Sadie Benning
Aurora Picture Show at Dean's Credit Clothing
Stephanie Martz
A compilation of Sadie Benning’s videos and films curated by Thomas Beard, program director of the Brooklyn-based microcinema Ocularis, recently screened at Dean’s Credit Clothing as part of Aurora Picture Show’s offsite programming. Benning is a lesbian experimental video/filmmaker best known for her early works shot with a Fisher-Price Pixelvision camera, a children’s toy sold briefly in the late 1980s. Pixelvision was a commercial flop because of its low quality and distorted images—precisely the same reasons it became a choice medium for experimental video and filmmakers. Images shot in Pixelvision are grainy and blurred, a sort of hybrid of film, video and animation. Use of the camera enhances the intimate nature and sense of isolation in the artist’s early work.
Benning’s 1991 If Every Girl Had A Diary, an early Pixelvision piece, consists entirely of closeups. The artist, at the time just seventeen, is the video’s subject. Interspersed with shots of her face, oftentimes with her eyes filling the entire screen, are fragmented images: a dresser, a cat, a window, the ceiling, a comb, her hand. Benning addresses the camera as if it were a person she is dining with in a restaurant. The piece reveals only segments of conversation combined with her thoughts about this person and the self-realization she comes to through this particular conversation: the revelation that she is isolated, unable to communicate openly with another person.
Sadie Benning, It Wasn't Love, 1992
Video stills
Courtesy of the Video Data Bank
Sadie Benning, Girl Power, 1992
Video stills
Courtesy of the Video Data Bank
Sadie Benning, Girl Power, 1992
Video stills
Courtesy of the Video Data Bank
Sadie Benning, Me and Rubyfruit, 1992
Video stills
Courtesy of the Video Data Bank
The next piece, German Song, created in 1995, is distinct not simply because it is primarily a Super 8 mm film (and a music video for the band Come) but is also a departure from the overtly personal narratives prevalent in Benning’s early works. In it, the camera follows a boyish girl who wanders empty suburban yards, streets and a carnival. But the viewer is not given opportunity to enter the character’s mind in the intimate manner in which Benning revealed of herself in previous works.
Toward the end of the film, Benning does drop in a Pixelvision scene in which the artist is pictured kissing an unknown girl; it is a brief moment that is, perhaps, an attempt to contextualize this piece as part of the artist’s oeuvre.
Benning regularly employs varied film and video formats as tools to define the countless ways in which we see ourselves, others and the world. In the 1998 black and white film Flat Is Beautiful, the artist’s first feature, we see desolate urban streets shot in Super 8 while domestic interiors are rendered in Pixelvision and the fantasies of the main character are animated. The film is Benning’s retelling of a segment of her own childhood and every character’s face in the film is hidden behind a large papier-mâché mask.
The artist uses, as a stand-in for herself, a fifth grader named Taylor, who lives with her mother and a gay roommate and occasionally gets phone calls from a father who never has time to see his daughter.
Flat Is Beautiful unfolds as an untraditional narrative: there is no climax and no resolution. The piece simply offers a moment in the life of a child who, while becoming aware of her own sexuality, discovers that life is filled with disappointment: love is not easily found and happiness may only be attainable through fantasy. Through the use of masks, Benning is not only able to distance the viewer from each character but create an additional distance both within and between the characters who are separated from each other by their individuated desires for love and validation.
At the end of Flat is Beautiful, one is transported back to a moment in If Every Girl Had A Diary in which Benning says, “I guess to be alone is to know yourself for you and not who you’re with, and I like that.” It is a statement that resonates with knowledge—finding in oneself the power to exist for oneself. While a theme of isolation exists throughout Benning’s body of work, it is an isolation filled with the strength and beauty of the artist herself.