The Muse | Ben Wadler | Episode 988

Ben Wadler | Episode 988

Ben Wadler is a sculptor making pottery under the name Special Vessels. Borrowing forms freely from found and imagined architecture, comic books, video games, psychedelia, erotica, calligraphy, and cake decoration — Ben’s pieces evoke a faux history that feels both sacred and silly. Reverent and irreverent. Ben likes to imagine the work serving as the first point of contact with an alien race, and how it would look in the vacuum of space. Until then, Ben listens for distant radio signals on WFMU, emanating from his home planet of New Jersey. Ben studied sculpture at the Royal College of Art in London, at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, and at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Ben is currently based in Vienna and Tel Aviv.

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When you are looking for deep waters for personal growth, where do you go?

To be honest I think traveling is where a lot of new ideas come from and it’s not the case that I’ll see something, it’s not that I will see a doorway and say, Okay that’s my next piece, but it’s like a chef that’s traveling and collecting ingredients, not knowing when they will come up but knowing they might be useful to them. So a lot of it is solo traveling in different cities and taking a lot of photos.

Does your international travel influence your making?

I guess so, I mean the guy I studied with in London used to like to ask us questions in group critiques, he would ask us whether we thought the particular work that we were looking at had a passport. In other words, Is this English art? Is this Italian art? Did it have a sort of national identity? The answer wasn’t always yes. But sometimes that’s an interesting way into the work. Maybe it’s a privilege to answer but I guess I like to imagine that the work has some kind of intergalactic passport. Like a skeleton key to all different kinds of societies.

Does the critique end up changing your work and your making?

I think that the work is definitely born from that kind of an environment. I grew up in that environment in undergraduate and graduate school having this work constantly testing in a pretty rigorous and critical environment. But I think that serves to help an artist kind of troubleshoot and locate and triangulate their voice in space. A group in a critique in asking questions can help the work be the strongest version of itself. So we are all listening with a stethoscope saying, It sounds like you are trying to say… x.y, and z but what’s this other flashy thing over here? Are you just making that because you think that’s what we want to see? Or because you think that’s what makes the work look clever or informed? Because that’s actually a distraction for us. And sometimes this gives the artist the permission to let go of things that are unnecessary or deadweight.

Do you ever reference your older work for new ideas?

That’s a really good question. I look at my work a lot for patterns and stuff but no. I mean when I look at other potters, even potters that I would consider a sort of fine art potter side of the spectrum, many of them have standard pieces. They’ve got a sort of repertoire of maybe a half a dozen or a dozen different forms that they make again and again to meet certain orders. And of course I can do that, but even if I could, I don’t think I could. Even if I had the technical ability to make the same piece twice, which I am not sure that I do, I don’t think spiritually I could.