There are artists who begin with a blank canvas and artists who begin with a block of marble. Jean-Robert P. Béffort begins with whatever somebody else has given up on.
A doll without a body. A mannequin without a store window. A wrestling figure whose glory days are over. A Matchbox car with nowhere to go. A lamp with a bad wire. A guitar. A toy. A hubcap. A piece of tile. Marbles, glass, chrome lettering, ceramic plates. Things with histories, however picayune, that have been shoved toward the landfill.
Béffort looks at them differently.
On the morning I visited his Silver City studio, somebody brought him a board game. Béffort picked through the pieces of a Twister set, examining the tiny components with the delighted concentration of a man who had just been handed a new universe in a cardboard box.
“I am like a kid at Christmas,” he said.
A few feet away, he was examining a UFO light that needed electrical work. Extraterrestrial illumination, apparently, still requires somebody who knows what he's doing with a wire.
This is Béffort's peculiar territory. His studio is crowded with mannequins, dolls and doll parts, wrestling figures, Matchbox and Hot Wheels cars, toys, lamps, guitars and other casualties of usefulness. Some are waiting to be incorporated. Others have already begun another life.
Béffort calls the process “value added.” He doesn't mean the phrase in the language of business plans or real estate. He means the object has to receive something from the person making the art. It has to be changed with intention. It has to acquire another meaning.
Otherwise, he says, it is “soulless.” That word matters. So does another: reparation.
Béffort is interested in the repair of objects—not simply fixing a broken thing so it can resume its former function but giving it a reason to exist again. The scratches stay. The absurdity stays. The original purpose may be gone, but something else can take its place.
The object is not rescued so much as reincarnated.
From Architecture to the Space Between
Béffort was born in Spokane, Washington in 1962 and raised in Great Falls, Montana, where the landscape had more to say than most people did. He studied architecture at Montana State University in Bozeman, earning a Bachelor of Architecture in 1986.
Five years in Portland followed, working for architectural firms. Eventually, Béffort decided that drawing other people's buildings was less interesting than getting his own hands dirty. He went out on his own as a designer and builder, gravitating toward recycled materials and alternative construction. In 1992, he moved to Taos, where he learned carpentry and built Earthships, adobe structures and straw-bale buildings.
Architecture, but with mud under its fingernails.
In 1995, Béffort settled in Silver City. He became a one-man toolbox of trades: designer, builder, draftsperson, graphic artist, carpenter, stonemason and maker of glass-and-tile mosaics. He raised three children, two sons and a daughter, while making a living according to whatever work happened to be available.
Then, in 2004, a tree came down. Béffort suffered an incomplete spinal-cord injury that left him partially paralyzed from the waist down. After rehabilitation, he learned to walk again, somewhat, using forearm crutches.
The accident did not stop the making. It rearranged it.
He began creating custom tile mosaics and teaching art to seventh- and eighth-grade students. Gradually, the building trades receded and art took over more of the territory.
At 46, Béffort was offered a small studio by a local artist. The space was free for a year. He took it. His first solo exhibition, in 2008, featured collages and mixed-media assemblages.
He was discovering that the things most people considered useless could be useful to him.
By 2009, the little adobe studio had become too small. Béffort moved into a 4,000-square-foot warehouse in Silver City and established a)sp…“A”©e Studio / Art / Gallery. Seventeen years later, the place still refuses to behave like a conventional gallery.
There is art on the walls and work in various stages of assembly. Mannequins and doll parts share space with toys, lamps and guitars. A stage accommodates rap battles, theater, dance and poetry slams. Artists come and go. So do people carrying things they cannot bear to throw away.
It is a working place, not a shrine.
Béffort's architectural background is never far away. He talks about the spaces between buildings, the narrow cracks and voids that conventional architecture tends to regard as leftover territory. He identified with those spaces.
When you see words on a page, he said, he is interested not in the words but in the space between them.
That idea eventually migrated from architecture into art. His own architecture thesis was already pushing in that direction. Instead of merely designing the expected arrangement of rooms and doors, he built a model that attempted to combine architecture and art. He was heading there before he knew exactly where “there” was.
Perhaps Béffort never really abandoned architecture. He simply stopped building with the materials architecture expected him to use. Now the materials are whatever wanders through the door.
