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About Henry Banger Benvenuti

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Once upon a time…
There was a man, in white and black, and so thin that on his edge, he could cut light, colours, the shapes of night.
The nights he haunted then, the New York nights, with all those shooting stars crossing downtown, in that wild, that dangerous time: the Eighties, East Village, NY.
Yes he collaborated on canvas with his compadre Jean Michel Basquiat, and yes, the beat poet Gregory Corso did a drawing of him. He was from that strange aristocracy, that poem, that uncompromising voyage to the edges of some truth, some life, some art.
The difference with him is that he was there long before, and long after. He survived. And he painted. All along the way, under the radar, he has given us a sharp, formidable story of these times. Leaving thousands of images in his wake, everywhere, in galleries, private collections, forgotten in basements and attics.
Wherever he was, in comfort or in misery, in New York in Paris, or in Toronto, he painted. He couldn’t be anything else. ~ jean francois vallee

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the story about giving my colleague, the great artist, Jean Michel Basquiat his first gallery showing.

it waz early January 1980 and I was walking up 2^nd Ave and somebody called out my name.  Banger, …yo Banger”. I saw Samo sitting on a blue mailbox and went over to him. i said, “hey, Samo”, and he asked what i was doing. I told him I was curating an art exhibition for January 22nd titled “A New Decade In Art”. i said it would be at the Nonson Gallery on Wooster Street. I then said, “I know you do graffiti but do you paint?  He said “ya”.  I asked him, “when can I come over to see?  He said, “Come over tomorrow”.  He gave me the address at 570 something east 12^th street.  I said, “hey, I live on that block with my lady trixy”.  He said, “its near ave B”.  I said, “I know coz I live on the corner of ave. A on the south side”, and told him I’d be there about noon.  He told me to just walk in the front door up the steps and it’s the first apartment on the right, there’s no door buzzer and the front door is boarded up but just push the wood aside.  So, the next day at noon, I went down the block and into the building, it was abandoned, up the stairs and knocked on the first apt. on the right.  He answered the door.  He was alone.  I followed him in to the front of the building.  It was a railroad apt.  I said, “wheres your work?  He pointed to one, it was an old found tv set with figures painted all over them.  I said, “perfect, kool, ya have any more?”  He showed me two more pieces painted on cold press illustration board.  I said nice and went up close and touched one, it was still wet, I thought to myself , “oil”!  “Are these oil?”,  I asked, he said, “no acrylic”.  I laughed to myself cause I thought, “I bet he just did em”.  “That’s all you have?” I said. He said  “ya”.  I said, “I like them bring them down to the gallery tomorrow, but they have to be ok’d by the gallery owner.  He brought them to the gallery the next day and George Staples the Gallery owner liked the tv.  I then told him that I have to write out the details for the invitations and he gave me the title and we measured the size.  I then wrote Samo as the artist and he abruptly stopped me and said,  “no, no don’t write Samo write Jean Michel Basquiat”, I said, “What?”.  I laughed and said, “you just turned into a painter and now your turning French on me.  He laughed and said, “no Banger, I’m part Haitian”.  I said, “how about if I write Jean Samo?”  He said, “ok”. The rest is history…

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BANGER, UNUTTERABLE & PRIMITIVE DANDY

                                       

                                                             by Charles Dreyfus, Paris, 1998

 On a knife edge, Banger affirms the indefeasible and indomitable intransigence of individuality.  He remains one of the rare people who follow the new kind of aristocracy depicted by Baudelaire, “…all the more difficult to be broken because it is based on the most precious and indestructible abilities and on celestial gifts which neither money nor labor can award”.

  Here we are in front of  one extemely refined taste that has no hold on moral or utilitarian aims. Banger conceives his commitments to painting as the action of a person who takes part in life itself :  a baker whose subtle alchemy cooks a quality bread as his life long desire.  He is like the painter Whistler who claimed a value not for the finish of his paintings but for what he had himself become, for the refinement of perception and sensibility he had achieved to embody.

