An Outtake from BOMB 103, Spring 2008…

In BOMB’s Spring 2008 issue, painters Steve DiBenedetto and David Humphrey discuss their studios as prosthetic rooms—extensions of the artists’ personalities—authentic fictions, dirty optics, and the hum of existence. Read the below outtake on matters of faith.

 

Steve DiBenedetto, Transmission, 2006, charcoal pencil on paper, 26×40 ¾”. Courtesy of the artist and David Nolan Gallery, NY.

 

A Question of Faith

David Humphrey I’ve never seen you, in your work, exercise the degree of faith under which you could render one single thing as an icon, and say, Here it is.

Steve DiBenedetto You’re right. I was working on that painting, and I thought, Am I entering my Gestalt phase or something?

DH Well, you’re a father now, maybe that had something to do with it.

SdB No. I don’t think so. (laughter) The kid is awesome, there’s no doubt about it: Lucio is a genius. And I do, of course, reflect on the fact that I’m in this position, but I have no idea whether it’s influencing the work.

DH I’m being speculative and fucking with you a bit, but, there’s a change, and it seems to coincide with this new condition…within a mythology of fatherhood in which the towering corporate headquarters has some bearing.

SdB I’m all for things having a covert, or subconscious reflection. But I’m not conscious of it.

DH I don’t want to force the issue, but these paintings are resonant with an opaque, patriarchal, phallic, authoritarian discourse.

SdB Well, there is a horizontal in there. (laughter) That one entertains the notion of a horizontal skyscraper. If the mega-vertical skyscraper is the spectacle of reaching for the heavens, and I believe, an extension of some weird collective thing about leaving the earth, then the horizontal version must be one of those giant, twenty-mile, underground particle accelerators.

DH That’s a beautiful mirroring, in each there’s a reaching for knowledge and abstract experience. You’re exercising a science fiction imagination in which the biological and technological are fused.

SdB Intuitively. Terrence McKenna as an anthropological science fiction. I do approach the absurd, the paranormal and the hallucinatory from a skeptical point of view however.

DH I tend to be the debunker, the person who needs to know, to reassure myself of a rationalist, materialist account of experience, but I acknowledge that it’s just as psychologically fraught as being a gooey believer.

 

Steve DiBenedetto, Untitled, 2007, oil on linen, 72×118”. Courtesy of Kevin Noble, NY and David Nolan Gallery, NY.

 

 

Read the print edition interview of Steve DiBenedetto by David Humphrey in BOMB 103, Spring 2008, now available on newsstands. Subscribe today and receive your FREE copy!