↳ Exhibitions

Benjamin Crotty at VI, VII

December 26, 2016

Artist: Benjamin Crotty

Venue: VI, VII, Oslo, Norway

Date: October 14 – December 18, 2016

Photography: Vegard Kleven, all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and VI, VII, Oslo

VI, VII is pleased to announce its first show with Paris based filmmaker Benjamin Crotty—his first solo exhibition in a gallery setting.

Crotty studied figurative painting at Yale University followed by film at Le Fresnoy – Studio National in northern France. He left school with an esthetic penchant for the banality of American domestic standards (the family included), bucolic landscapes, military iconography, the conventions of episodic TV and the idle sense of time inspired by the viewing of soap operas.

Since leaving the Fresnoy, his work has been focused on 16mm narrative film, including Visionary Iraq (2009), a queer family melodrama about the Iraq War, made together with Portuguese-American filmmaker Gabriel Abrantes, where the filmmakers play father and mother, as well as son and adopted daughter in love, and Liberdade (2011), a love story set in Angola. Fort Buchanan (2014), the filmmaker’s first feature film, again looks at war through the lens of domestic melodrama, focusing on sexual frustration and down time spent on a woodland military base.

Following the line of these films, Division Movement to Vungtau (2016), made in collaboration with French artist Bertrand Dezoteux, derives from a similar obsession with the prosaic side of militarized life, using material sourced from the US National archives to offer a “reverse shot” of US army abuses and excesses. The duo has reworked previously unedited, 16mm footage casually shot by American soldiers stationed in Vietnam during the years 1966-68—swimming in rivers, driving tanks, and receiving Holy Communion in an impromptu jungle mass—down to seven short vignettes. Each of these now portray the fictional adventures of a group of anthropomorphic fruits during an unspecified 20th century American military mission abroad—four fruits in a tropical theater of war.

Walking a line between home movie, experimental film and propagandistic documentary, Division Movement to Vungtau diverts the viewer from the idea of war as an uninterrupted continuum of violence, aligning itself more closely with psychedelic cultural production for children of the Mary Poppins (Robert Stevenson, 1964) and Bedknobs and Broomsticks (Stevenson, 1971) variety. In this genre of 20th century film conflating animation and live action, humans and cartoons promiscuously mix in an alternate reality where their formal differences are simultaneously underlined and discarded. While the short, 30-second duration of the vignettes and their iris shot transitions are the heritage of silent film and animated shorts, the photo-realistic render of the 3D fruit “skins” and the fluidity of their movements— the result of motion capture—are a perverse nod to the contemporary obsession in Hollywood and advertising with attaining total virtual representational verisimilitude.

Re-imagining the lives of these soldier-cameramen and their fruit companions in a faraway tropical land, the recreated images unseat actual knowledge of historical fact and awareness of geo-militaristic concerns, substituting the nonchalant viewpoint of a spectator-child.

Joining these vignettes, the series Presidential Menus series is the result of the same détournement of ostensibly sober source material, also borrowed from the National Archives. In it, records of meals eaten by former American President Harry S. Truman are on display, occupying a space between historical document and the poetry of every day life. Accompanying America from the dropping of the bomb to postwar prosperity, Truman’s menus reflect mid-century aspirational culinary culture—growing increasingly lavish and sophisticated from year to year—in addition to showcasing his personal tastes.

In these works, it is not so much American history, the Vietnam War or the White House that interest the artist as the bodies and organic functions of those that produce that history: a group of soldiers enjoying a dip under the tropical sun, a president of the United States preferring this fruit to that for his dessert. While Crotty’s work is profoundly cinematic, the dramatic action is located in the interstices of daily life, the blind spots and furtive moments captured by records and devices, be they a White House typewriter or a 16mm camera.

