While doing some art installation, I was introduced to Ben Foch’s work at the old Hyde Park Art Center, where he meticulously painted a small section of their old school moulding. I imagine it is probably still there, along with some disheveled office supplies, tangled phone chords, and defunct desks. The vibrantly painted moulding just sort of hovered there, surrounded by white walls and white ceiling.

Conrad Freiburg: How is your project The World typical of your art-making practice?

Ben Foch: Let me first say, it is project-based. I often work in a series, and it is usually related to a specific project. I do this because I like to think about a situation that presents me with a type of problem, and to complete the equation with a response. The World Project is such a response. The Hyde Park Art Center (HPAC) approached me to contribute to their Not Just Another Pretty Face (NJAPF) exhibition, a development on the traditional benefit auction, where they pair artists with patrons under the loose theme of portraiture, playing on fine art’s historical role in a previous era. I was eager to participate because it presented a very interesting problem: Being an artist in the contemporary world, how does/could my practice relate to this model/relationship? For this project, I decided I would create a map of the world, with each country as its own individually-shaped panel, each available for sale at a ratio of 1 USD to 1 Billion dollars worth of GDP/PPP. In this sense, it is then an economic portrait of nations, and it also allows the participants to draw their own portraits through the process of its consumption.

This piece relates to my practice as a whole in that it affords me the opportunity to reflect on themes consistent throughout my work, particularly ‘active historical narratives’, the effect of the historical avant-garde and the artist’s relationship to a “ruling class” and the role, if any, ascribed to artists working today.

Quickly, I would like to draw one tangent connection, that being: the global market economy is the system that tore at the fabric of this traditional relationship which allowed for the avant-garde. Thinking of this, I was led to a high-end real estate project in Dubai. That project functions two-fold (perhaps three- or four-fold) but at least two-fold in that it operates as a type of portraiture both collectively, illustrating humanity in general, and individually by tracing the motives latent in specific buyers purchasing/desiring specific islands.

Here we can see how my ‘World’ project again relates to my general practice, in that I am utilizing a non-linear system, pointing towards that system and beyond the object and beyond the mere social (in the 1970s minimalist object type of way), towards a reality pictured through an economic lens.

CF: In this sort of feedback loop you have articulated, you are cleverly capitalizing on the way we as a world economy measure our relative status through GDP. You have scaled down the money to such an extent that it is approachable for a person to buy a country, or for a rich person (or a company, for that matter) to buy the world. I think one of the funniest things about your project is that it capitalizes on the buyer’s desire to own the world, like some cartoon of a Napoleonic evildoer out to rule the world. But if this microcosm is a path to reality, does it follow that in reality we all have some sort of little hand-wringing world dominator inside of us?

BF: Yes. It is scaled down. However, the ratio of the scale down must also be considered. As objects, these panels have no intrinsic value. Value is abstracted and symbolic. Two panels of equal size can have extremely different values and their relationship to their source is … well, merely symbolic. Japan is tiny. Yet, it is valued over 4,000 dollars. Uzbekistan, physically a lot more substantial of an object, is priced much less, a little over 100 dollars. We could draw political implications, however, a viewer could also see this process in this context as very democratic, even socialistic, in that there is something for everybody. Anybody can participate.

Now, in terms of portraiture and individual motivations, variation is virtually infinite. Who knows why people will purchase what they purchase? Maybe they think it is simply a good deal, maybe they want to support the Art Center, maybe they like my idea, maybe their grandparents were born in Ireland, or maybe they just like the shape of Venezuela. It is possible that they have world-dominating fantasies, but I think they are in for a rude awakening if this is their means of indulging it.

CF: At the risk of oversimplifying, am I correct in my understanding that The World Project is a portrait of the following process: market economy leads to an avant-garde which is seen properly only through a market exchange. In your equation, can “global market economy” be substituted for the historical “ruling class?” It appears that instead of making a portrait of a fancy bedeckled lady of silk and lace, you are making a portrait of the economic system that rules us.

