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B e n S p i e r sS e a m l e s s R e i n v e n t i o n

In 1992 Jeffrey Deitch curated Post Human, one

of the most important exhibitions of the last

twenty years. In it he addressed what he

identified as a revolution in the way people

perceived themselves and the effect this was

having on figurative art around the world. As

Deitch explained in an interview in 1992, “The

convergence of rapid advances in biotechnology

and computer science with society’s questioning of

traditional social and sexual roles may be leading

to nothing less than a redefinition of human

life…the end of natural evolution and the beginning

of artificial evolution. These developments will

have an enormous impact on economics, politics,

and on virtually every aspect of life… The point of

Post Human is to begin looking at how these new

technologies and new social attitudes will intersect

with art.” Deitch addressed phenomena such as

extreme plastic surgery as a means of changing

appearance, identity, even gender, and the ‘meta-

art’ of performance, pop videos and advertising in

extending the cultural field.

Twenty years later the path Dietch inferred has

become a reality in ways no-one could have

expected. Travel is cheaper than ever and cosmetic

surgery more and more prevalent. Identity is

seemingly less and less fixed, and it is certainly

much easier to reinvent oneself. The internet is full

of websites providing personal and professional

profiles of the subject. Each is a mini-fiction, a

small essay in presentation and reinvention in

which it is increasingly hard to differentiate fact

from fiction, the authentic from the constructed.

This is the world with which Spiers engages in his

portraits, with their questioning of what is or is not

authentic and their exploration of the mismatch

between one’s inner and outer life, appearance and

sense of identity.

In contrast, for the past century the dominant

paradigm for painters engaged with the figure has

been the pursuit of verifiable truths through the act

of painting from life. For a generation of ‘School of

London’ painters, Francis Bacon’s attempt to

capture appearance was the motivating factor, an

aim that led artists, such as Frank Auerbach,

Lucian Freud and Leon Kossoff, to a formidable

focus on the motif before them in the studio,

depicted day in day out for months, years and even

decades. For these artists, as for painters before

and since, the challenge has always been not

merely to record, but to transform appearance. But

each is also acutely aware of the weight of the art

of the past and each body of works serves not only

to emphasise the immediacy of the present, but to

engage with the history of the medium.

by James Hyman

“For me art is about one’s immersion in culture. Thereis a choice about the nature of this immersion, abouthow one responds to precedents and propositions. Somuch is compelling that it’s limiting to be aligned to asingle current. I want to extract what’s useful to me.So it’s a combined vision. This collaging of elements is,for me, the point of creativity. I seek to bring together,seamlessly, different philosophical as well as visualtraditions to create something new…exploring therupture between inner experience and outerrepresentation. I love the idea that I can take a bodythat is absolutely burdened by a kind of overwhelmingcorporeality and yet, simultaneously, invest it with anempathic, complex, perhaps even beautiful, inner life.” Ben Spiers in interview, December 2010

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opposite: Trim

below: Camp

For younger artists the weight of this history can

be overwhelming: not just a precedent of technical

accomplishment, but of fidelity to the subject. But

where some of the most interesting young

painters depart from this, or rather differ from

this, is that, in drawing from the art of the past,

their canon has widened. Their stimuli extend

geographically way beyond Western sources to

encompass Japanese, Chinese, India and Islamic

Art, but also conceptually in their non-hierarchical

appropriation of sources; not for them the bastion

of ‘High Art’ – the preserve of fine art museums –

but instead an equal appreciation of folk,

decorative and graphic art, ephemera and kitsch.

Anything may be used and each source has a

comparable weight. The result is art that is less

about observable fact and the capturing of life and

likeness, and more about addressing the culture,

or cultures, in which we live today.

It is a commonplace that our experience of life is

mediated. It is mediated in a broad sense by our

cultural milieu and in a more specific sense by the

barrage of our surroundings: magazines,

billboards, comics, pop videos, websites. The

range of mediating media is ever-growing. This is

a world in which we may seldom see our friends

and rarely speak to them on the phone, yet

maintain and even increase our intimacy with

them through text message, Twitter or Facebook;

all simulacra for direct contact, whether emotional

or physical. The aim of all these technologies is to

make our lives seamless. One can hear a song,

use an app to identify it, order it, pay for it, and

receive a download within seconds. Gone is the

world of the chance discovery; everything is about

control.

