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A day in the life: with a new color video and a group of large paintings of heads, Sadie Benning moves beyond her reputation as the enfant terrible of Pixelvision, the toy-camera medium she used to wry, diaristic effect in the '90s

Art in America, Sept, 2007 by Faye Hirsch

Sadie Benning's most recent video, Play Pause (2006), is a departure for this artist, who came to public attention in the early '90s as a teenager making precocious live-action shorts in her bedroom. Unlike her best-known works, shot with a toy Fisher-Price PXL-2000 camera, Play Pause is an animation of sorts, a sophisticated dual-channel projection in which paired still drawings unfold in quick succession, something like synchronized slide shows. Toward the end, the barrage of images slows, during a scene in which a figure in an airport hesitates near the restrooms. Apparently undecided, the figure, wearing baggy jeans and a loose shirt that offer no gender clues, gazes toward the ladies' room while facing the men's. From the textured audio, airport sounds drift through, unintelligible but for an occasional slightly muffled flight announcement. Benning's graphic style is fiat, linear and cartoonish, but she captures a manifold psychology in the figure's pose and gesture. How to choose? Male or female? It is a humorous moment but also significant, encapsulating the betwixt-and-between, metamorphic sense of identity that has pervaded Benning's videos from the first one, made in 1989, through the present.

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The setting of Play Pause is suggestive of Chicago (a big city, an elevated train, a nearby lake), where Benning lives, and the time span is a day, a night and the following morning. The era is sometime after 9/11, when--as her occasional renditions of newspaper front pages show us--war is raging somewhere, terror alerts are at red or orange, and displays of patriotic zeal abound. There are no words spoken. Focused on no particular character and following no narrative in the strict sense, the video is borne along by fragmentary musical tracks and beats, and by ambient sounds recorded at the kinds of locales seen in the drawings.

Also propelling the video, which itself is something like a song, are the rhythm and tempo of the image sequencing, in which the drawings percolate in their horizontal, abutting positions. Executed mostly in black and white, with occasional color and backgrounds of solid hues as if made on sheets of colored paper, they are mostly different "shots" of the same scene, meant to relate to the same passing episode: for a pickup soccer game, say, details of turf and ball, or close-ups of faces and sneakers. At times the two frames merge into a continuous image, as in the opening titles, behind which buildings flow by as if seen from a train window, or in a passage showing cars commuting along a freeway, where the confluence of the road into a single artery running through both frames offers the visual equivalent of a sustained chord. Sometimes the beat of the drawing sequence links up with that of the audio, for example in a dance-floor scene in which frames of gesturing hands bop along in time with the music.

Benning has been known for the autobiographical nature of her films, but Play Pause is not specifically anecdotal; one discerns a sensibility-amused, observant--in her choice of scenes and the style in which they are conveyed, but her viewpoint has become more generalized. The feeling is that the person behind the "lens"--or rather, the pen--is something of a flaneur, an observer moving alone through the city, remaining detached from the action. Play Pause opens and closes with transportation--at the beginning on a commuter-rail platform, and at the end on a plane, as clouds humorously suggestive of body parts or excrement float by outside the window. (Some preparatory drawings show the clouds harboring erotic tableaux.) The day unfolds in stages, each assigned different environments and sounds--rackety streets in the morning, complete with noisy construction and scrabbling, garbage-picking squirrels; a leafy park filled with birdsong for lunch; the stone steps of a quay, waves lapping, for an afternoon nap; a jangly mall, for shopping after work or school; "ZE Bar," for nighttime music, dancing and sex. There are glimpses of labor--a construction worker handling a drill, a melancholy businessman waiting on a traffic island, a bartender dispensing drinks--but most of the scenes depict leisure activities: people playing, or flirting, or fucking. There's window-gazing (a display of wigs catches the eye for a time), newspaper-reading in the park, a stolen kiss on a busy street.

Sex begins after dark, in a parking lot at the bar, and goes on for fully a quarter of Play Pause. Abstract shapes drift by in colored ambiences as if in celebration; erotic scenarios proliferate in back rooms, back seats, hot apartments and parks teeming with fantastical night birds. Here some of the drawings are rough, with visible erasures and wobbly outlines, like amuletic sketches made by a kid expressing new and uncomfortable feelings (the character Taylor, a fifth-grader, draws such a picture--of naked women kissing--in Benning's 1998 film Flat Is Beautiful). In one scene, a woman bends forward on a table, penetrated from behind as she writes or draws; perhaps she is describing the very sex act in which she is engaged (on the audio are scribbling sounds). While it's presumably gay sex we are seeing, at least for the most part--ZE Bar has a triangle in the window, and its habitues include tough butches and fey transvestites--Benning often keeps participants gender-ambiguous, with harnesses, strap-ons and other toys confusing matters further. Resistance to gender specifics is part of the contemporary definition of being queer, so almost everyone is queer in Benning's world. At the end of Play Pause, two people having sex materialize on the plane's wing--but it is impossible to determine Who is what.

A day in the life: with a new color video and a group of large paintings of heads, Sadie Benning moves beyond her reputation as the enfant terrible of Pixelvision, the toy-camera medium she used to wry, diaristic effect in the '90s

Art in America, Sept, 2007 by Faye Hirsch

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