NONUMENTAL WORK
IT’S NOT A TYPO: BEN QUENSEL SCULPTS NON-MONUMENTS
In late July, the Stamford artist Ben Quesnel delivered his latest creation — a sculpted pair of human legs — to a new outdoor art trail in Kingston, N.Y.
He calls it “Nonument,” as in non-monument. “It looks like a typo, right? That comical twist of changing the first letter M to N,” Quesnel says. But to him the title is much more than a play on words.
His “Nonument” is intentionally unimposing, only hinting at the colossus it might have been. Made from rough cement, it’s human scale, just a pair of legs in trousers, cut off at mid-thigh, standing on a pedestal, near a trolley track.
“I’m interested in people questioning objects,” Quesnel says. “So I wanted to create this nonument as something that doesn’t necessarily represent anything. It’s in this in between state. For people walking by, it’s supposed to create this conversation.”
That conversation may concern the political moment. Who or what gives monuments meaning? Should disowned monuments be preserved, and how?
Then there are questions Quesnel hopes people may ask about the truncated sculpture itself: “Is this a monument that got knocked down? Is this monument not finished?” Eventually they might come to see it as he does. “It’s a nonument. It’s neither nor,” he says.
Quesnel is a young artist. He’s 32 years old. He grew up in East Windsor, a Connecticut tobacco valley town, got a degree in art education and since 2010 has taught art in Greenwich public schools. His personal artist’s statement has an arresting opening.
“In 2015, I put down my paintbrush to become an artist,” he writes. “I enrolled in the School of Visual Art Master’s program (in New York) to expand my craft beyond the canvas and into an interdisciplinary approach to artistic thinking and art making.”
Quesnel completed the master’s in 2017. That same year he had two pieces that might qualify as sculpture in the Governors Island Art Fair. One was “Standing Room Only,” an installation of disassembled wooden chairs displayed as they might be in a junk shop. The other was a teddy bear, or something that once might have been a teddy bear. It was white and collapsed against a cinder block wall, like a derelict Marshmallow Man. It was titled “Unburdened Bare.”
Again, as with “Nonument,” the title used word play. His bear was displayed bare, without a fur covering. And it was free, unburdened, of any clear identity. “It has no meaning yet,” he says.
So the bear, the chairs and the nonument all reflect Quesnel’s exploration of the difference between a thing and an object, or how perception turns a thing into an object. The question may sound uselessly abstract to some ears. But, as he explains, there is an emerging field of critical inquiry called Thing Theory, associated with a University of Chicago professor named Bill Brown.
“I like to work in this transitional state where things are identifiable or unidentifiable, nameable or unnameable … where you might be able to attach meaning, or you might not,” Quesnel says.
Ideas animate his work. Earlier this year, he participated in a SVA show, “Care Package,” timed to the COVID-19 shutdown that wasn’t just online; each piece was contrived to be printed out.
His contribution was an oil painting of an egg surrounded by emojis used in sexting. One idea behind it was that social distancing was stifling physical relationships. Another was in the title, “Embody with Organs,” an ironic reference to a philosophical concept about how life might be experienced without bodies.
“I don’t know if you want to write about it,” Quesnel warns, because of “Organs” sexual theme. After printing out his painting, people were to create their own artwork at home. “You cut out the emojis and place them on top of the egg in any sort of arrangement you want. It can be surreal, or it can be obvious, like a Mr. Potato Head. It’s supposed to be an interactive, fun piece.”
There’s often an interactive component to his work. For a 2018 exhibit at the Alvarez Gallery in Stamford themed on the opioid crisis, Quesnel did an installation in which he arranged a grave of 17,000 pill replicas in front of a medicine cabinet shaped like a tombstone. Quesnel molded the pills by hand from clay, each representing an opioid death during a single year.
“People could take the clay pieces,” he says. “It’s reducing the installation and hopefully spreading knowledge to reduce the number of deaths.”
The exhibit had extra local relevance because the Alvarez Gallery, which represents Quesnel, was two blocks from the headquarters of Purdue Pharma, the company sued for promoting opioid use.
Also in 2018, the Clementina Arts Foundation hosted one of Quesnel’s most public and accessible projects, in the actual physical sense, in Wilton. Titled “Undelivered,” it featured a mail truck, still containing mail, that Quesnel found abandoned in a swamp near his childhood home. He salvaged the truck body, cleaned it up, covered the old mail in plexiglass and displayed it inside a store as a resident artist in the foundation’s Sprouting Spaces program.
People were invited to enter the truck and leave their own letters, sealed or unsealed. “The idea was I was developing this archive of messages,” he says. The truck stayed in Wilton eight months.
Since then the truck has been exhibited outdoors at the Governors Island Art Fair and Quesnel has been named co-director the foundation’s artist-in-residency program. He says he and a partner have also gotten a state grant to develop a distant learning art program for middle and high school students.
Quesnel sees also acts as a kind of curator, creating art experiences. He says one of his favorite projects was “Sour Milk,” in which he and another SVA alumnus invited to 22 artists from Connecticut and elsewhere to take over a house slated for demolition near the Bruce Museum in Greenwich.
“People were cutting into walls and painting toilets. There was projection art, performance art, a band, food was served,” he says. It amounted to a pop-up remodeling project that lasted one night only. “We wanted it to be one of those things where you have one chance to see it.”
The title, “Sour Milk,” was again a kind of word play, again referring to a transitional state. For “Milk,” it’s an object’s vanishing usefulness. For “Nonument,” it’s a thing waiting to be declared an object.
The sculpture is one of the first in the public ArtStream project that is an offshoot of a new contemporary art center called ArtPort Kingston. Quesnel says he’s been promised “Nonument” will remain in place indefinitely.
“I hope it doesn’t get toppled over. That’s harder to fix. But if it’s spray painted, I’ll leave it,” he says. “I’m an artist. I’m going to go along with whatever happens.”
“IS THIS A MONUMENT THAT GOT KNOCKED DOWN? IS THIS MONUMENT NOT FINISHED? ... IT’S A NONUMENT. IT’S NEITHER NOR.”