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Written by Martin Vincent | Manchester Metro | Monday, 12.6.00 | (4 stars out of 5)
The Fifties were the glory days of abstract painting, when American heroes like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko were filling vast majestic canvases that seemed to embody the spiritual freedom of the West. Since then nothing has been so simple again. In the 21st century, art is so wrapped in post-ironic complexity that even the act of stretching up a canvas is fraught with uncertainty.
Manchester-based artist Ben Cook’s strategy for negotiating this aesthetic minefield is brilliantly simple.
A couple of years ago he came across some discarded rolls of football shirt fabric, in which the printing process had gone wrong, creating disruptions in the colours and patterns. Through carefully selecting large areas of the faulty material, Cook was able to create what he called ‘found paintings’.
Since he had already been making ‘proper’ abstract paintings for several years, this leap into the conceptual realm was done with deep consideration and a great deal of skill.
Three of his large scale works using defective material have been specially commissioned by the Whitworth, and they carry all the poetry and conviction of that great abstract expressionist tradition. To such an extent that you doubt whether they really are just ‘found’.
So much of art lies in context and presentation – and half the artist’s job is to control that process. Through its remarkable conflation of modernism and postmodernism, Cook’s work raises all sorts of questions about truth and authenticity. It’s definitely art, but is it painting?
Written by James Hopkin | The Guardian 12.02.02
For much of the 19th century, Macclesfield was the silk capital of Britain, and one of the most affluent towns in the north. As resident artist at the town’s Paradise Mill (which was operational until 1981), Ben Cook has drawn upon this heritage to develop his project of Found Paintings. Taking flawed textiles, he stretches them across a wooden frame to give the appearance of painted canvas in an approach that is somewhere between ready-made and revisionist. And now he's gone a step further, or rather, back.
After selecting early hand-painted designs from the mill’s textile design archive, Cook scanned them into a computer, played with them, and had them digitally printed on silk, and mounted on 6ft by 4 ft wooden frames. It’s an ingenious concept, for in taking the process back to its source and then bringing in computer-aided design, Cook is utilising design skills that are more than 100 years apart. The results are stunning.
Taking as its reference point the coloured line-blocks of the famous Macclesfield Stripe design, Cook’s Study for A Macclesfield Stripe immediately challenges the barcode-like formality of the original. From a distance, the silk looks like a vivid canvas, and Cook’s softened lines seem like a sketch of shimmering blinds, or diffracted rays, blurring from the centre outwards. Strikingly, the print achieves a three-dimensional effect as the lines reach towards the viewer to create the illusion of a step.
Such is the allure of these strange slats of colour that they seem to hail and hold the viewer. Painting the Void is no exception. The starting point here is an old block design of thin red, black and blue lines crossing in a kind of intense circuit diagram. Cook has exploded this into a print with a searing, cinematic feel. Like a photograph of a speeding object, the edges are wildly out-of-focus, a concrete spin with mere traces of colour. Staring at the more defined white-blue-pink lines at the centre, you feel like you’re playing a computer game in which you steer a hapless vessel between ever-narrowing walls, as Cook traps the viewer in a landscape of frantic motion and space. An ideal pattern, then, for a 21st-century silk scarf or tie.
Written by Helen Tither | Manchester Metro News (all City Editions) 19 April 2002
Ben Cook’s paintings come complete with their own set of washing instructions. Made purely from stretched pieces of fabric, such as replica football kit material, each one of them is hand-washable – although bleaching and tumble drying are not recommended. In fact, it is probably best not to touch them at all as they could very well become worth a bob or two.
The paintings are being prepared for a new installation at the Lowry’s Deck Gallery where Stockport-based Ben will be exhibiting. But already some of the paintings have been snapped up by the likes of Urban Splash boss Tom Bloxham and the five-star Lowry Hotel.
“My work has shown you don’t have to go down to London to make a name for yourself as a successful conceptual artist” said Ben.
Ben’s latest exhibition Found Paintings is backed by the North West Arts Board and the Arts Council of England. It is the result of six year’s work, which all started in discarded fabric shop.
“This collection started when I found some pieces of flawed fabric that had been thrown out of a factory. I stretched the fabric out onto a frame and it looked just like the abstract work I had been doing”.
Included in the exhibition will be three pieces made from stretched referee shirts. Those made from replica football shirts, including a Manchester United shirt, have already been snapped up by mystery buyers.
Written by Rachel Pugh | Metro Manchester 3 May 2002
As a hard-up student, painting on reject cloth was, for Ben Cook, a cheap alternative to expensive canvases. But now the textiles themselves have, for him, become a work of art. The artist – whose exhibition Found Paintings goes on show at The Lowry from tomorrow until June 30 – is in the business of pushing the boundaries of painting to the limits.
The question he is always asking himself is: “At what point does a painting cease to be a painting?” To date, he has had his textile designs made into shirts, had his ideas woven into cloth by a commercial mill and even put his cloth creations into bags, but he still does not believe he has exhausted the concept of what painting is.
The 34-year-old Yorkshireman, now settled in Heaton Moor, is one of those minimalist artists who appeal to the city’s burgeoning loft dwellers, and who has made an impression on the London art critics, some of who credit him with having “reinvented the North”.
That is a far-fetched statement to which Ben Cook gives no credence. He just tapped into the textile past of the city when he arrived here as a post-graduate at the Manchester Metropolitan University and his work had struck a note in the art world.
For the record, Ben Cook considers himself a painter. His textile adventures started when, as a student, he looked for alternatives to canvases with paint on. His studio at MASA near Piccadilly station, surrounded by textiles warehouses, led him one day to watch cloth being unloaded.
A light went on in his head and he soon found himself in a reject shop looking at denim, which presented a fine white back surface on which he could create his abstract images.
