Lori Gordon

Curatorial
Hush Hush

Ben Guttin
Dancing in my studio (or Dance like me)
video [2005]

To the clogged artist, creation seems irrational. It’s end result, the work of art, seems corollary to a wild animal, completely outside your control. Inside your studio, it’s skittish refusal to yield to your entreaties and reveal itself, reflect your failure to create a fortifying environment. Work germinates in recesses of mind we cannot access at will. The completed work of art presents itself to the artist and the viewer in the same Athenian way, something fully grown at first sight, something born perforce the wild longings that thrive under the silence of a near motionless mind. The processes we ply are illusive, most of all to the maker.

In Ben Guttin’s “Dancing in My Studio (Dance like Me),”a man faces a camera. More specifically, a maker gesticulates wildly amidst his wares. He wears the wry smile of a sad and fractious self-awareness. There is no sound. He is surrounded by a panoply of past work. Absurdity abounds, but an insidious, constrictive absurdity. Most notably, a pastel painting of a bird hangs above him, his steely talon around his own throat, suffering a self-inflicted silence.

The studio is a place of incantation, where the maker practices at creation, waiting for the great work to create itself. But creation will not be domesticated. And it’s refusal launches the artist into despondency. He may look into the mirror, and suspect he is on the other side, waiting for the original to make a move that he can mimic. He feels himself to be a forgery. This is the first sign that he is not. Ben Guttin reinvents reflection, rendering it a generative act. The artists looks into his studio, and this inward gaze begets endless self-invention. He dances before the camera, sensing that if he simply pours enough energy into that vessel of introspection, it will eventually overflow, and this outpouring will form a tour-de-force. It’s funny, but long after the audience has lost the faculty of laughter, the comic continues cracking jokes. Like most comedians, he’s got a terribly serious sense of humor, begging the question: “how long must I continue to act?” The answer comes in the form of a seemingly interminable dance: “until acting feels natural.”

Lastly, Guttin knows that when a work of art relents, it is to superhuman energies. And he expends himself accordingly. All good artists reach a certain stage, where they refuse to create banalities, but they cannot cease to create. In a darkened studio, past accomplishments collect like graves. The question is, “what do you do?” In the dark, in your studio, in your mind - strings of meaning continue to construct themselves like cabalistic sentences, but they lack the pretense of sense, or relevance. And yet, there is still this human thrust to construct meaning. And so you dance.

Exhibition Text: Kendra Sullivan