The Art of Reparation
Béffort's art is additive, but it isn't random. He wants people who participate in his Art on a Stick workshops to do more than glue an interesting object onto another interesting object. He wants intention. He wants transformation.
“If there is no intention or reparation,” he says, “then what they have is just soulless.”
The word “reparation” gets closer to what he is after than “recycling” does.
Recycling suggests a process. Reparation suggests a relationship.
The discarded thing is not merely being repurposed. Somebody is paying attention to it.
A mannequin becomes something other than a mannequin. A doll's head escapes the nursery. A wrestling figure finds a new opponent. A toy car becomes part of an impossible machine. A lamp becomes sculpture, provided somebody first figures out why the damn thing isn't working.
That is where Béffort's architectural instincts and assemblage practice meet. He is still solving problems with materials. Only now the materials have already lived a life.
He calls his art “non-linear.” One piece at a time. One of a kind. No fixed destination.
“I don't know what I'm going to do in a given day,” he says.
He may have an idea. He may have a pile of things. He may have a particular object that seems to be asking for something. But the final result can surprise him.
“At the end,” he said, “I'm just as surprised when I get to the finish line.”
He tells the same thing to people who come in for Art on a Stick.
“You didn't know you were going to make that this morning, did you?”
No, they didn't. That's the trick. The person thinks he is making an object. Béffort is trying to get him to discover something about the object—and perhaps something about himself.
He calls the workshops a “land of empowerment.” People take things consumer culture has already judged and make their own decisions about them.
You don't buy the finished product. You make it. You decide what the thing means. Everybody gets a different answer.
Béffort has watched people come through the door who initially don't know what to do. He gives them a nudge. Then they start handling the materials. Soon they are making decisions.
With couples, he jokes that Art on a Stick is “the cheapest couples therapy you can get.” They can collaborate on one piece or make something for each other.
Either way, they have to look at something together. They have to use their hands.
“We're going to evolve,” Béffort says, “and all you're going to have left is your thumbs.”
He means the thumbs on the phone. His antidote is a pile of junk.
The Reincarnation of the Ordinary
There is something stubbornly American about Béffort's attraction to the unwanted object. The country has always had a talent for taking yesterday's machinery and figuring out what it might do tomorrow.
Béffort's version is stranger. A public installation in Silver City has included hubcaps, car-chrome nameplate emblems, Hot Wheels cars, tile, marbles, glass globs and ceramic plates.
The materials are ordinary. The combinations are not. There can be pulchritude in the collision, although Béffort's art isn't interested in being pretty for very long. It wants to be curious. It wants to make somebody stop and wonder what the hell they are looking at.
Some people don't know. Béffort knows that.
“My art isn't easy to understand for some people,” he said. “It's not in their file system.”
They don't know how to process it, so they leave. But occasionally somebody stays. A couple comes in from Phoenix. A child makes something. Somebody who has been holding onto a broken object for years finally finds a use for it. That's a win.
Béffort doesn't need everyone to understand the work. The encounter matters. The possibility that somebody will walk into the warehouse, see a mannequin transformed into something unrecognizable, and have his mental machinery disturbed for five minutes. That counts.
The studio itself is built around that disturbance. Things accumulate. Guitars. Lamps. Mannequins. Toys.
“They're piling up,” Béffort says.
Of course they are. Projects occupy the walls and work surfaces in various stages. He talks about striking while the iron is hot, except the iron may be a lamp, a toy, a doll, a piece of chrome or some other object that has somehow found its way to Silver City.
People keep bringing things. They don't want them to go to the landfill. Béffort keeps taking them. And somewhere between an object's first life and whatever comes next, the work begins.
Indeed, this is where his idea of reincarnation becomes more than a clever description. The object does not become valuable because it is old or rare or expensive. Its value comes from what someone sees in it and what someone is willing to do with it. The repair, the intention and the sweat are all bound up in the transformation.
Indeed, the soul Béffort talks about is not something he assumes an object possesses. It comes through the act of making—through attention, risk and the willingness to push a discarded thing somewhere it has never been before.
Béffort's studio is less a warehouse of junk than a place where abandoned things get another chance.
The Twister pieces are still there. So is the UFO light, waiting for its electrical resurrection. Nearby, a mannequin, a wrestling figure, a doll and a Matchbox car have yet to reveal what they might become.
Béffort picks something up and turns it over in his hands. He looks. He thinks. Then he starts. The thing that was finished isn't finished after all.