But it did not take him long to realise that some of the defects in the cloth were similar to the effects that he created with paint, so he started to display the textiles themselves on wooden frames, taking special joy in any flaws.
His Bagged Paintings are the result of his problems of how to store cloth on frames, and his decision to take them off and roll them up in individual bags until needed, with labels indicating what they are.
“I consider myself to be an experimental abstract painter and my role is to question the medium and lead the spectator to ask more questions.”
His current work has led him to Belford Prints in Bollington, where his real paintings have been turned into digital images and woven into images that then look like paintings, even though they can be rolled up and put in the wash. So in a funny sort of way he is back with paintings again.
“It’s been a long journey,” laughs Ben. “Now all those definitions and labels seem so much less important.”
The Whitworth Art Gallery and the Arts Council own examples of his work and Urban Splash boss Tom Bloxham and The Lowry Hotel also have some of his paintings.
Success will not drive him from Manchester; which he sees as an artistically exciting place to be. He has a studio in Salford and sees no reason to move. He says: “People are always saying that you can not establish yourself as a national artist in the north west – I intend to prove them wrong.”
Written by Phil Griffin | CityLife 15-30 April 2002
The opening show at Manchester Art Gallery is by Michael Craig-Martin. He has been a considerable artist for many years, but arguably his most potent achievement is his role as head of Goldsmiths School of Art. To some extent he invented and inspired Brit Art and the young British Artists, beloved of ’90s media. Without Michael, no Damien; and without either of them, possibly no Ben Cook, whose exhibition, Found Paintings, is at The Lowry until 30th June.
Ben Cook has been making his work in Manchester for ten years, following a degree from Sunderland School of Art, and throughout an MA at Manchester Metropolitan University. He’s the nearest thing to a YBA we’ve got. “I used to look at the Brit Art pack and think they were all just into each other, and being photographed pissed-up in trendy bars. Later I realised that they were all working their bollocks off. You have to work at placing your work, you have to keep evolving and putting it in different places, and in front of different people. You have to put yourself in front of different people”. This is something that Ben got good at.
Over the last couple of years, and in collaboration with Manchester graphic designer Trevor Johnson, amongst others, Ben has produced a series of mail shots, a personal logo, a sort of mission statement, and limited edition books. All of this has been designed with willing collaborators with the intention of heightening his profile, sharpening his image, and make the name/brand ���Ben Cook’ better known in art and art-related circles. He wants to sell more work and to be able to afford to make more and better work. He wants to make a good living from his art, and, in some synergetic way, to make art out of his good living.
Unsurprisingly, Ben Cook’s new show is something of a product range, which includes silk scarves, bespoke shirts, hand-made books, and paintings in bags. All of this began when Ben found some cast-off miss-printed football shirt material when he was rummaging in an oddments box in a fabric shop one day.
Ben makes a lot of this. He talks about these highly coloured blurs and blunders being “re-presented as paintings”. Needless to say, he gets up a lot of painters’ noses. The fact is, his Found Paintings are highly decorative, instantly pleasing and drip dry. They are beginning to sell like the United away strip.
You can see half a dozen Found Paintings hanging in the foyer of The Lowry Hotel. Some of them were in the prestigious New Contemporaries show a few years back, and one of the judges allegedly made a bit of an issue out of them, threatening to resign if such blatant commercial work was selected. It was. She didn’t. Eye of the beholder. For ten years and more Ben Cook has been an interesting artist. He has fostered his work and cultivated his image, which involves a tasteful mini, good glasses and bespoke shirts. He would not be out of place at White Cube, nor would his work. It has always been Ben’s aim – actually, part of his style – to make it from Manchester. His determination is admirable, and so are his somewhat metropolitan strategies for getting there.
I don’t buy into the Ben Cook product range. The shirts, Macclesfield striped scarves and custom-printed bags maybe for you, but I think they irritate me. I’ve always had time for Ben’s big work, it’s as if he arrived fully matured and, Brit Art like, full of confidence. There is little room for modesty or hesitation in the public Ben Cook. He knew he’d found something when he found the paintings in the bin. He seems to know that there’s another corner to turn. The latest work in the show began as digital images of details of The Lowry building. Ben selected a few and made typically bad small paintings of them. These he had scanned and made into repeat-patterned prints by Belford Prints in Bollington. The bespoke fabrics form the last big images in the show. As Martin Vincent once pointed out in City Life, they may not be paintings, but they’re certainly art.
Written by Phil Griffin | Metro Manchester 3 May 2002
Ben Cook is a logo, like Paul Smith and Vivienne Westwood. Except he’s a painter, or so he says. Walk into The Lowry Hotel and you’ll see six big Ben Cook abstract paintings. Except there’s no paint on them. They are washes of colour; blues and pinks and orange. They are junked pieces of fabric, flawed in the printing process, ���re-presented as paintings’.
Walk into the Deck Gallery at The Lowry, Salford Quays, from tomorrow and you’ll see a vivid run of Cook’s Found Paintings. They have evolved over a decade, beginning with the artist painting on the back of bits of cloth because it was cheaper than artist-quality canvas. Then he painted on the front of fabrics, sometimes expensive velvets and silks.
One day, Cook discovered large pieces of patterned cloth in crazy stripes and swirls that looked just like abstracts ��� it turns out they were printer discards from a football strip manufacturer – so he put together a team of Found Paintings, including a Polar Nightscape With meteor – a referee’s kit.
Cook has also taken pieces of faulty fabric and had them made into finest quality shirts by Manchester shirtmaker Frank Rostron. If you buy a painting you’ll get a matching shirt free, although it won’t necessarily be in your size.
He has made real mini-paintings of the found pieces, then had them scanned and made into unflawed fabric by Belford Prints in Bollington.
Commodification, it seems, is as much art as it is retail.