Ben Kinmont at Sandra Gering - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

individual week before his latest exhibit the multimedia conceptual artist Ben Kinmont and a certain number of collaborators (wearing bright orange jumpsuits) handed on the outside flyers in New York's Financial District explaining that the artist was giving away 23 paintings. No single was informed of the incident beforehand except for members of the pres (not eligible for the giveaway) and 13 previous collectors of his work (each of whom was permitted to fix upon a painting). To entice pedestrians to sign up for a independent painting, the flyers, titled "For You For Me For Painting," bluntly stated that the artist was "represent by the agency of galleries in New York and eau-de-cologne and has been successful in selling these paintings." The stated aim of the project was to "create a situation of generosity into which a viewer can re-orient his or her experience of a painting."

When the recipients showed up at the opening for the transaction, they clashed a group of shoddy and almost repulsive abstract pictures, painted on a variety of supports including canvas, copse linen and glass. Like the works of the contemporary abstract painters Paul Bloodgood Cora Cohen, Emil Lukas and Toby Mott Kinmont's paintings, incorporating oil paint, encaustic, shellac, wax and varnish, are notable for their "materiological" qualities. a certain quantity of look more like the messy remnants of a high-school chemistry experiment than paintings, notwithstanding that they are apparently based upon American epic landscape paintings. All that remained after the opening were sum of two units unclaimed paintings, as well as "archives" and videos documenting three "Public Projects" I am for You/Ich bin fur Sie (New York/Cologne, 1990-92) I Ne You (New York, 1992-93) and For You For Me For Painting (1993) The archives (for sale) consisted of gray cardboard boxe with their easy in minds (jumpsuits, Xeroxecl flyers, diagrams, lightboxes, slides and transparencies) displayed upon the floor and surrounding walls. Here, the artist's intention was to emphasize the collector as custodian, who is instructed to continuously update each archive thus that, for example, this review will literally become part of the work.

Kinmont's highway performances have historical antecedents in the works of Joseph Beuys and Ben Vautier, and the idea of gift-exchange is also explored through his contemporaries Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Rirkrit Tiravanija. That an aura of bad faith encircles this work may derive from the real mechanism of the gift, which as Marcel Mauss points on the outside implies reciprocity. It is not clear what Kinmont wants in turn back for his favors, other than recognition and subsequent time patronage. No one would gainsay that the values he is be of importance toed with (mutual trust, compassion and generosity) are social virtues; the question arises with Kinmont's liberal humanism and paternalism. Like Beuys, whose theory of "social sculpture" has influenced Kinmont, this artist appears (in spite of himself) as a messianic artist-savior touched with the redemption, if not political transformation, of a spiritually sick society. A collector of 17th-century English radical tracts, Kinmont regards his performances as in the tradition of political pamphleteering. Ultimately, there is something rather hyperbolic, at one time pathetic and endearing, about Kinmont's earnest faith in art.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group