This is the world of Ben Spiers: a world in which

the smooth aesthetic of Photoshop replaces the

dislocated collage of cut-up and repainted

imagery; a time in which music may be seamlessly

sampled, without jerks and scratches; and an age

when a fashion model is photo-shopped to

improve complexion, remove wrinkles, increase

curves, decrease cellulite and this is accepted,

visually, as accurate, not as distortion.

Precedents for this type of activity include Francis

Picabia with his engagement with kitsch; Francis

Bacon with his appropriation of film and

photography; John Currin’s peculiar

physiognomical distortion; and Glenn Brown’s

admiration for science fiction. Yet Ben Spiers’

painting has a peculiarity that is all his own.

Superficially, this is simply the result of his own

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particular tastes and the specific sources that he

has appropriated, but more deeply it is to do with

the way in which he has transfigured and

transposed these various sources.

This is borne out by a number of Spiers’ most

recent paintings. In one of the most sexualised of

Spiers’ recent works, Clamp, a work whose title

embodies this physicality, the sources are wide-

ranging: the composition is derived from a print by

Hokusai that was pared down to exclude props,

setting and genitals. The colour and sheen of the

woman's lips are taken from an image in Vogue.

The skin tone of the female figure comes from a

painting of The Birth of Venus by Amaury Duval

and that of the male figure from Drunken Silenus

by Van Dyke. As Spiers explains, “Like many

artists, I file away elements of other artists' work

in my mind in order to bastardise them in my own

at a later date.”

In another recent painting, the male portrait

Minnow, the pose comes from a Roman statue and

the long hair from a photograph of David Bowie.

Kink is similarly derived from a statue - in this

case from a Victorian sculpture of a female

grandee in the Victoria and Albert Museum – but,

in an indication of Spiers’ openness to stimuli, the

eyes are taken from a famous advertisement for

the computer game, Playstation, directed by Chris

opposite: Minnow

left: Clamp

Cunningham, and the hair from an Art Deco

fashion photograph. Meanwhile in the portrait

Furrow the sampling includes a 1980s glamour

photograph; the jaw of Phillip IV from a painting

by Velasquez; the artist’s own forehead; a scar

taken from a friend; and tears from a photograph

from Man Ray.

What such works demonstrate is the facility with

which Spiers reinvents form, texture, scale and

medium to reconstruct something that is new,

harmonious, whole, yet entirely synthetic. In Trim

the starting point is a Japanese print by Kuniyoshi,

but the references include a jacket found in a

painting by Holbein; a photograph of glass eyes; a

colour combination for the background that comes

from a Barnett Newman; and a cup taken from

William Nicholson.

What Spiers admires in a painter, such as William

Nicholson, illuminates his own ambitions as a

painter. For Spiers as for Nicholson, the mark-

making emphasises the artist’s subjectivity and

engagement with the process of painting. In each

case the imagery is not enough; what matters is

the way that the artist makes it his own.

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Above all, what matters for Spiers is the

transfiguration of material, not just the

presentation of a cultural product. His paintings

illustrate the way that the act of painting allows

the artist to introduce his own sensibility and

thereby to make the subject his own. The

message, then, is ultimately hopeful. For in

addressing directly the age in which he lives,

Spiers ultimately finds something positive beneath

the artificial surfaces and endless fluidity: an

inviolate, individual spark of life that lies within

each of us, whatever the external changes.

As Spiers, himself, has commented, “For me one

of the measures of a successful painting is that

incongruity is seamlessly whole. I can't buy into or

enjoy paintings which attempt to bring together

disparate elements, but fail to knot them together,

or that do so in a glib way. For me painting has to

be more than simple collage or just a pick and mix

of juicy pre-existing cultural signifiers. You have to

grind imagery through the mill of your

subjectivity, to re-inhabit, colonise and weave it

into a transfigured, new constellation. Yes, we live

surrounded by images, yes, our experience of the

‘real’ is always mediated, but, without the

desperate hope and determination to stamp things

with the mark of our inner-reality, we are doomed

to solipsistic repetition.”

Ben Spiers. Recent Painting runs 10 February – 5

March at James Hyman Fine Art, 5 Savile Row,

London, W1S 3PD. Telephone: +44 (0) 20 7494

3857. www.jameshymanfineart.com

opposite: Spell

left: Ben Spiers