At age 17, I began recording videos on my malfunctioning Acer laptop’s webcam. I was inspired by YouTube self-talk videos where YouTubers would talk about the triumphs and tribulations of their lives. I was part of the hunt for a medium to journal my days without having to scribble for hours in my diary. This nouveau pursuit, though short-lived, felt cathartic not because I could process the state of affairs but because being in front of the camera would fill me with different concerns for those few minutes. I felt like a performer, someone in charge, someone in power.
The camera witnessed a teenager’s confusion, utter melodrama, and sometimes wrath. I talked about concerns such as body image issues, familial conflicts, academic pressure, and a whole lot more existential longings in those videos that I believed were deeply personal, something not to be shared ever, something that was anything but a film. Though, in retrospect, the themes seem universal. I refrained from revisiting those videos until I misplaced them several years ago.
When I see American artist Sadie Benning’s video works, I see a glimpse of what we call ‘the personal is political’. Sadie (they/them), daughter of avant-garde filmmaker James Benning, began making video diaries as a 15-year-old through a ‘Fisher Price Pixelvision toy camera’ inside their bedroom. A thick black border wraps the footage of what we can also call their video diaries. The camera’s strong whirring sound is perpetually present in these films. This series of work made them the youngest artist at the Whitney Biennale in 1993.
Given how most videos are shot in the bedroom—with whatever was available to them—the work evolved in a highly personal space. Themes of transnational, transracial, and trans-sexuality hold relevance in this body of work that also made Benning a voice for queer youth in the 1990s. Not only did their work find resonance among gay and lesbian circuits, but it also created a rupture into the scope of non-fiction filmmaking and how the digital could be an important tool for gender minorities to reflect, introspect, and comment. Among scholars, Benning’s work is studied as a case of self-representation in the post-cinema verite age that pushes the boundaries of autobiographical video art. Most importantly, their work is a noteworthy intervention in the timeless question, ‘What at all is a film?’
Routinely oscillating between harsh realities and a teasing allure, Benning’s works are evocative, experimental, and at times far-reaching, giving away the thought process and intimate revelations of a teenager with honesty, humor, and implicit unease.
Into the ‘I’
Benning started creating these videos in 1989. These first sets of videos are relatively difficult to decipher and of a lower quality than the rest of the works, seemingly because of the technical difficulties in editing the Pixelvision videos. The later works from 1991 onwards are of better visual quality and way easier to watch, primarily because of fewer editing glitches.
A New Year (1989) starts with Benning’s realization of how they feel everyone around them is “crazy”. Benning tells the tale of a friend who was raped by a Black man and how that experience transformed the friend into a racist Nazi. Accompanied by everyday visuals of playing cards, view from the window and segments from the television, the film is the viewer’s entry into Benning’s world.
A step further, Living Inside (1989) is a warm-up to Benning’s voice and being. It introduces the viewer to their life, their ruminations of time and the world, their longing to escape school, and more. The film seems to have been shot when Benning was confined to their room and not attending school (‘I should be in study hall right now. Studying. I have not gone to school in a week.’). Furthermore, Living Inside also sets the ground to address themes of adolescence (‘I hate school.’, ‘I only have one friend.’), which makes Benning representative of a universal set of people who go through similar experiences. This also makes Benning’s work collectivistic and explains why it can be characterized as transnational.
Exploring Benning’s immediate environment and their world creates an immersive experience and lays the groundwork for the narratives to follow, which only extends to their next film, Me and Rubyfruit (1989). Herein, Benning is in a conversation with themself about girl-girl marriage. In comparison to the previous works, Me and Rubyfruit can be considered the first video diary wherein Benning adopts the narrative of coming out as queer.
Video Confessions and Performance of the Self
In If Every Girl Had A Diary (1990), the camera focuses on a very zoomed Benning’s eyes where they talk about being referred to as a dyke—a homophobic slur for lesbian women—and the constant anxiety that follows with being in a room full of people. In one scene from the film, Benning’s hand appears against an all-black background. They move their hand for some time and then curl and uncurl their fingers to form a fist as we hear Benning talk about what it feels like to be in a crowd. “Attention makes me nervous…. I start to feel more different now, even in this room with eight hundred million other faces,” they say. The 9-minute film is almost as if Benning is coming out to themself. Thus, what seems like a ‘home video’ is made deictic by Benning by showing rather than just telling.