When in 1977 he arrives from Pittsburgh to New York City (as a student at the Art Students League), he immediately imerses himself in the punk scene of the Lower East Side – as means of subsistence, he is a seller in a $3 punk clothing shop.  He then tries rather unsuccessfully, to instill some intrest for the arts to his musician friends.  He deluges with his paintings every club of the punk trend, Max’s Kansas City Chick Peas, CBGB’s, Mudd Club etc.

in 1978 he curates the first punk no wave art exhibition in New York, with Joey Ramone, Debbie Harry, as the lead artists. A mixed media event he showcased artists of various mediums from Fashion, Music, Painting, Sculpture, Video, and Installation. Art critics consider the show just one more rock party. Intransigent and fiery, he can hardly stand the stuffy art world, still and serene. a year later confronting  an art critic  on the state of the art world he was snubbed. He then severs two of his fingers from his left hand at the reception desk at the art critics newspaper office. And while his accomplices achieve their famous careers, Banger continues his instinctive vehemence that borders to orgies of expressionist lack of restraint.

Too much in advance, he tries in 1980 to liven up the conceptually quiet world of Soho galleries. He co-curates a  group show that breaks the cherry of Jean Michel Basquiat, showing his work for the first time in a gallery.

Like Matisse he starts by cutting up colored papers. However Banger uses ‘photo imagery’ instead, giving them shapes (which he considers primitive) in the instant ingenuity of great speed.  For him, the line of the photo cut can speak : he can express through it the heartrending scream in a dialogue without distance nor delay.  The paper persecuted by the ferocious slash of energy establishes the slaughter of resolutions and finds a new and unusual beauty.

In Florida of the year 1988, he falls victim to a serious auto crash.  Convalescing in Paris, he feels himself restored to life with friends. Among them Agnes b. who aknowledges and respects his complete refusal of being a gear like other ones. The allegory of variegated harlequin, Picasso’s favorite alter ego, is close to him.

His organic, multiple and primary necessity assumes today in his art the aspect of a painting containing cut ups from magazines.  The glossy paper sends him back his social reflection he has to resist to, in order not to be trapped by the infernal mechanization of the image in this contemporary world.

So, he is obliged to move backward to a kind of primitivism, rather than finding himself in a corner among a heap of data.  Bangers untamed hope moves away from dandy’s inert arrogance, as they were in the last century. He starts from the delicate environement to detect in it, at all costs, the appearance of a soul.

He quests for himself a heartfelt generosity to see things clearly, not much valued in our times.

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Washington Post

Mutilation: The Artist’s Angry Message

By Paul RichardNovember 29, 1979

“First he put the phone down, then he swung the ax,” said Donna Frost. “Nobody screamed. He didn’t make a sound. You can still see where the blade cut into the counter. There wasn’t much blood, just a few drops.

“He left behind a rat trap with a dollar bill in it, his briefcase and his hatchet.

“He walked out of here so calmly that I thought it was a piece of theater — until I saw his fingers lying on the floor.”

Henry “Banger” Benvenuti was an artist with a message: He was tired of the runaround. At 11:30 on Monday morning he walked to the reception desk of the Soho Weekly News where Donna Frost, who works in the newspaper’s advertising office, was standing. He asked to speak to the art editor and telephoned him from the desk phone.

“He told me,” said the News’ art editor Gerald Marzonati, “he wanted ‘to rap about the art world.’ I told him, ‘Look, man, I’m right on deadline. I’m finishing a column. Leave your number, I’ll call you back.’

“He said I was ‘just like all the other art editors,” and that he’d leave a message at the desk. Then he hung up. I didn’t see him chop off two of his fingers with one swing of his ax.”

“There’s a guy here called Buzzy,” Marzonati said. “He was great. He picked up the fingers right away — they were the fourth and fifth fingers of his left hand — and wrapped them in ice and put them in the icebox. Then he called the cops. We hoped the doctors could sew them back.”

But after he was taken to New York’s Bellevue Hospital, Benvenuti told the surgeons that he did not want them to reattach his fingers. The doctors say their patient “is not acting irrationally.”

“He was speaking to the world,” says his roommate Lenny Ferrari. “He did it for all the artists who don’t have the clout, the connections, who can’t come up with the payola. He wasn’t depressed or anything. He did it as a sacrifice.He said that he was acting ‘in the name of art.’

Benvenuti’s scarifying message apparently was delivered with sincerity. But how was it received?

Were he not an artist, Benvenuti might be thought just another nut, but there are pain-filled mansions in the house of art, and Benvenuti’s gesture puts him in a grand tradition. Think of Van Gogh’s ear.

