Scott Benzel

Who is Scott Benzel?

Scott Benzel is an American visual artist, composer, and producer. Interested in the contradictions inherent in mythologized cultural histories, Benzel's work shows an ongoing fascination with the disjuncture between embodiments of popular culture - from the classical music score to photographic ephemera - and their accumulated meanings. Undertaking research into the genealogy of seminal pop music and cultural moments, Benzel’s interventions such as turning a pop musical score upside down to be played by a classically trained quartet and pressing the resulting recording to a lacquer which degrades upon play explore the processes and contradictions of mass media systems of production alongside the development of collective cultural imaginations and identification.

His visual and sound-based artwork has been shown at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, The Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Performa 09, New York Blum and Poe, Los Angeles, Human Resources, Los Angeles, The Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA, The Western Front, Vancouver, BC, Mandrake, Los Angeles, and Art Basel: Statements and Sonce Alexander Gallery in Los Angeles . He has collaborated with Mike Kelley on the soundtracks to Kelley’s installations Day is Done at Gagosian, New York, Profondeurs Vertes at the Louvre, Paris, and Kelley and Michael Smith’s A Voyage of Growth and Discovery at the Sculpture Center, New York and West of Rome, Los Angeles.