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

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.

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.

Benning made her first video (A New Year) in 1989, when she was 15, with the Fisher-Price toy that her father, avant-garde filmmaker James Benning, had given her the previous Christmas. As she tells it, she was annoyed that she hadn't received a "real" camcorder, so she waited a bit before picking it up. She quickly became one of the leading practitioners of Pixelvision, so-called because of the highly pixelated images obtained by the toy. (1) In murky black-and-white, and framed within a frame, Pixelvision looks as if it's recorded in a dirty fishbowl and proceeds in jerking fits and starts. It is, in other words, perhaps the most handmade-looking moving-picture idiom. (2) Benning's early endeavors focus on herself--her face, her hands, when place is revealed--her bedroom, a boarded-up neighborhood in Milwaukee (where she grew up), a dreamscape of figurines and scary dolls--it provides an archetypal setting for transitional states and off-hour activities: coming of age, coming out; boredom; the do-nothing period between waking and heading out to some low-level job; the stealth-time of high-school hooky. ("I haven't gone to school in a week," she says in Living Inside, 1989. "what have I done? I've been feeding the dog and going to work.") In the beginning, her subject matter was her adolescence--her lesbian adolescence, to be precise; more than half her films, mainly shorts done in Pixelvision, were completed before she was 20. (3) At 29 minutes, Play Pause (not in Pixelvision, which she has stopped using) is her second-longest work, after Flat Is Beautiful (1998), 56 minutes; most of the rest have been between 5 and 12 minutes' duration.

In her earliest, most diaristic videos, Benning holds the camera so close to her face that she is seen only in parts--her nose, her eye, her mouth, which speaks (Pixelvision's audio is always recorded at the same time as the visuals, on the same cassettes). Mostly, she's alone. The stories she tells are about her childhood and her greatest preoccupation, sex and sexuality. In If Every Girl Had a Diary (1990), Benning says,

   "You know. I've been waiting for that day to come when I could walk
   the street. People would look at me and say, 'That's a dyke.' And if
   they didn't like it they'd fall into the center of the earth and
   deal with themselves. Maybe they'd return, but they'd respect me."

The monologue sounds mildly threatening, but it's also funny: throughout it, Beaning--looking very young--is chewing some food and pretending she's in a restaurant with a companion, though it's clear she's alone in her bedroom. Just as, in Play Pause, sex is pervasive and celebratory, so from the start of her career it was a liberating force, an impetus to imaginative flights of fancy. At 16, in Jollies (1990), she exchanges phone numbers with a girl; "and that night, I found out I was as queer as can be." It Wasn't Love (1992) is dedicated to "girls everywhere."

Benning was making her early diaristic videos at the same time that Jonathan Caouette, creator of the harrowing 2003 documentary Tarnation, was shooting pictures of his own troubled life. Assembled from materials compiled over a period of 19 years, his is a saga of a boy coming out against a background of parental neglect and madness. Both Benning and Caouette document their odysseys in real time; they are not safely remembering from the perspective of adulthood--Benning even more than Caouette, since he edited his raw materials later. There is little nostalgia or hindsight in their films. Both artists show the street smarts of the gay teenager, forced not only--like many adolescents--to come to terms with feeling like a misfit, but to develop a powerful self-awareness and intuition that enable them to find others like themselves, sometimes undergoing humiliation and even danger along the way. Benning's early videos--compelling works despite the fact that they were made when she was so young--relate incidents in which she is scrapping with boys and ridiculed by girls. The feminine is problematic, alluring in others but questionable in herself.

Me and Rubyfruit (1990) is an homage to Rita Mae Brown's 1973 coming-out novel, Rubyfruit Jungle, but it demonstrates how ingenious Beaning already was, working with the extremely limited technology of her toy camera, in figuring out how to construct a narrative. The film evokes a teenager's immersion in a book--not just any book, but one that gives meaning to her life. Benning quotes passages, reciting them aloud or jerkily panning over words written out in block letters, a device that makes the film feel as though it is telling secrets. (She often uses this technique, scanning words scrawled or taped on paper, glass, furniture and windows, as in her always diverse byline credits.) The spoken and written texts in Rubyfruit carry on a conversation, out loud and silent. ("Why don't you marry me?" quotes Benning from the novel, aloud, "I'm not handsome but I'm pretty." The writing responds, "Girls can't get married." "Says who?" asks her voice, which then answers, "It's a rule." The writing comments, "It's a dumb rule.") Though Benning is alone in the video, her conversation with herself and with the book leaves the impression of multiple characters. (4) And it demonstrates a discerning sense of filmmaking as a medium in which stories can be told in many different ways, with cues both visual and aural.

Benning's videos coincide with, and embrace to a certain degree, the confessional mode into which much art and writing slid in the 1990s. But she does not exploit suffering; instead, her narratives are sweetly amusing and her videomaking artful and metaphoric. Things clearly went wrong--her parents were separated, her father was absent, kids picked on her, school stank and so she dropped out. But it's clear that she immediately recognized video as one very effective way to navigate the obstacle course of her life. Her tale is unsentimental; she wants to be tough, so she takes on a tough way of talking. She dons disguises--wigs and costumes--and hides herself in crude montage: whatever works. Her persona is always super-sincere, as if what she's saying--whether pure fabrication or actual memoir--is the truest thing imaginable.

