See You on the Other Side

Ben Venom’s massive See You on the Other Side (2011) is a thirteen-by-fifteen-foot quilt made out of heavy metal T-shirts, fabric, batting, and thread. The quilt’s central image shows the skull of a fanged humanoid with a nest of live and terrifying snakes inside a black and red circle. The circle itself is supported by two smaller circles, inside of which are pyramids; at the top of the quilt are looming lightning bolts; pentagrams emblazon each of the four corners. The pentagrams, pyramids, and the fanged skull with snake-hair are collaged out of ripped heavy metal band T-shirts on which some band names are legible: Kreator, Metallica, Judas Priest, Cannibal Corpse. Other animal and humanoid forms emerge from the chaos of color and shape that forms the skull and snakes: snarling wolves, cartoon monsters, a bruised Jesus holding a cross, more skulls, and more snakes.

See You on the Other Side, a title that itself both alludes to a gospel tradition and could be a sinister invitation to hell, argues for an association between two traditional American crafts: quilting and metal. Yet such an uncanny association is belied by some obvious structural affinities—quilting and metal are both genres that emerge as working class productions, and so can be read as eschewing the conceptual rigor and moneyed sophistication that mark the urban work of bourgeois art. Both quilting and metal are virtuosic displays. Metal, just as one example of its craft, is not punk; this is simply to insist on its intricacy and speed and the necessity of training for the aspiring rocker. Quilting, too, is a laborious and learned craft that parades as utilitarian object, providing warmth while reveling in its scale and elaborate patterning.

At the same time, what could be further from the fiery demonic yawp of a spectacular metal performance than the 

See You on the Other Side, 2011; hand-made quilt of heavy metal T-shirts, fabric, batting, and thread; 155 x 175 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco.

quilter in repose? While See You achieves much in its reminder that metalheads are, after all, crafty in their appropriation of materials and that quilters “shred” in the virtuosity of their craft as much as anybody plying an axe, this dialectical triumph is still a little uneasy, anxious, over the top. That is, it challenges the traditional reception of either of these artifacts as facile modes. Also, it rawks.

See You on the Other Side is on view at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, in San Francisco, through October 11, 2011.