The Assembly
Session 01 · 3′51″Captions available
“You don’t determine how it is presented to you. You take it as it comes, as the person presents.”
You were asking about this painting —
How this painting relates to doing a session, right? When you’re doing a session, you’re presented with the whole dynamic of a person — and then the parts. You have to oscillate between how you receive an organ, a limb, whatever. And you don’t determine how that is presented to you. You take it as it comes, as the person presents.
In a way, it’s similar to doing a painting. You might have some preconception, some vague sense of what you want to convey — but really it emerges through the process, which is similar to a session on the table, working with somebody.
This kind of portrays that assembly: you have different parts, and they can be in different relationships than what would be a classical arrangement. You can have a reflection, like that figure in the buttocks — see that, right there. When you’re working on an organ, or on the brain, you actually get somewhat of a holographic representation of something that’s present in a psychoemotional state, not just an anatomical state. So this is all the things that can happen in a session with a person on the table — but also in the painting.
You see this is made up of a bunch of different panels that get rearranged many times before there’s a final painting. I might even pull from other paintings and switch them out — somewhat similar to when you’re working with somebody and you have the memory and sense of a similar manifestation in a different client: the merging of your experience with the present moment.
When you’re working on a patient, how often do you pull anything from your painting experience?
I don’t think about painting when I’m working on a person. I’m totally just with the phenomenon of emergence — what’s happening with that person at that moment.
How about vice versa?
“When you’re painting, you’re painting.”
Then I try to access it — but it’s not easy. It’s more when I’m looking at a painting I’m working on, and I want a sense of it. But it’s not easy to retrieve, because it’s really a present, emergent phenomenon when you’re working with a person on the table. It’s not easy to parallel that with painting.
Does this have a title?
No, it does not. I have difficulty making titles.
Transcript lightly edited for readability · captions on the film are near-verbatim
Untitled, in ten panels
A figure assembled the way a person arrives: in parts, in a certain order, never twice the same.
Head, torso, hips, feet — and, where the ground should be, possibly a pelvis. The figure is painted across ten separate canvases that Ben rearranges many times before a painting is final; panels migrate in from other paintings and out again. What holds it together is not normal anatomy in relation to gravity, but parts, space, and function of a different order.
It’s the same move he describes on the treatment table: receiving an organ, a limb, a person, in whatever sequence and relationship they present themselves — parts that carry more than their anatomical state.
Does it have a title? — “No, it does not. I have difficulty making titles.”
The yellow painting
A second canvas hangs at Ben’s shoulder through the whole conversation — dark heads and profiles strung across a mustard ground, watching the interview like an audience. It waits its turn in the series.