BF: To define “avant-garde” and discuss the historical avant-garde here is difficult, but I will say I perceive the rise of a global market economy as the demise of the avant-garde, in that its support both literally and symbolically depended on the hegemony of a class which lost its power to this new system, with new rules and values. Support of culture is no longer obligatory or a result of position and responsibility, but rather one of utility and market speculation. You cannot have a purely formal object in this new system. This status is always checked by its invariable exchange value. The nature of this new system denies us this narrative. Even if it was a fictional narrative in the past, it was still believable. In our contemporary environment, the ability to suspend disbelief has been lost.

However, I like the idea of entertaining the notion that a new type of avant-garde could be bred under these new conditions. The reality of that picture is enticing indeed!

CF: So, to deal with our contemporary problem of our disbelief (in an advance in culture for instance) we must accept reality . . . but which one? Many make claim to separate absolutes. Where is the center of the real? It seems to me that one can choose a reality in which to believe and so we are back where we started, i.e. in oppositional or at least relativistic belief systems. Or alternately, is what you are delineating in this discussion the reality of the de-centered, the absolute reality of disbelief? In this floating world, to what does one’s anchor hook?

BF: I hope that The World Project can allow for subjective interpretation within an objective framework. There is a foundation of the modern narrative, in that this piece “is what it is.” Its parameters are as clearly defined as in an Ad Reinhardt painting. However, the reduction is not a paint brush size, grid division of a square within a limited color palette, but rather a reduction in an economic system and the social production that ensues. I hope an audience perceives this as a conscious attempt on my part to explore/push the means of this type of artistic application/investigation.

I often give an example of this type of shift by relying on two hypothetical works of art, the modernist black square and the minimalist grey cube. If the former gives birth to the latter, and the latter gives birth to the social via context, I suspect the social to be extended by the economic structure that underpins it and the next vestige for logical formal exploration.

Interestingly, this puts us square in the middle of the “fusion of art and life” and a potential for the return of avant-garde values, i.e. distance from utility, in that the structure that reduced formalism to an economic function may in turn be formalised within this extension of artistic production. This is the cusp of that picture I found so enticing.

CF: Beautifully enticing indeed! Woven through this discussion are many theoretical references which require a focused exploration – your hypothetical propositions of black square to grey cube as an example. We might not be able to unpack those bags for this format, but I would like to shift the focus to this problem, if there is one, of the necessity of at least acknowledging that luggage. As usual, much remains unsaid. Somehow your project maintains an object making practice within a philosophy that calls to broaden the context of a definitive object (the shape of a nation state, for instance), to explicitly include its everyday economy. The World as art project is an acute point through which to enter our daily experience of the world as a geographic marketplace. This special point of entry seems most readable to those versed in the historical trajectory you are plotting. For my part, I have an impetuous fear of going too far into the art historical ether, for fear of distracting the off-the-street audience from the joy of looking. Basically, the object inspires a thoughtful curiosity that can lead the viewer to the truly interesting fundamental ideas proposed. I acknowledge that there is a joy of the theoretical/historical, but frequently it requires the propulsion of a formal object. For you, where is the balance the object and the idea? And how might this balance shift with the audience’s level of awareness of the historical context?

BF: Ah! The great form vs. content conundrum. This is a difficult question to answer in any definitive way without sounding presumptuous. I think there is always a gap to be bridged, with integrity on one side and compromise on the other. For me, all I can do is do what I do. I try to not be too bothered with who is going to like or not like something, or over who is going to “get it” or “not get it.” I’ve resigned myself to the fact that individuals have little control over these questions in the world at large. I just do what makes me happy.

CF: Well put. If there is nothing else you would like to clarify at this time, perhaps we should let the good readers move on. Thank you for taking the time for this conversation. I look forward to seeing your work.

For the curious, Ben Foch’s The World will be on display Oct. 18, 2008 – Jan. 7, 2009 at the Hyde Park Art Center (5020 S Cornell Ave, Chicago), as part of their Not Just Another Pretty Face exhibition. www.hydeparkart.org

by Conrad Freiburg