Body artist Chris Burden, a famous artist, shot himself with a pistol and cut himself with glass. Conceptualist Vito Acconci locked himself in a box. cMarcel Duchamp shaved his head. Washington’s Yuri Schwebler, in a similar gesture, once shaved his whole body. Yves Klein once hurled himself from a building to express the void. Rudolph Schwarzkogler and Gina Pane slashed themselves with razors. Lucas Samaras once bound his head with string. Arshile Gorky killed himself, so did Oscar Bluemner, Van Gogh and Mark Rothko.

“Artists using their own bodies as their primary medium of expression is the most significant artistic development of the 1970s,” wrote curator Ira Licht in the catalogue accompanying the “Bodyworks” exhibition held in 1975 at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

“I saw Henry right before he did it — and in the hospital right after,” said Ferrari, the artist’s roommate. “He said, ‘Of course I didn’t warn you. You’d have talked me out of it.’ He didn’t seem at all unhappy. He said he felt no pain. He’s a very giving human, a very spiritual person. He goes to communion every day.”

“It’s true he put on the first new wave art show in New York, but that was last year. It’s true he dyed a red streak in his hair, but that ‘s because he thought of himself as a painting.

Ferrari, who has known Benvenuti since their childhood in Pittsburgh, is a drummer who has played, he says, with “15 New York new wave bands.” At the Mudd Club — a Lower Manhattan dance hall which advertised that while Johnny Thunder plays there with his new band, Gang War, “Johnny will be closely watched at all times by Motor City bodyguards with auto-accessory weapons” — a photograph of Henry “Banger Benvenuti by William Coupon was displayed on the wall for more than a year.

“Henry is a very responsible individual,” says George Staples, the New York art dealer in whose Nonson Gallery Benvenuti has worked and shown for the past three years. “Henry is very dependable. He makes collages and assemblages. He’s working on a movie. The art we show here isn’t decorative. It’s shocking. It’s intimidating. Sometimes it’s threatening. It isn’t easy art.

“Henry is deeply concerned about the art world. He feels, and I agree, that the media ignore the new artists. You don’t review them, you don’t take them seriously, you don’t even come to see their work. Henry truly cares.

“I saw him in the hospital. I asked him, ‘How do you feel?’ He said. ‘I feel really great.’ He was satisfied with what he’d done.”

At Bellevue, the surgeons and psychiatrists tried to talk Benvenuti into permitting microsurgery, but the artist procrastinated. When he finally agreed, it already was too late. “We’ve just been able to sew up the two stumps,” a hospital spokesman said.

“Henry comes from a really nice family,” said Ferrari. They’re gracious, religious people. He studied at the Pittsburgh Art Institute, at the Carnegie-Mellon University, and at the Ivy School of Art. He’s the most productive artist I’ve ever known. Right now he has maybe 600 pieces. He cares about people, he wants to see world peace, he’s sorry for the bums. Listen to this. This is from Henry’s diary. It’s a poem about our neighborhood, the Lower East Side: . . . My world is full of bums Whose smiles are full of toothless gums: The lower East Side. Give me a chance, Mr. Businessman . . . Beauty is only skin deep Can’t you understand, creep? My puke stained clothes Are worn to show I’m on skid row. Help me change my way, Searching for a new day, Honest, I’m OK.

poetry

DOCTOR ART

HE OPENS YOUR MIND TO THE INVISIBLE
WHILE HE HANDS YOU A MIRROR

HE SPEAKS IN TONGUES
AS HE ENLIGHTENS THE DARK

CONCOCTING A FEAST
FOR MALNOURISHED MINDS
HE FILLS A SOUL ON EMPTY

HE ENSHRINES A MOMENT IN TIME
WITH SACRED UTTERANCES AND OLEANDERS

SOME SAY HE’S AN ASCETIC
NO ONE KNOWS FOR SURE

HE PRESCRIBES HIS TRUTH SERUM
IN HIGH DOSES

AND SPLITS A LOG IN TWO
SETTING ABLAZE THE DRIEST PART

SEEKING PRAISE
HE SEEKS NO OTHER PAYMENT

DOCTOR ART WHO ARE YOU? “I AM” REPLIED A VOICE FROM THE DEEP!

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collectors

David Cronenberg, Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello, Diana Osana, Agnes b., Gregory Corso, Nicholas Helion, Jean Michel Basquiat, A-One, Sharon Gless, John & Joanne Rooney, Jake Woolworth, Michael Woolworth, Gigi Woolworth, William Coupon, J.P. Morgan Chase Bank, Stephen Lack

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works