Progressing more towards performance, their next film, Jollies (1990), is more descriptive and confessional than the works before. The film opens with Barbie dolls facing the camera and then facing each other while Benning talks about how they realized they were queer. They begin talking about their first crush on twins from their kindergarten class in 1978. The camera focuses on their lips while they tell us about them, enunciating the words. It is an exciting juxtaposition of light-hearted seduction from the video and humor from the confessional voiceover.
Over the next seven minutes in this 11-minute video, Benning continues to talk about other encounters with boys and how those encounters brought them closer to women and helped them embrace queer identity. The film juxtaposes audio and video such that one without the other will not give the viewer a clear understanding of the narrative. In the voiceover, Benning tells us that they were naked with a 16-year-old boy when they were 12; the video right after shows the text, ‘I never touched his dick, and I started kissing girls’. The visual of two people kissing follows this, one of them being Benning. Jollies is thus a highly performative piece of work, crafted wisely and way more evenly paced than their other films, that seeks to celebrate female sexuality.
With Jollies, Benning informs the viewer of the realization of their lesbian identity with an air of celebration. The videos of dolls are followed by a glimpse of their moments with presumably a girlfriend; Benning attempts to respond to their nascent sexuality and the inherent morbidness of being queer. The film ends with Benning shaving their face for two minutes until they sit in front of the camera wearing a shirt and tie. “I am not a man,” they say and continue staring at the camera. The film concludes with the text, “I found I was as queer as I can be.” This piece is not merely intimate and confessional but also highly radical. The act of writing text on dollar bills, shaving on camera, and the larger DIY-esque, experimental nature of the film add overtones of subversion. Music and sound in this film and others add to this message.
In all of Benning’s films, there is a strange sense of intimacy. Their voice is partly the reason that evokes an emotional response from the viewers. The music employed often accentuates the emotions being explored. Together, the sound design has a solid affective impact on the viewer. In contrast, Benning’s body language and facial gestures are more exaggerated and expressive. The written statements also emphasize critical moments in the narrative style and often serve as a moment of amazement for the viewer—for instance, in the case of Girl Power, Part 1 (1992).
Benning says, “The world outside my bedroom window was brutal and ugly. I wondered how I would survive, how I would escape.” The sentence is a nightmarish view into the film’s subject matter that showcases a boisterous vision of being a radical girl in the 90s. The film features archival footage of pop culture figures like American actor Matt Dillon and American rock band Blondie, found footage from security cameras, clips of wars, explosions, and other segments from television that feature speeches by politicians such as George Lincoln Rockwell, a Nazi Party leader. Girl Power thus redefines the dynamics of female youth’s visual representation, departing from conventional notions of passivity and polite conformity to embrace notions of radical autonomy and self-defined sexual identity.
Afterthoughts
With humor, candor, disillusionment, and sadness, Benning has revealed their complex personality—with each video, in each year—taking the viewer through the process of maturing as an artist and an individual. Benning’s works illustrate several teenagers across borders who seek to find recluse in listening to music, writing poetry, or drawing paintings. At the same time, Benning can be considered the mouthpiece of gay youth from the 1990s if at all they had some form of mainstream representation. This makes these works an essential case wherein Benning seems to carry the weight of survival, highlighting the struggles and resilience of those whose voices are not typically heard or acknowledged in society.
My initial conflict while watching their work was, ‘If this is art, then what do we call the vlogs we see on YouTube and Instagram? Why does this work, which seemed highly experimental decades ago, hold no novelty today?’
While engaging with Benning’s video diaries, I have somewhat unraveled the answer. Benning’s techniques of reenactment, close-up monologues, and filming the mundane juxtaposed with fragments of pop culture music make TikTok and Instagram so popular and relevant today. However, the same is not as revolutionary as today, mainly because what was perceived as the democratization of technology today has transitioned into privatization and commodification.
It also makes sense why, when the entire world has become accustomed to Benning’s approach, Benning moved on to other forms of art, particularly resin and enamel-based abstract paintings. In an interview, Benning mentioned how the entire process of making a film, the shooting, the editing, and the dissemination, depends significantly on large corporations. Even when they want to work against capitalist structures, modes like such do not leave an option (Stocker, 2022).
There has been a more significant loss of faith in the power of the internet, which is not an anomaly in the art world today. Benning has moved on to other forms that bring with it freedom, meaning, and a space to create work that has meaning. Honestly, I see Benning’s power as an artist in this act of walking away.
Article Courtesy of Anjani Chadha
Feature Image of Sadie Benning via Senses of Cinema