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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
Flat Is Beautiful, along with Play Pause Benning's most ambitious work to date, is a barely fictionalized memoir complete with a bonafide cast; it is the culmination of her Pixelvision efforts (though she also incorporated standard black-and-white video in it). The film follows the main character, Taylor, living with a cash-strapped single morn and her roommate, a gay man. Taylor is a latchkey kid who spends her time watching the tube, microwaving TV dinners, playing video games and trying to comprehend her growing attraction to girls. (In one scene, she is horrified to discover she's begun menstruating--"Now what am I gonna do?" she moans on the toilet, dropping her head in her hands.) Taylor's father, an artist or curator, calls her infrequently, conducting pained conversations in which he egotistically prattles on about his travels and makes excuses for why he's not around. Mostly, Taylor's on her own.
Throughout the film, the actors wear big, ungainly paper masks with crudely hand-drawn features. The masks provide a distancing effect from the sad tale told, and droll moments, for example when the characters attempt to eat (the mother stuffing chips in the mouth hole as she frets about money). On a playground, children wearing the masks look like exiles from a photograph by Helen Levitt or Ralph Eugene Meatyard. Benning managed to exact a surprising emotional range from her characters, despite--or even because of--the unwieldy masks, which seem like a metaphor for the burdensome truths people carry about. Though the expressions on them don't change, the masks can look fearful, bored, anxious or sad, depending on the narrative. In this way, the characters with their drawn masks form a precursor to the drawn figures in Play Pause. (8) And Benning seems to be making a statement about drawing's role in Flat Is Beautiful--its redemptive power for Taylor, who is seen drawing in the film.
Apparently, Benning herself has always drawn, and in a spring exhibition at the Wexner Center, where she was a resident artist in the institution's Art & Technology program, (9) she included--in addition to Play Pause--a group of large paintings in Flashe on paper executed over the past six years. At once recalling Alex Katz and Beauford Delaney, they formed a nice counterpart to the drawings in Play Pause, so that altogether the show offered a new context in which to know this artist, other than in Pixelvision--and to understand her earlier attraction to that medium's painterly, abstract qualities. As much as 8 feet high, the paintings are mostly colorful large heads, faceted in many hues and decoratively patterned--imaginary portraits with big features, ruefully smiling. The style hasn't changed much from that of the masks in Flat Is Beautiful, abbreviated yet oddly labile. Some of the drawings show more--an ominous crowd of masked riot police, for example, or a couple dancing. A character of ambiguous gender hugs its chest and is accompanied by a legend, written in block letters, "I was born to transform." And there is also a drummer--one assumes Benning herself, wearing a green suit and orange shirt--depicted in a work installed at the entrance to the viewing room of Play Pause. Sticks raised, she seemed ready to provide the kind of beats that accompanied the film inside--to kindly guide us, that is, through a day in her life.
