the opening night people just say "cool" or "great" – even if they hate it.  The best thing is when people take the time to engage with the work and actually give me some sort of response that I can then take with me to keep everything moving in my head and in the work.

Do you look for work that might shock viewers?

Shock value is a tool that advertisers and the media use all the time, so it’s not so out of place I think within art as a way of putting a different message across.  I’m shocked every day, so yeah, I feed that back into my art making process.

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Characters from Bambi appear in several of your pieces, including a painting and sculpture of Bambi in which mini-Bambis emerge from a larger Bambi’s backside. Why Bambi?

Bambi is the ultimate icon of innocence and there’s this weird sexuality mixed in with that innocence.  It’s like all those Disney characters – none of them have any pants on, and theyr’e constantly exposing themselves, but of course genitalia is always missing.  The whole visual system that Disney has imposed is so, so clever.

As with the Bambi sculpture, you seem interested in converting fragments of some of your paintings into sculpture form. How do you decide which fragments get promoted? What helps you decide if a certain scene will connect with audiences as a sculpture?

I’ve moved into the sculptural form to expand the dialogue of my work into new areas.  It became obvious when I started working with Madeleine Boyd (XXZILLA) who constructs my sculptures that really the sky is the limit as far as what can actually be done in translating imagery to sculptures.  "The Self Regenerating Bambi" was pretty successful, and we made two of those, the latest one is the "Fight or Flight Tweety" of which three have been made.

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One of those Bambi sculptures was destroyed when a drunk girl knocked it over, and you had to watch it happen. How exactly did that go down, and what did you say to her when that happened?

Yeah it was so crap, but it was kind of amazing to see the whole sculpture fall through the air in slow motion and smash into 50 pieces on the ground.  I had to take the girl to court to get her to even acknowledge that it was her fault.  Like maybe if she had at least apologized then I wouldn’t have had to do the whole Judge Judy deal.

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I’m curious as to how a parent might react to seeing birds peck at Tweety’s exposed brain. Do you ever get responses from families?

Not really, it’s usually like really old people that get a bit whacky.  I think young kids are seeing this kind of thing every day when they watch their cartoons, I’m just stating it all a little more obviously ..

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What were your thoughts on having eleven-year-old kids play punk rock with
your art as the backdrop?

The Tiny Masters of Today played at the opening – they were awesome.  I couldn’t have imagined a better scenario to have my work on display, which have these elements of childhood and rebellion within it, than to have Ivan and Ada play a few songs within it all.  I did their latest 7 inch sleeve cover which has already sold out in the UK, and having them play at my Brooklyn show (where they are based) was just too perfect.

What role does religion play in your work?

My last solo exhibition in Sydney was called "New Gods", which referred to the mythology of popular icons that have replaced religion, but I have never really used specific elements of religion.  I’m more interested in critiquing the contemporary cults of celebrity, capitalism and oil worship.

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As a final question, tell me about a time when you thought you were going to be killed or you did something crazy that you want people to know about.

I faked my own death in an exhibition in 2000, which is why my website is called benfrostisdead.com.  I sent out with the invitations to the show, these fake newspaper clippings from the the funeral notice section, that said something like "please join friends and relatives of Ben who departed recently at age 24 for a service to commemorate... etc, etc".  Via a strange coincidence, a local Australian art patron died on the same day these invites went out, and there were a lot of upset people saying I was making this sick joke at this guy's expense, which I totally wasn't, which is weird because they ended up being more upset when they found out I hadn't actually died and that it was really just a prank.  The national press picked up on it and it made the whole thing this whacky deal, but it was a cool take on the death of the 20th century and my own state of self renewal at the time.  It was pretty crazy and also the closest I've ever come to dying.

Downloads

Danger of Death- cant take you back.mp3
Danger of Death- die for you.mp3
Danger of Death- now electric.mp3

Website

www.benfrostisdead.com

Photos

Tina Vaden

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