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Thinking of Benedict like a gothicly depressed Baldessari is helpful. A formal artist using the basic propositions of art against itself, in the wrong, that if, like Baldessari, the text must relate, when in semio haywire it does not, its semantic slippage disconnects us. While Baldessari's rupture produced laughter in art's children, Benedict's continual unplugging of content creates morose vacuum: when Benedict, as early on, is funny, it is easy to take, but when it, as he continually more and more aims to depict culture as, is decidedly empty it creates a resignation to its abuse, a feeling of learned helplessness in rats, of numbness, feeling like viral conditions speaking through stuffed nasal sinuses, stuffed up, comparison leading violence.
John Baldessari at Marian Goodman, Will Benedict at Bortolami
