BEN ALTMAN / The More That Is Taken Away
August 30, 2023 – January 19, 2024
The More That Is Taken Away is a meditation on mass violence and what it means to inherit such histories. A nine-year solo attempt to come to terms with historical evil, it takes place at a mass-grave-like excavation behind the artist’s home in rural upstate New York. It is an evanescent memorial and a performance, a cycle to catastrophe and back. Begun in late 2011, work at the site largely concluded in 2019.
Header image: Year Four, November #12, Ben Altman
You must praise the mutilated world - Adam Zagajewski
In 2005 I visited the town in Belarus where my Jewish grandfather was born. In the nearby forest we were shown a mass grave and memorial, all that remained of his community of origin. I had not thought much about the Holocaust before this and did not have much of a response at the time, but that visit marked the start of my current practice. In the years since, my work has often focused on violent turning points of modern history, how they have formed our world, and what it means to inherit these collective traumas. Through this work I seek non-rational understandings of the challenges imposed by the past, with a view to decoding and rethinking the present.
To mourn, memorialize, and activate these histories, I draw ideas and materials from a range of practices including photography, video, performance, and sculptural interventions in the land. I often engage my topics through bodily experience. My current and recent work is made in the context of my home, but I have also visited sites around the world.
The More That Is Taken Away is an extended attempt to negotiate with the intractable fact of genocide. In late 2011 I began to dig behind my house in rural upstate New York, working entirely by myself and only with hand tools. The excavation became simultaneously an artwork, an evanescent memorial, and a site of performance.
In the first phase, year One to year Four, the excavation evolved by subtraction. Geometric shapes were successively created, damaged by weather and vegetation, re-shaped, and removed, leaving a pit sixty feet long, ten feet wide, and four to five feet deep.
At the end of year Four I cut off my long hair and shaved my head. At twenty stations along the site I filmed myself undressing, then photographed myself lying in the pit. In year Six these body photographs, printed life-size on cotton fabric, were buried in the pit in the positions of the original poses. The site was leveled and seeded during years Eight and Nine, using grasses to recreate the body images as semi-legible forms.
The traces of the work are a complete video record, a set of large-format black-and-white photographs, and the site itself which is now gradually being overgrown.
About the Artist
Ben Altman (b. 1953) trained as an artist by studying physics, towing icebergs, and working in commercial photography. A naturalized U.S. citizen of British origin, his work responds to how histories of mass violence live in our lives and imaginations. Altman has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, two New York State Council on the Arts Artist Support Grants, a NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship, a Project Support Grant from the Center for Photographic Art, and Artist in Community grants from the Community Arts Partnership of Tompkins County. His work was selected for the Houston Center for Photography’s 2015 Fellowship, the 2015 Critical Mass Top 50, and many others. benaltman.net
This exhibition was curated by Granary Arts in partnership with Americans and the Holocaust: A Traveling Exhibition for Libraries, an educational initiative of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the American Library Association, hosted by Snow College Karen H. Huntsman Library from September 4 through October 11, 2023. For more information, visit www.snow.edu/library/.
The More That Is Taken Away is supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. The work is a fiscally sponsored project of NYFA Fiscal Sponsorship. This exhibition is made possible in part by an Emergency Grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.