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Ben Quilty: My name’s Ben Quilty and I’m an artist.
Super: Ben, tell us about your work
Ben Quilty: I make big paintings, that’s what I’m known for and they’re paintings
about being a young man basically. They’re autobiographical works about debauchery and
the sort of aggressiveness of masculinity. Probably my career highlight was winning the
Brett Whitley Travelling Arts Scholarship, which is run by the Art Gallery of New South
Wales in 2002. And that’s for a six month residency in Paris in the Cite des Arts and
that’s really when I gave up my day job and could focus completely on my work, on
my art, and that was a pretty exciting feeling.
Super: Tell us about your role as official war artist
Ben Quilty: I went over to Afghanistan to make work to document what the young people
there were doing. I really went over with an open brief. The War Memorial and the Australian
Government really pushed on me that they wanted me to say whatever I wanted. The work that
I will go on to make about Afghanistan I think will end up being less about the politics
of why we’re there and more about the personal experiences of the young people that I met.
Super: Why should the arts matter to anyone else?
Ben Quilty: I think that people, that humans rely on culture
because without it there’s no outlet in a way for human discourse, for humans to discuss
being human. When the economy crashes and people are desperate, then culture also fills
this vacuum. It’s a way of people telling their stories. It’s a way of celebrating
humanity; of forgetting that not everything relies on finance, that humans are more dimensional
than that simple monetary aspect of what our culture is based upon. I just think the arts
and the broad umbrella of the arts is really important because I think a healthy culture
which comes directly from the arts to me tends to say that the society is healthy and I’ve
always believed that.