Ben Young was born in 1973 in Amersham, England to an American mother and a British father.  He lives and works in San Francisco and London.

Nationality: American/British

 

HAPPY NIHILISM April, 2011
It’s a good time to be a nihilist; when nothing makes sense in art or in the wider culture. If we are indeed going through what Kierkegaard and Nietzsche called a ‘levelling’ process, in which belief in any human construct ultimately becomes a reductio ad absurdum – the real nihilism of sectarian religion or of a decadent, bourgeois art that stands for nothing, then it is time to step back from the fray and watch the fire burn itself out.
These new paintings are assembled under the convenient banner ‘Happy Nihilism’ with the occasional nod and wink in the direction of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. But more than the Gewicht of German philosophy, these works hopefully point to that free spirit, the happy nihilist who stands outside the burning citadel and looks the other way.

 

MEANING OUT OF CHAOS

Meaning out of chaos

Singularity out of proliferation

Passion as opposed to apathy

Activity as opposed to passivity

The individual as opposed to the mass

The unique against the mass-produced

The irrational as opposed to the rational

The subjective as opposed to the objective

Living flesh and blood as opposed to virtual reality

Storytelling as opposed to downloading

Resistance to power

Difference

Ben Young, London, February 21st 2010

 

 

My Crisis
Art for me works on many different levels. First and foremost it’s a visual language, the language of the subconscious. The subconscious speaks in images. I believe that art is a way to access the depth of our being in a way that was once much more easy and natural for us to do but over the centuries we’ve lost touch more and more with this spontaneous ability to return to our primordial, interconnected selves. In our day and age art serves other functions as well, including the creation or expression of beauty – what we lack in our lives we must replace with art. I believe that the very first art, the cave-paintings, was made as a way of resolving the anxious tension in ourselves. As our ancestors became more self-aware, more self-conscious even, it bred anxiety because we realized our true place in the physical universe, which was, and is, almost total insignificance. Only in the non-physical, metaphysical, mythical universe, the universe of art, could our lives have any real significance – and that is just as true today. When we try to find meaning for our existence purely in the material world something profound is missing.
Through my art I am trying to find a meaningful location in the metaphysical world for me, for I am man. Something primitive is going on here. I am trying to make sense of my place in this alien culture, for although I grew up in it, it doesn’t make sense to me. The culture we live in is inimical to the truly creative life – probably because we’ve simply forgotten what it’s like to truly live. With the waning of religion in the West – and religion has for millennia been one of the ways of accessing that profound, interconnected, metaphysical realm – there has been a corresponding decline in our knowledge of ourselves. We do not need these old religions for we have clearly outgrown them – this is a good thing, but perhaps we need a new religion. I tend to agree with Jonathan Meese when he says that art should be the new religion. My art is full of the signs of decay and crisis but also of possible ways forward. I read the news, I read the signs and I digest them and then shit them out. The shit is many different colours and quite beautiful. I paint with this shit. Why are we so afraid of shit? Shit is fodder for new life!
My art is about me and my place in this alien and disfiguring culture but ‘I’ am symbolic and therefore universal. A universal truth can be found in my crisis.

Ben Young, New Year’s Day, Berlin 2010

 

 Metaphysical Paintings

These are metaphysical paintings.  Look at the surfaces.  Something is being scratched away to reveal inner workings, hidden truths.  Appearances are being stripped away. There is a questing movement with these paintings.  They are a snapshot of a search; a stop along the way through the dark night of the soul.  Nothing has been fully resolved and the destination has not been reached but there is a trajectory towards a goal – self-knowledge.

I would be happy to be part of a movement that defined itself in opposition to the last 20 years of art which has been too clever by half – just like the clever but dishonest financial system that underpinned the global economy during the same period.  People tire of clever lies eventually.  In art, as in consumer society, there has been a clever, conspiratorial hoax for far too long.  Art as expensive baubles for the rich.  This is not a new accusation but it is still valid.  If art is always, whether it likes it or not, a reflection of the society in which it is made, then the art of the last 20 years has accurately reflected the truth of the avid collectors, curators and consuming public of that time.  We made decadent, over-hyped, cynical art.  Times have changed.

My paintings are a search for some kind of truth, however fleeting or marginal.  The truth of a lonely, mixed up individual sitting by the side of a canal at midnight in the middle of winter in London.  Truth is real because it is that which you cannot escape.  In my paintings there is truly a search for authenticity – against the grain of postmodernism.  But look in the dumpster – there lies the body of Late 20th Century Consumer Capitalism wrapped up in the works of Baudrillard, Bourriaud & Art Forum, killed by a monitor fallen from an abandoned Matthew Barney installation at the sadly recently foreclosed MoMA.

 

Ben Young, Berkeley, March 16, 2009.