Background

Ethnicity: Barton Lidice Beněs's father was a son of Czech immigrants.

Beněs was born in Hackensack, New Jersey, United States, on November 16, 1942. He was the son of Marie and Richard Benes. Beněs' father gave him his middle name in memory of Lidice, a Czech town, which was destroyed by the Nazis in 1942. After his parents divorced, Barton Beněs stayed with his mother.

Education

Barton Lidice Beněs resided with his grandparents in Brooklyn, New York. As a teenager, Beněs was a member of the American Olympic speed skating team, while smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. It became clear around 17 years old that Barton had a flair for the contradictory and the romantic. He would often walk around the city barefoot saying “I thought it was romantic to be a pig”.

Between 1960 and 1961 Beněs was a student of Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York. Around this time Benĕs sneaked out and went to a gay bar named New Colony. While spending time there he was commissioned to complete an installation for customers to view. After being hired for his first piece he was given a job designing window installations for New Colony. While working for New Colony he met a man named Howard Meyer.

Career

Benĕs was contracted and put on his first exhibition "Leather and Lace", a show involving him tied naked to a upholstered leather table, which took place in 1969. He was then changed when he travelled to Africa. While in Africa his views of art evolved towards a preoccupation with Africa’s tribal culture, artifacts, and erotica.

After his trip to Africa, Barton Benĕs works became increasingly more contradictory during the 1970s and 1980s. Around this time his aunt Evelyn that was interested in the stories of Barton’s life in New York wrote letters ranging from 50 to 60 pages. Later Barton Benĕs turned the letters into small intricate books. However, when Aunt Evelyn became informed of what her letters were being used for, she threatened to sue Benĕs and immediately stopped all communication with her nephew. Later Benĕs attempted to reconnect with his aunt but his efforts were not successful.

In 1986 his friend Howard Meyer was diagnosed with Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Benĕs with AIDS. In three years, Howard Meyers died from his illness. This was a difficult time for Benĕs as he watched his lover pass. Barton says that "When he died - it’s crazy but true - I saw the energy leave his body ... And I got on top of him to grab the energy." For the first time since Barton Benĕs was diagnosed with AIDS, he had an artistic impulse, turning his emotions into an artistic experience. Benĕs began to use his friends and their memories as mementos in his art pieces.

On one evening in 1990, he cut his hand while cooking dinner. Being used to fact that his blood is toxic he rushed for bleach. But before retrieving the bleach, he started to focus on the artistic aspect, considering that his blood contained a dualistic meaning. He began a series of pieces titled "Lethal Weapons". It was a collection of 30 vessels, including a water pistol, a perfume atomizer and a set of hollow darts. They all were filled with the artist’s or other people’s HIV-infected blood.

This series was shown in 1993 at the North Dakota Museum of Art without incident. "After we announced it, I think we had one woman write us a letter," Laurel J. Reuter, the museum director, said in an interview. "After we talked to her about the art, and why it was important, she came to the opening."

"Lethal Weapons" was also presented in Lund, Sweden, but not before Mr. Benes agreed to let the authorities heat the installation to 160 degrees Fahrenheit in a hospital oven to make it safe for public viewing.

After his diagnosis, Barton became an advocate for the destigmatizing of AIDS. Between 2003 and 2009 he served on the board of Visual AIDS. His work dealing with the AIDS epidemic was acclaimed for its raw approach to death. Some of it was so undisguised that he had difficulty finding art galleries willing to show it. Among his best known works, though it was never exhibited publicly, was his collection of memento mori filling his 850-square-foot Greenwich Village apartment and studio floor to ceiling. It included thousands of artifacts like tribal masks, taxidermy, animal skeletons, religious relics, voodoo dolls and a stockpile of celebrity ephemera. He called it "my tomb."

Achievements

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  Barton Benĕs was one of the leading artists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Beneš came to prominence during the 1980s with his whimsical constructions of shredded currency and later with his signature "museums," gridded arrangements of relics from Ancient Egypt to Hollywood. He transformed fragments of our throwaway culture into art. It sometimes addressed taboo subjects and often used unconventional materials including cremation ashes, shells, bodily fluids, currency and shredded money, relics, celebrity artifacts and found objects.
  
  Beneš's apartment in New York contained a collection of over $1 million worth of African, Egyptian, and contemporary art, as well as his own. In 2012 the interior of his apartment, including his shadow box museums, was relocated and reconstructed at the North Dakota Museum of Art, under the guidance of his colleague and friend Laurel Reuter, director of the museum. The exhibit opened in late 2013 and was called Barton's Place.
  
  Beneš was also featured in numerous documentaries about art, gay history, and AIDS, including Lovett Productions’ Gay Sex in the 1970s. His work has been displayed nationally and internationally at The Cleveland Museum of Art; The Katonah Museum of Art; The New York Public Library; North Dakota Museum of Art; and Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as Centre Pompidou, Paris; Boras Konstmuseum, Sweden; and Old Town Hall, Prague.
  
  His artworks are in the permanent collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, The Smithsonian, The United States Mint and North Dakota Museum of Art. Beneš is represented by Pavel Zoubok Gallery in New York City.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Curiosa

    (Barton Benes imbues mundane objects with the mystical pow...)

    2002

• collage

  • Money Matters

    (Selected Part of Letters from Aunt Evelyn)

  • Safari

  • Leftovers

  • Gram of Picasso

  • Venomous Rose

  • Lethal Weapons: Essence

  • Afghanistan

  • Reliquarium

  • Botanica (Flowers)

  • Petit Fours

  • Par Avion

  • Graffiti III

  • Letter from Aunt Evelyn

  • Smorgasbord: Italy

  • American Pie

  • Barton Lidice Benes Mixed Media Work

  • Ribbon

  • Essence

  • Nest Egg

  • Transubstantiation series

• sculpture

  • Cojones III

  • Cojones II

  • Letters From my Aunt Evelyn Anita Bryant

  • Untitled (Maroon Handbag Book)

  • Untitled (Cigarette Butt Book)

  • Untitled (Book with Safety Pin)(Les Misérables)

  • Untitled (Sold American Book)

  • Untitled (Book and Paper Cutter)

  • Untitled (Necktie Book)

  • Untitled (Yellow Book with Rope)

  • Untitled (Barbed Wire-Bounded Book)

Connections

Barton Lidice Beněs had a romantic affair with Howard Meyer.

References

• Barton Lidice Beněs Art by Barton Lidice Benes.
  1986
• Barton Lidice Benes: Master of Disguise Book by Doreen Dippre.
  1985