Bio

the means of coercion make those on whom they are applied clearly visible” (Foucault, pg171). This coercion brings to mind the term “small town mentality”. Individuals, which become part of this small regional culture, a society within a society, begin to feel trapped within it’s regulations, rules and belief systems. They feel they are not an applicable part in any other system. To be accepted or successful, they must adhere to the micro physics of this system.

To grow up on a farm is to learn the rigors of a strict work ethic. Much of this work ethic incorporates great physical labor and believes that rewards are often equal to the effort put forth. This system is rooted in a long tradition of farmers and laborers in my neck of the woods. It has supported generations of families.

Art is not seen as a profession within Paris, Kentucky, it is seen as self-serving. If the objects you produce don’t have a utilitarian use to the community, they are quite literally seen as “not useful” to the culture or family except in it‘s power of solidifying a memory for that particular individual. Therefore, to gain value or acceptance within the community, an artist’s practice must show transparent signs of skill, labor and this work ethic. This causes me to ask “Who makes this judgment?” “What are their qualifications to create value?” “How do they get to be in a position of creating value?” “From where do they get their power?”

I was trained in basic representational sculpture; and in the traditional mediums of clay, bronze, stone, and wood work. As long as the work represented what I was sculpting and went through the transformation of traditional materials it was justified as “Fine Art”. The knowledge of our surroundings, the ability to reproduce physically what was seen, and understanding what materials were accepted in the art world became the defining credentials of a successful artist. The art was more about carrying on in a tradition as opposed to questioning those expectations. Personal expression and expectations were to be ignored. To practice anything other than physical representation was an unworthy or selfish practice where expectations of the community were valued over the self.

Throughout my undergraduate experience, I continued to follow this restrictive direction of representative figurative sculpture. I knew that this practice was fueling a facility for the future that I could use to my benefit. However, through independent projects, I began to explore new possibilities and new solutions to my creative processes. Research in Art movements after World War I began to give new enlightenment on what could be considered as art. It finally seemed viable to pay attention to what my own consciousness was considering as art. Dadaism and Surrealism became a tool to justify my new exploration of alternative creative methods.

After I got married, graduated and had kids, my art alone could not support my family. I realized I had an obsession with creating stuff and thought manual labor and pipe welding fabrication could feed my passion as sculpture did. In this fashion, I could make a living through physically useful and culturally acceptable means of fabrication, and at the same time supply a natural obsession to create. Depression set in, and the specter of creative processes began to creep.

After I realized that basic industrial fabrication did not feed my passion for creation, I tried to understand why. I began to see myself as some kind of visual prophet. I felt that my thoughts and visions were important enough to share with the masses. I felt the need to tell a story or teach society something through my creations. Visual communication was indeed my calling.

As I began the process of creating a portfolio to apply to graduate school, my undergraduate mentor spent a lot of time with me. We had many conversations during those obsessive events of all night art making. One conversation in particular haunts my mind still today.

My Professor started by saying, “Ben, you have been one of the most impressive students I have ever taught and truly believe you have the talent to move on, but I don’t want you to get depressed if you are not accepted to some of these schools on your first attempt.”

I followed with, “Why?”

He answered, ”Well it is a shot in the dark to who is excepted to these schools. You never know what they will consider as “Fine art.” We don’t have the power as artists, the critics do.”

After this conversation, I began to think back to all that I had been taught. For five years I had been told what was accepted by the art world as success, and in the end, I questioned the possibility of conforming to the traditional world of art making. Through this experience came the birth of my fascination with power…who obtains it and how it is obtained. Was power something I could research and possibly learn to manipulate?

In general, I thought power was a certain object that could be possessed and used. I saw power as an emotion within, that I could use to express myself, to justify my natural ability and intelligence obtained throughout my life. However, the introduction of Michel Foucault’s research opened my eyes to other possibilities.

Foucault’s work focuses, not on power as his general theme, but through what mechanics the individual subject is affected by power; a kind of suppression upon individual status within a cultural constraint. Power is actual1y a label given to parts of society that explore, break down, and rearrange the human body to better fit standards set in culture. So power was a label given to a system, not a singular object. Power was interlinked to society’s created system of knowledge. “ The Historical moment of the disciplines was the moment when an art of the human body was born, which was directed not only at the growth of its skills, nor at the intensification of its subjection, but at the formation of a relation that in the mechanism itself makes it more obedient as it becomes more useful, and conversely” ( Foucault, pg138).

Through these interpretations I thought I had found the definition of the differences between, what I call, objects and artifacts. However, it still did not seem right. Finally, I found an answer through my mentor Michael Minelli during graduate school..

When I created artwork, I thought that the content I produced must be universal or seek to answer a timeless question within our society in order to be useful or successful. I did this by producing figurative work that mimicked the masters; that met the standards of “beautiful” or historically validated artwork. However, this style of art making became too personal and at times seemed to only make sense to me; no one could read the messages. This made the work no more conceptually valuable than the stainless steel pipelines I was fabricating for produce preparation. If someone walked up to me when I was putting in pipelines they would have no clue what it’s job was unless they asked or I told them, the same case was apparent in my sculpture. They both were only objects to the viewer.

During graduate school, I remember a private critique I had with Michael Minelli. Walking up to the three bronze pieces I had produced, he looked over at me without moving his head, took a deep breath, exhaled and asked, “What are you doing?”

I went into an extensive amount of rambling about each specific symbol in each piece, and gave my full effort to help Minelli see how clever each visual sign was. Minelli smiled, walked around each sculpture, opened his mouth to speak, paused, and began to slowly circle the work once again. Finally, he put his hands on his hips and said, “Why are you doing these now, in graduate school? You can do these after graduate school and make money doing it, but you’re not pushing your boundaries, you’re depending on your ability to sculpt.”

