Barton lidice benes biography channel

Audio Description of
Talisman
by
Barton Lidice Beneš

Fifty blue and white beads are strung on a thick green cord arranged in a circle about five inches in diameter, forming the shape of a necklace. At the bottom of the circle, in the same green color as the cord, there is an upside-down V-shape that resembles a knot in the cord, with the two ends of the cord hanging down. The necklace form is centered along the vertical axis of a thick, rectangular piece of white paper and slightly higher than the paper’s horizontal axis. The paper’s edges are torn. Although the pattern of the tearing is irregular, it almost resembles a scalloped border. The paper is mounted on top of a white surface that is just slightly larger than the scalloped torn edges. A ruled line in graphite runs across the paper’s lower edge, extending nearly to the left and right edges and leaving about two inches of blank space between the bottom of the necklace and the graphite line. On that line, the title, artist’s name, and date are written in neat, legible cursive: Talisman, Barton Lidice Beneš, 1994.

On closer inspection, the blue-and-white beads reveal themselves to be medicine — fifty identical capsules, carefully positioned so that the same printed information is visible on each one. Above the blue line on each capsule, there is a black unicorn with tail curled over its back and one foreleg lifted and just below it the word “Wellcome” (with two l’s). Below the blue line, two rows of numbers and letters — “Y9C” over “100.”

The capsules are clustered in symmetrical groupings. Immediately to the left and right of the knot, there is a cluster of six; next on either side is a cluster of five; after that, two clusters on each side of four; around the upper part of the necklace, there are four clusters of three capsules each. The blue line that bisects each capsule lines up with the blue line

Barton Lidice Benes
November 16, 1942 - May 30, 2012

I got an email from the brother of my friend Barton Benes, informing me and other friends that Barton died this morning at NYU Medical Center. It wasn’t a surprise; Barton had been very ill and when his kidneys began to fail last week he made the decision to stop further treatment.

Death was familiar to Barton, as it is to so many gay men of our generation. Familiarity breeds a certain matter-of-fact acceptance. Barton endured the loss of his partner, Howard Myer, and innumerable others to AIDS (including Jeffrey Schaire, the mutual friend who introduced us).

Barton absorbed death into his work as an artist, exploring loss, mourning, grief and release through sculpture and collage, often cleverly exploiting our ingrained fear and revulsion at the unthinkable and inevitable fate from which none of us will escape. POZ’s Laura Whitehorn said if she were to compare Barton to a poet, it would be to John Donne, “who played with death throughout his work and made it a lover along with an enemy, thus allowing us to live more fully.”

For more than 20 years of our friendship, on Barton’s dining table there was always a small pile of pottery shards, each pasted with a piece of a photograph of a deceased friend. Most died from AIDS. The pictures are carefully torn from casual snapshots to fit the shape of each shard. They show happy, serene and beautiful faces, photographed at moments of joy and peace, even ecstasy. The first few times I visited Barton he sorted through the pile slowly, holding each one in his hand for a moment. He told me the stories of each friend, what they were like, what he missed about them, the circumstances of their last days. It was through his recollections of those friends that I learned Barton’s own life story.

Later, as more shards were added to the ever-growing pile, they were usually people I knew as well, including a number of former POZ contributors and

NEW YORK — Barton Lidice Benes, a New York sculptor who worked in materials that he called artifacts of everyday life, expanded his definition of everyday as he went. He used the everyday mementos of childhood in his early work, and later made sculptures from chopped-up, everyday US cash (purchased already shredded from the Federal Reserve).

When friends started dying of AIDS, and Mr. Benes tested HIV-positive, he began working in everyday materials of the epidemic: pills and capsules, intravenous tubes, HIV-infected blood, and cremated human remains.

Mr. Benes, who died of acute kidney failure on May 30 at 69, created a body of work that was ­exhibited internationally and included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and the ­Smithsonian Institute.

His work dealing with the AIDS epidemic was acclaimed for its raw approach to death. Some of it was so raw that he had difficulty finding art galleries willing to show it. Among his best known works, though it was never exhibited publicly, was his collection of memento mori filling his 850-square-foot New York City apartment and studio from floor to ceiling: thousands of artifacts like tribal masks, animal skeletons, taxidermy, religious relics, voodoo dolls, and a stockpile of celebrity ephemera. He called it ‘‘my tomb.’’

The North Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks, which in the early 1990s showed controversial artworks of his that no other galleries would, plans to build a replica of his apartment and furnish it exactly as Mr. Benes left it. Among its objects, many of them macabre, are a blackened human toe; a giant hourglass holding the mingled ashes of two of Mr. Benes’s friends, partners who died of AIDS; a gallstone removed from his friend Larry Hagman, the actor; and a stuffed giraffe’s head.

‘‘Everyone thought I killed it,’’ Mr. Benes said of the giraffe in an interview last

Barton Lidice Benes, “In Memory of Barton Lidice Benes”

Umeå, 8.6–28.6  2013

New York-based artist Barton Lidice Benes grabbed the attention of the art world by incorporating items from his vast collection of objet trouvés in his distinctive collages and cabinets. A master of transformation, he turned the forsaken and rejected into poetic, colorful illuminations of life. During the 80’s, as his friends started dying of AIDS and Benes himself tested HIV-positive, the everyday materials of the epidemic made their way into his work: pills, tubes and infected blood, even the ashes of cremated friends. The somber and personal themes, combined with his Dadaistic sense of humor, always made for relevant and life-embracing works of art, which unveiled cultural taboos and pushed boundaries in such a charming manner that no one could disregard it.

The starting point for Benes’ collecting frenzy was a trip to West Africa in 1971. An initial contact with a few anthropologists and archaeologists, gradually led to a worldwide network of friends and fans, sending him random oddities to expand his collection of relics of the past and the present: a piece of Saddam Hussein’s palace, a thread from Mikhail Baryshnikov’s ballet shoe, Sylvester Stallone’s urine, a blackened human toe, jelly beans from the Oval Office, Larry Hagman’s gallstones, a piece of Elizabeth Taylor’s shoe, one of Hitler’s spoons and shattered glass form the car that brought Princess Diana to her end. Items which used to fill Benes’ Greenwich Village apartment and studio, floor to ceiling. All labeled with white tags in his signature loopy handwriting.

Sadly, Barton Benes left us on the 30th of May 2012. He truly was a great artist, and even greater person – a collector of curiosities as well as of loving friends. As a longtime member of our gallery family, he will be truly missed and forever remembered. The exhibition is our farewell to him, or perhaps a ‘see you later’.