Benedict Carpenter van Barthold—Artist in Residence
“I began thinking about one's own self after life — when you stop being a human and become an object — and started trying to make work that plays with that numinous, fundamental, unhuman objecthood, all the while being human.”
Meet Benedict Carpenter van Barthold, this month's Artist in Residence. Continuing from our conversation on artificial intelligence from earlier this month, we dove deeper into Benedict's practice, where he explores the deep, non-human meaning found in the unknowable intelligence of objects through sculpture and illustration.
Imprimo: Circling back to earlier, you mentioned you wanted to be able to incorporate generative AI in your workflow wherever possible. Have you started incorporating the tools we have available today into your workflow? If so have you had any interesting results?
Benedict: I have started to play around with them. And at the moment, I’m still acquiring the skills I need to be able to do that well. But I’m at the point where I’m able to produce images, which are — up to a certain point — kind of like the drawings I do. It’s not perfect, I don’t think it’s powerful enough yet, but it gets close. It has enabled me to see my work differently. I’ll give you an example. I generated a load of images, based on this still-life series. And it was like getting a fresh pair of eyes on something that I was doing because, while I’d never seen the images that it was producing before, I could recognize that there was something about them that was distinctively in “my style.” And I could see that the AI had pinpointed something about the way the shadow was being held around the forms that I thought was interesting. Then I looked at my original drawings and thought, I’ve never noticed that, but that’s something that I do that I wasn’t conscious of.
Benedict Carpenter van Barthold, 2007
Imprimo: Your artist statement on your Imprimo profile stuck with me — “It's funny how the appearance of a thing and its reality rarely seem to coincide. I am drawn to those things where this gap seems largest. I have a feeling that they know something that I don't, and that can only be glimpsed sidewise but never known directly.” Am I intuiting correctly that this is a comment on the nature of perception? Do you find honesty in this ambiguity?
Benedict: I have had a feeling since I was a boy that certain objects possess a type of knowledge or awareness that is inaccessible to me. That they seem to have access to a kind of reality that I don’t have access to. I get the same feeling from really great art. There’s an amazing Zurbarán painting in the Prado — a still-life of some vessels — and I mean, it looks like a really prosaic, quotidian image but it has this amazing otherworldly presence. It’s so loaded with a kind of intelligence that I can’t even begin to understand. I can feel it, and I find it really moving, and actually very upsetting. Being in front of it in the flesh was a bit harrowing, and I can’t explain why.
All of the things that I mentioned earlier in our conversation, about the embodied experience of painting or sculpture, and the irrationality of great art, can only happen because humans are social creatures and art is a human story. But also, that same humanity cuts us off from some things, because you can’t stop being human. So while I’m not an animist, I do think there’s a kind of meaning in the world which is not human. So every once in a while — and I’m quite aware that none of this stands up to rational scrutiny — but I get this sort of feeling that, say, this boiled egg has got a life that’s completely separate from me. At least until the point where I eat it, and then probably, you know, it doesn’t (laughs).
That experience started coming out unconsciously in my work. When I recognized it, I became more interested in it. It took me to all sorts of strange places. I began thinking about one’s own self after life — when you stop being a human and become an object — and started trying to make work that plays with that numinous, fundamental, unhuman objecthood, all the while being human.
Francisco de Zurbarán, 1633
Imprimo: I know you said you’re not an animist, but the concept of objects having a life or a ‘soul’ outside of us, is a core tenet in a lot of Eastern religions — Shinto comes to mind.
Benedict: I’m sympathetic to that. You get the same set of ideas in object-oriented ontology, a philosophical movement that came out of new materialism, but some of the authors in that area have gone to an animistic place. But just to circle it back a bit, I think that there’s something about my interest in non-human life that runs parallel with my interest in AI, because that’s human-adjacent, but still quite removed from the intelligence that we possess.
And yes — to answer your previous question — there is honesty in the ambiguity of objects. Absolutely. They’re ambiguous because we can only see them from the human side. But at the same time, the non-human permanence of the object — that it was there before I was, and will still be there after I’m gone — means there’s a kind of arrogance in assuming that I could see them in any way which is fixed or accurate or true.
