Ben Werther

The photographs on view in Ben Werther’s When You Can No Longer Speak, Sing Me a Song. may look like journalistic dispatches from the frontlines of a conflict, but they are not. Though they borrow the visual language of objective reporting –or maybe something closer to a mockumentary or found footage horror film– they are first person POV photos made by the artist whilst participating in a Military Simulation game known as MilSim.

Unlike war reenactments, MilSim is Live Action Role Play, or LARP, with no empirical record of history acting as a guideline for the action. It is a world made and unmade in real time, its creation continuous and predicated entirely on the player’s fantasies, memories, media references, and personal conceptions of violence. Werther acted as both an active participant in, and documentarian of, these multi-day events over the course of 3 years. The culmination of this devotional and fully immersive practice are the works presented in his solo “When you can no longer speak, sing me a song”. This is Werther’s first time showing with No Gallery and is in collaboration with Amanita NY.

“In writing this, in surviving these events, and in documenting them, I have tried to heed the call of the wild gods. I have been guided by the southern star. For I am the bard, I am the scribe, I am the one who writes time. The history I have only just begun to record is one of atrocity, of a war being waged by a group of airsoft LARPers across a desolate American landscape — one that is ravaged by a familiar plague, a sickness that is both of the past, ongoing in the present, and to the future. A mythology of great warriors upon a distant planet whose name has been forgotten — whose exact location lost to history. Theirs is a planet completely consumed by extreme ideology, in the darkness of total objectivity, where there is no hope for the future or for the self, where everything is known and there is nothing left to be understood, where there is no joy left to seek, and thus no art left to create. These few brave men were devoured long ago by an obsession to become like the gods — a sort of final, desperate effort. They are engaged in a war for personal identity and its rite. For only a god is granted the divine privilege of true creation — of making something irrefutably new, a capability these men have referred to as the “ultra-art” or “total sculpture”. Upon this planet, the LARP has become the new readymade — a strange occurrence brought about by 10,000 years of dark age, of war and pestilence as a result of the eradication of any and all intellectuals, artists, and poets by the state. No one can remember when the war started or what it is that they are fighting for, for the people of this world do not care for nuance or meaning, all they see in the fog of dawn, all that is illuminated as the sun begins to rise, is the gift of a righteous battle, and thus an open gate to heaven. Each day as they awake anew in that place, that pit, with starlight upon their grimy faces, they give thanks for a once again and seemingly final chance at becoming like gods in their earthly domain — for they dare not look to the future, only to the past and to what has been known. To them each day is a precipice, for tomorrow they will descend into babble. As the last remaining artist upon this planet, it is my duty to construct meaning, my moral obligation to seek out that which is still left to be understood: the remainder of a time before. I have transcribed here the nature of what these events were, events which are still not known, and the strange occulture that surrounds them. For it is my LARP, my light in its abyss.”

—Ben Werther

Ben Werther (b. 1998 Nashville, Tennessee) received his BFA from Cooper Union in 2020. An impulsive collector from a young age, his practice often employs collections of found materials which he recontextualizes as social artifacts.