Benjamin Crotty (b.1979, USA) is a graduate of Yale University, and the Fresnoy – Studio National in Northern France. His work in film and video has been shown in numerous international film festivals such as Rotterdam and Locarno; on regional television in the United States, national television in France, and in institutions such as the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Centre d’Art Contemporain de Genève, the Palais de Tokyo, Palazzo Grassi and Tate Modern. Crotty’s first feature film, Fort Buchanan, was debuted at the 2014 Locarno Film Festival and had its US premiere at the MoMA / Film Society of Lincoln Center’s New Directors/New Films Festival in March 2015.

His work was included in a retrospective Friends with Benefits: An Anthology of Four New American Filmmakers at the Film Society at Lincoln Center, New York in February 2016.

Benjamin Crotty, Menu No. 3, 2016, (Meals eaten during the presidency of Harry S. Truman), Acetate and glass, 30.5 x 23.5 x 0.3 cm (12″ x 9 1/4″ x 1/8″)

Benjamin Crotty, Menu No. 15, 2016, (Meals eaten during the presidency of Harry S. Truman), Transparency film and glass, 30.5 x 23.5 x 0.3 cm (12″ x 9 1/4″ x 1/8″)

Benjamin Crotty, Menu No. 2, 2016, (Meals eaten during the presidency of Harry S. Truman), Acetate and glass, 30.5 x 23.5 x 0.3 cm (12″ x 9 1/4″ x 1/8″)

Benjamin Crotty, Menu No. 6, 2016, (Meals eaten during the presidency of Harry S. Truman), Acetate and glass, 30.5 x 23.5 x 0.3 cm (12″ x 9 1/4″ x 1/8″)

Benjamin Crotty, Menu No. 4, 2016, (Meals eaten during the presidency of Harry S. Truman), Acetate and glass, 30.5 x 23.5 x 0.3 cm (12″ x 9 1/4″ x 1/8″)

Benjamin Crotty, Menu No. 5, 2016, (Meals eaten during the presidency of Harry S. Truman), Transparency film and glass, 30.5 x 23.5 x 0.3 cm (12″ x 9 1/4″ x 1/8″)

Benjamin Crotty, Menu No. 1, 2016, (Meals eaten during the presidency of Harry S. Truman), Transparency film and glass, 30.5 x 23.5 x 0.3 cm (12″ x 9 1/4″ x 1/8″)

Benjamin Crotty, Menu No. 10, 2016, (Meals eaten during the presidency of Harry S. Truman), Plexiglass and transparency film, 29.7 x 21 x 1 cm (11 3/4″ x 8 1/4″ x 3/8″)

Benjamin Crotty, Menu No. 12, 2016, (Meals eaten during the presidency of Harry S. Truman), Plexiglass and transparency film, 29.7 x 21 x 1 cm (11 3/4″ x 8 1/4″ x 3/8″)

Benjamin Crotty, Menu No. 9, 2016, (Meals eaten during the presidency of Harry S. Truman), Plexiglass and transparency film, 29.7 x 21 x 1 cm (11 3/4″ x 8 1/4″ x 3/8″)

Benjamin Crotty, Menu No. 11, 2016, (Meals eaten during the presidency of Harry S. Truman), Plexiglass and transparency film, 29.7 x 21 x 1 cm (11 3/4″ x 8 1/4″ x 3/8″)

Benjamin Crotty, Menu No. 7, 2016, (Meals eaten during the presidency of Harry S. Truman), Plexiglass and transparency film, 29.7 x 21 x 1 cm (11 3/4″ x 8 1/4″ x 3/8″)

Benjamin Crotty, Menu No. 8, 2016, (Meals eaten during the presidency of Harry S. Truman), Plexiglass and transparency film, 29.7 x 21 x 1 cm (11 3/4″ x 8 1/4″ x 3/8″)

Benjamin Crotty, Menu No. 13, 2016, (Meals eaten during the presidency of Harry S. Truman), Plexiglass and transparency film, 29.7 x 21 x 1 cm (11 3/4″ x 8 1/4″ x 3/8″)