CURA.

STEFFEN JØRGENSEN
Sometimes when we work it’s like you’re sitting on my lap and I’m telling you a story.

WILL BENEDICT
What’s the story?

STEFFEN JØRGENSEN
People seem to be really divided on clowns.

WILL BENEDICT
You like clowns. You know Cirque du Soleil is struggling. They went bankrupt during Covid then restructured and are performing again but yesterday they announced that The Beatles LOVE was closing at The Mirage. I saw Mystère at Treasure Island in 2010 and there was this amazing performer called Big Baby who had been the Big Baby at Treasure Island for 20 years so people really saw him grow as a baby over time. I think this is your dream job.

STEFFEN JØRGENSEN
Did he wear a diaper?

WILL BENEDICT
Yes.

STEFFEN JØRGENSEN
Interesting. I recently saw some drawings on the internet of a woman on all fours shitting into diapers which had become so enlarged with shit that the diaper was 4 times the size of the woman and the artist had drawn a face on the diaper and given the diaper a hairdo.

WILL BENEDICT
Furries are into diapers too. Which I always found funny because it makes perfect sense for them to wear the diaper on the inside of the suit because getting that costume on and off must be some work but they wear the diapers on the outside of the suit. I guess it lets us know that the furry’s fursona is in fact real anatomy.

STEFFEN JØRGENSEN
I wonder if diaper furries are just a rare sub-sect of furries and all the other furries are frustrated and embarrassed by them since the diaper furries get all the press and make the non-diaper wearing furries feel like deviants.

WILL BENEDICT
I don’t know. But if furries are anything like non-furries then that would make sense. You like clowns and teddy bears. I feel it’s kind of how people like the Eiffel Tower as an icon or symbol but you just like teddy bears. And you like them scary. There is a scene in Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen where this huge scary teddy bear bursts out of the bushes while Mina Murray and Allan Quatermain are having sex against a tree and the bear takes them back to where he lives and along the way they run into Mr. Toad from The Wind in the Willows and then you realize that all these fictional human-animal hybrids from all our fairytales and fables are created by Dr. Moreau from The Island of Doctor Moreau. Anyway, this teddy bear reminds me of you. I read The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen once a year and every time I get to that part it makes me think you’re bursting out of the bushes.

STEFFEN JØRGENSEN
Yes, my interest in teddy bears or clowns is deep. You shy away from them. I also like rainbows which you also seem to avoid.

WILL BENEDICT
Ya, that’s true. Maybe I need to get into rainbows. This reminds me of our ongoing discussion of steampunk.

STEFFEN JØRGENSEN
Oh yes, the pleasure
of the worst.

WILL BENEDICT
Ya, the pleasure of the worst.

STEFFEN JØRGENSEN
Slippery slope. You always say that Venom is all style over substance. Why do you say that?

WILL BENEDICT
Umm. Marvel wanted a character as popular as Spider-Man but wearing black. Sort of like how every NBA team now has a black jersey. It’s chic and it sells. So, Venom not only “wears black” but he is the idea of pure infinite metaphysical blackness. He is the alien unknown. He is a black hole. He’s transcendental. He is the absolute “other” but all style. No social consciousness. No political reference. He has an interesting and mysterious black silhouette. He is French fashion. Or what French fashion has traditionally wanted to be. Which reminds me of Ad Reinhardt and his rules about art and art for art’s sake and how he also made comics about the dangers of kitsch but these comics weren’t art to him as he made them. But now to me and I think everyone else, 70 years later it doesn’t matter and the black paintings that aren’t really black and the comics about the dangers of kitsch are all part of a complete artistic statement. French fashion is also going through a similar process of quoting the dangers of kitsch to create a complete artistic statement.

STEFFEN JØRGENSEN
Yes, in a world where cat videos reign supreme we measure our worth in meows.

WILL BENEDICT
You had a show at Tranen in Copenhagen last year which featured some of your scary teddy bears and you were then accused of being a satanist and pedophile on an anti-vax conspiracy Facebook forum.

STEFFEN JØRGENSEN
It was actually really scary. There was a talking teddy bear in one of my videos and he has sex with the earth like Robinson Crusoe in Michel Tournier’s version of Crusoe and I think it struck a nerve for some nuts who live in fear through the internet; it’s very easy for people to convince me to live in fear and the last thing I want is to be nuts. I just feel like a teddy bear decomposing into the earth. And when you have kids, like I do, you also dream of being alone sometimes. I think this is very reasonable.

WILL BENEDICT
I often think of you as very attached to the idea of a man stranded on a desert island. Like your attachment to teddy bears and clowns. But you made some great videos with Allan Nicolaisen and Robert Kjær Clausen where you guys were stranded on desert islands or were archeologists excavating the earth, penetrating the earth looking for bits of nothing. That archeology video was called Easy Beige no? If I remember correctly you find a pair of broken sunglasses. And then the negative space of the excavation site begins to levitate and you enter into the former cavity which then swallows you. Your work is very Freudian but in the sense that that’s how jokes are built. We can be the correct semiotic materialists or anti-humanist in real life but that’s not really how jokes get built: they get built with raw ideology, Freudian cliches and dumb humanisms. You know?