He paused for a minute, looked at me, and I looked at him. He continued, “ I understand all of your references, but how many people do you think will have the knowledge of the references? Must each viewer be expected to know this information to interpret your work? And why are you trying to tackle all these universal questions all the time, why put that kind of stress on yourself? Why don’t you just try to concentrate on your region? Think about your hometown, your farming, driving tractors, shooting bottles or whatever redneck shit happens in Kentucky. I want to know about your experience as an artist, not what you know about other artist’s experiences.”

Minelli followed his comments with, “ Hmm..think about it.” and ended our session with a pat on my back.

For the first time, it was obvious what I needed to do. I had to concentrate on power/knowledge relationships within my time, my region, and my culture. My sculpture was not meant to be an artifact now, but in the future.
The artifact would come from my own personal experience of power/knowledge relationships, not all of mankind‘s experience with it.

After focusing on Minelli’s critique of my work, Foucault’s theories of breaking down power/knowledge relationships within culture began to make sense. However, the answer seemed too easy. Is it possible that the origins of power simply come from the system of knowledge?

In his book, The Order of Things, Michel Foucault looked at how man became the object of knowledge. He does this by taking the Renaissance, the classical era and the modern era, and unearthing each period’s “a priori.” The “a priori” is a grid of knowledge which organizes scientific discourse and defines what can or cannot be translated scientifically. Foucault wanted to find the underlying codes of culture. He labeled this type of investigation “archaeology”.

“Archaeology”, in Foucault’s terms, is the excavation of what renders essential a certain form of thought. Foucault ignores history and concentrates on impersonal structures of knowledge by analyzing each period’s “episteme.” An episteme is the subversive network which allows thought to organize itself. The episteme limits the totality of knowledge and truth, and governs each science in one period.

The Renaissance episteme was made up of four modes. The first mode is convenience, based on resemblance proximity, which relies upon resemblance. The second was emulation. Emulation was similitude within a distance. The third was analogy, which was the resemblance of relation where man was the center of the world. The final mode was sympathy. Sympathy was the resemblance of anything to anything else in universal attraction. The Renaissance believed god placed a signature on all things. This signature was hidden, and man gained knowledge through interpretation not observation.

The Classical episteme came into effect once the Renaissance modes of resemblance collapsed. Knowledge was no longer established by guessing, but by setting a specific order. This new system of order was constructed by analysis which was influenced by Miguel de Cervantes’s story of a knight named Don Quixote. Quixote was thrown into a world of reason based on identities and differences where his own analogy of signs and similitude’s confuse his judgments of windmills with mystical creatures. With the birth of analysis opened the age of judgment to man. Knowledge was now established through measurement, classifications, and order. This is when language began to be seen as transparent. Signs were no longer placed upon material things, and were a tool of knowledge signifying definite certainty.

The Modern episteme transforms order into a system of history, and finds man as the historical subject. It is through man’s body, values, and norms that make available the contents of empirical human life. Man’s system is now based on economy, biology, and the dissection of language. Language is now an object of knowledge.

Since modernity is based on constructing levels of order, modern societies constantly protect themselves from anything that could possibly disrupt order, and the maintenance of those in power. With this understood, it is fair to say that modern societies depend on establishing a binary opposition between "order" and "disorder," so that they can establish an absolute or perfect "order." In western culture, this disorder becomes "the other,” a term adapted by many feminist and minorities to describe the unjustifiable means they are forced to abide by. It is possible the theory of “the other” may include spirituality, faith or a belief in the fantastic, however, do not confuse this with religious organizations.

Foucault describes a passage from Borges of ``a certain Chinese encyclopedia'' that breaks up all the ordered surfaces of Western thought in the modern era. The encyclopedia divides animals into the following categories: ``a) belonging to the Emperor, b) embalmed, c) tame, d) sucking pigs, e) sirens, f) fabulous, g) stray dogs, h) included in the present classification, i) frenzied, j) innumerable, k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, l) et cetera, m) having just broken the water pitcher, n) that from a long way off look like flies”. What this taxonomy reveals is that there appears to be a culture that does not distribute the multiplicity of existing things into any of the categories that make it possible for us to identify. Here Foucault touches on a profound physical point. The impossibility of the information of the Borges encyclopedia is the impossibility for a certain thought to think different in itself with no relation to identity. By unearthing the latent grid of knowledge which organizes every scientific discourse and defines what can or cannot be thought scientifically. Foucault is trying to find the historical and fundamental codes of our culture. Foucault was beginning to see that scientific knowledge was linked to power rather than truth.

Logic itself is seen as a mere social construct. Reason, logic, and the scientific method are all constructs of a new social religion. They can be seen as just another form of scripture; a possible way of looking at the world.

Therefore, is power really defined by knowledge? Does knowledge lead to power or initially show weakness in our frail systems of rules and regulations? Sometimes I think it is a curse to become educated, and to absorb so much knowledge. The more we learn, the more weaknesses we seem to become aware of in each individual culture. We begin to create an awareness of the unobtainable, the fantastic. Does power actually lay in the bounds of the fantastic? Therefore, does the entity, institution or individual who thinks they can tap into this realm and offer an explanation explain to the masses of the enigmatic gain this power? Is this why religion and science have so much power in our culture? Is it within our search for the un-knowable, un-answerable or un-obtainable that we discover power? Are the variety of related and seemingly unrelated representations (be they god, science, fear or cultural manifestations of that power?

I had now found a direction for my art.