Benning was hypersensitive to visual stimuli from the outset, from the oft-shot view framed in her bedroom window, with shady characters slipping in and out of the house across the street, to magazine spreads and TV trash. However crude and blurry and cropped her versions wound up, she was willing to steal from outside sources often and to great effect. Her very first film, A New Year, opens with a scene from the game show "The Price Is Right," with host Bob Barker talking to contestants like they're small children who can barely comprehend the prizes. The only original dialogue in this mostly silent film is a panned-over, handwritten line: "I realized how crazy everyone is and what a small part I play in it"--an insight, to be sure. Significantly, is the first word actually uttered by her, in her second film, Living Inside. In the films that followed, she often included screen shots and videogames, as well as photographs from books and tabloids. Jollies uses Diane Arbus's Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967, imperfectly filmed, to illustrate the spoken narrative: "Like most people, I had a crush. It started in 1978 when I was in kindergarten. They were twins, and I was a tomboy." A Place Called Lovely (1991) includes a clip from Psycho, and, fittingly, the video is more filmic than what came before. It includes rabid headlines and gun ads, and in relating the effect the Atlanta child murders had on her in 1979, Benning shows pictures of black children we take to be the victims, smiling in their school pictures. (5)

Music has also been very important to Benning, who is herself a musician. (6) Throughout her videos, she finds ways of integrating the soundtrack so that it becomes an expressive force as powerful as the visuals. Her noir flick, It Wasn't Love, draws on excerpts from some three dozen songs to shape the narrative, a wry romance told, as usual, by Benning herself, (7) picked up by a girl who suggests they drive to Hollywood, robbing liquor stores along the way. They only get as far as a parking lot where they have sex in the car. The sex is nothing more than the artist sucking on her own fingers and the car is a toy, but, as she says, "We didn't need Hollywood--we WERE Hollywood." Each time something new happens, the music changes: from Screamin' Jay Hawkins's "I Put a Spell on You" to disco and blues, a radio tuning, Michael Jackson, Nirvana, George Clinton and "My Funny Valentine" (for the parking-lot "sex" scene). She borrows clips from the 1956 scorcher The Bad Seed, about a murderous little girl--and samples Prince's "I Wanna Be Your Lover" to accompany a scene in which the pigtailed child reassuringly strokes her mother. Among the high points is Benning sporting a goatee, suit and cane, absurdly playing a thug like those in a gangster movie she pilfers. At the end, Benning sums up her romance in true noir style: "She had a way of making me feel that I was the goddamn Nile River or something." Similarly, Benning tweaks her makeshift style, dressing it up in musical and visual appropriations, and transforming the homely facts into something absurdly glamorous.

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.

(1.) The story of getting the Fisher-Price PXL-2000 camera has been published in a number of accounts, among them Bill Horrigan, "Sadie Benning or the Secret Artist," Art Journal, Winter 1995, p. 27. Horrigan writes, "Among video producers, the Fisher-Price toy camera enjoys a cult status not unlike that of the Diana still-photo camera among photographers."

(2.) For a useful article on the more technical aspects of Pixelvision, see michaeloreilly.com/pixelpage.html.

(3.) Benning's 1992 Pixelvision video It Wasn't Love was included in the 1993 Whitney Biennial, at which time it was claimed Benning was the youngest artist ever to have been selected for the exhibition. She returned to the Biennial in 2000 with her film Flat Is Beautiful (1998).

(4.) In a number of interviews, Benning speaks of the loneliness of being gay, as for example to Amy Sillman: "I think maybe there is something intrinsic to being queer in the world where there's a kind of loneliness to some degree, in that you don't always have things to identify with. You're looking for those things in signs and in more transitory glances." "Sadie Benning/Amy Sillman: A Conversation," in Sadie Beaning: Suspended Animation, exh. cat., Columbus, Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, 2007, pp. 21-22. See also Benning with Solveig Nelson, in Retrospective: Sadie Benning, Columbus, Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, 2004, p. 12, an enlightening interview throughout.

(5.) Benning tells Nelson, "I was really affected by the Atlanta child murders, even though it wasn't my family, it wasn't me, but I identified with a fear of being stolen or murdered.... When I had nightmares [my grandma] told me that bad things happen to bad people. I knew even as a child that that wasn't right, that tragedy can happen to anyone." She was just five and six at the time. Ibid., p. 9.

(6.) As drummer and singer, Benning cofounded the rock band Le Tigre with Kathleen Hanna and Johanna Fateman in 1998. Performances included slideshows by Benning. She left the band in 2001, and the artist JD Samson joined. Le Tigre disbanded earlier this year.

(7.) By contrast, German Song (1995), shot in black-and-white video and Super-8, is set to a single song of that title by the indie group Come. There's no dialogue in the film.

(8.) Another precedent is her 1995 The Judy Spots, five shorts following the grim adventures of a papier-mache teenager, which aired on MTV in 1998.

(9.) According to its Web site, the Wexner offers an "advanced video suite and editing studio," with equipment and technical support, to some 20 artists per year; Benning worked there on Play Pause.

"Sadie Benning: Suspended Animation" appeared at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus [Jan. 26-Apt 15, 2007], and was accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Eileen Myles, Helen Molesworth and Aleksandar Hermon, and an interview with Amy Sillman. Play Pause will be screened for three days in Dia's Chelsea space, New York, Sept. 13-15, and included in the San Diego Museum of Art's "Animated Painting" [Oct. 13-Dec. 30]. A one-person gallery exhibition of a video, drawings and wall sculptures opens at Orchard, New York, Sept. 9 [through Oct. 7].

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