STEFFEN JØRGENSEN
Ya, I don’t know. Do you have a preferred viewing angle for your poop-flushing, or do you approach it more from a classic “over-the-shoulder” perspective?

WILL BENEDICT
We often talk about how it seems that the videos we are making seem to make themselves. Which always reminds me of Louis Kahn asking the brick what the brick wants to be.

STEFFEN JØRGENSEN
Yes, in the best sense we are asking the brick what the brick wants to be, the other way to think about it is we are not thinking too much about what we are doing.

WILL BENEDICT
This is why we always need extra time for editing because we have many stupid ideas. And some stupid ideas are better than others. I can never tell if it’s ok to talk about stupidity or if it’s like money and you aren’t supposed to talk about it.

STEFFEN JØRGENSEN
Again a slippery slope because maybe if you spend all your time talking about stupidity people start to think you’re stupid.

WILL BENEDICT
Benjamin Franklin was really into fart jokes. He would print these books of aphorisms, jokes, bad puns and stuff. It’s why the French love him. And he had all these pseudonyms, he originally became famous for writing as Mrs. Silence Dogood but also wrote under the pen name FART-HING. Anyway, writing as Poor Richard, one of his most famous pseudonyms, he wrote “Force shits on Reason’s back.” I’m haunted by an issue of The Incredible Hulk from 1981 where the Hulk fights Sabra the Israeli super-agent and when a Palestinian child the Hulk was trying to protect is killed by the Israelis he screams and roars at Sabra for not recognizing the humanity of this little dead boy and Sabra falls to her knees and weeps for the child. The narration reads “It has taken The Hulk to make her see this dead Arab boy as a human being. It has taken a monster to awaken her own sense of humanity.”

STEFFEN JØRGENSEN
Yes, that is very painful
on many levels.

WILL BENEDICT
The trivialization becomes very poignant. There are also layers of misogyny and neoliberalism to unpack in that issue of The Hulk but the core issue of a fictional monster getting involved in the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land is so stupid and yet it’s so human. It’s so human of us to make up crazy shit like that. Humans are the only creatures who breathe incorrectly. Humans have made weapons that could wipe out all life on earth and then we make art and entertainment about our ability to do that. Have you seen Fallout yet?

STEFFEN JØRGENSEN
No, not yet. But I remember you often talk about seeing a movie when you were young about what it would be like for people to live through a nuclear winter.

WILL BENEDICT
Yes, The Day After. I should not have seen that movie at that age. I was maybe 6 or something. By the end of the movie, the survivors are melting away. And you end with this scene sort of like Godard’s Weekend where you pan across this scene of devastation. We really are monsters.

STEFFEN JØRGENSEN
But our monsters are always upbeat and ready to move on. They’re sexy.

WILL BENEDICT
Yes, people are sexy and the death drive is strong. Our Snail Man character especially seems to divide people between those who see him as hot and those who see him as not. The issue of his sexual-beingness is very important.

STEFFEN JØRGENSEN
We should make pornography. Or an early 2000’s sex tape. MiniDV quality.

WILL BENEDICT
When Swamp Thing and Abby Cable have sex, she eats his fruit and they go on a metaphysical journey through space and time, mind-melding to all plant and animal life in the universe.

STEFFEN JØRGENSEN
Intense.

WILL BENEDICT
At some point a paparazzi tracks them down to the Louisiana swamp where Swamp Thing lives and takes photos of her “eating his fruit” and the paparazzi sell the photos to a tabloid in Gotham and when Abby visits Gotham for a funeral or something she gets arrested after the cops recognize her from the tabloids. When she asks her court-appointed attorney what she’s being charged with, the attorney says “you’re being charged under laws reserved for people who have carnal relationships with farm animals. The precise name of the offense is ‘Crimes Against Nature.’” Needless to say, Swamp Thing gets really mad and appears in Gotham, he can instantly appear anywhere in the universe that has any cellular plant life, he just pops up in Gotham and turns himself into a huge rainforest that takes over the city. Later he negotiates with Batman who comes around to Swamp Thing’s position that it’s crazy that Abby was arrested in the first place. Batman talks to Commissioner Gordon who really has his back against the wall because Gotham is completely overrun with plant life. So they really didn’t have any choice but to release her. And Batman is like “who am I to judge?” and lobbies for his release before Swamp Thing follows up on his threat to start growing vines out of people’s intestinal flora. It’s Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing who also wrote V for Vendetta so we have some of the same ethical dilemmas at work regarding terrorism.

STEFFEN JØRGENSEN
In the latest season of Star Trek: Discovery, Ambassador Saru and Vulcan President T’Rina decide to get married and when you think they’re finally going to kiss in the scene they don’t.

WILL BENEDICT
Ya, angelic lighting sequence, rising musical crescendo and no kiss! The actor who plays Saru is Doug Jones who was also the moon-man in those Mac Tonight commercials my dad did for McDonalds in the ‘80s.

STEFFEN JØRGENSEN
Our new Moon Face character is like his “free thinking” uncle who owns a used book store in Malmö.

WILL BENEDICT
Sort of like Halle Berry and Tom Hanks when they’re in the ‘70s part of Cloud Atlas.

STEFFEN JØRGENSEN
I love that movie.
It makes no sense.