Imprimo: It begs the question, how do we capture the truth of anything that exists outside of our linear perception of time, and reality?
Benedict: Sometimes I think we do see that in art, some artists have been able to capture something of that. Whether I’ve been able to do that or not, I wouldn’t comment. But I’ve seen that in other artists’ work, and it’s something that I really respond to.
Imprimo: One of the pieces on your Imprimo page that I keep finding myself drawn back to is Universal Object. It seems both futuristic and prehistoric, and no matter the angle I look at it from, it rejects what I want it to be. You really couldn’t have titled it more accurately.
Benedict: I wanted that piece to be an exercise in that kind of rejection of naming. I wanted it to be impossible to pin some kind of name to it. People have a very strong figurative impulse — like that game of seeing shapes and clouds.
Benedict Carpenter van Barthold, 2005 & 2001
Imprimo: Or faces. There’s a word for that.
Benedict: Pareidolia. Yeah. I wanted to stimulate that, but then frustrate it over and over again.
Imprimo: In my opinion, you succeeded. Is that something you play with often in your work?
Benedict: I mean, a fair bit. I created a series of artworks based on Rorschach inkblots. And then there was the sequence of works that Universal Objects is part of. One of that series is called “Portrait of a Monkey,” even though it doesn’t resemble a monkey, and another is called “Four Fingers,” which has four antennae-like structures that aren’t remotely finger-like — they were all made with the same intent to reject naming. That series is quite game-like and playful.
After that, I moved on to simpler and less playful work, and I started working towards pieces like Cloche, which is a bell shape — really, really simple. It’s hollow, and when you put it down it will enclose a space, and you can never really know what that space is like. So it’s a much less playful version of the same thing. In that work, and in other pieces I was making around the same time, there’s something a little bit deathly about them, whereas Universal Object, Portrait of a Monkey, and Four Fingers were like young bacteria that haven’t properly arrived.
Benedict Carpenter van Barthold, 2011 & 2012
Imprimo: What artists living or dead would you most like to meet for coffee?
Benedict: I think he'd probably be awful, and I think that he would probably smell a fair bit as well because I understand that his personal hygiene wasn't great, but Michelangelo. What do we really know about him? Wouldn't it be great just to be able to ask him some questions?
Imprimo: Is there an unlikely skill you've acquired in terms of your art?
Benedict: Probably talking. I'm quite introverted. I don't like parties, and I don't like meeting people very much. One of the reasons I think why I felt so comfortable in art school is because you could just make work and have entire weeks could go by, and you wouldn't have to talk to anybody, which was hugely attractive. The production of art doesn't end once you've finished making it. The kind of meaning generation around it, which I alluded to earlier on, is so valuable, and that happens with how you write about your work, how you platform yourself, and the conversations you have with collectors, and curators.
Through the process of having critiques and the experience of having exhibitions and speaking to journalists and collectors, I got better and better at it. And I think that conversation is a large part of the generation of meaning. And, you know, I do love language as well. I mean, I think, to go back to that answer, I love the ambiguity of meaning. I love the fact that you can say something really, really definite and concrete, and still be misinterpreted. I love that kind of slippage of meaning as well as its creation.
Imprimo: The next two questions come courtesy of our previous Artist in Residence, Samantha Williams-Chapelsky.
Samantha: What artist inspired you in the beginning and do they still inspire you today?
Benedict: I can remember being introduced to William Blake's work when I was about 10, and it blew my mind. There was nothing stuffy about it, and it spoke to me directly — even if I didn't know what it was saying! I still really like Blake's work, and also Samuel Palmer, that metaphysical, darkly romantic sentiment still has massive appeal and interest for me.
Samantha: What is your least favorite part about being an artist? And most favourite?
Benedict: I really like it when I find someone who wants to acquire my work, but I am still uncomfortable asking for money and translating the value of my work as art into a number. So, I'd love an agent, if anyone's reading! The best bit of being an artist for me is discovering something I made a while ago and thinking: 'that's not too bad'…
This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity
