Sadie Benning
Encyclopedia
Sadie Benning is a video
maker, visual artist, and musician
.
She first made her name in the early 1990s as a teenage video maker from Milwaukee, Wisconsin
. Raised by her mother in inner-city Milwaukee, Benning left school at age 16, primarily due to the homophobia she experienced. Her earliest works, made from the time she was 15, were shot with the Fisher-Price Pixelvision camera, which recorded pixelated, black and white video images onto standard audio cassettes. The Fischer-Price PXL-2000 camera used in her early works that brought her to the spotlight was a Christmas gift from her father, experimental filmmaker James Benning
. At first Sadie was standoffish to the PixelVision camera. "I thought, 'This is a piece of shit. It's black-and-white. It's for kids. He'd told me I was getting this surprise. I was expecting a camcorder." The majority of her shorts combined performance, experimental narrative, handwriting, and cut-up music to explore, among other subjects, gender and sexuality. Her work was twice included in the Whitney Biennial
.
In Sadie’s earlier works, A New Year, Living Inside, Me and Rubyfruit, Jollies, and If Every Girl Had a Diary all use Benning’s isolated surroundings and herself as the main focus in her videos. In her earliest work, A New Year Sadie shies away from the front of the camera, using her surroundings, which was primarily the confines of her room and her bedroom window, to portray her feelings of angst, confusion and alienation. Sadie said in an interview, “I don’t talk, I’m not physically in it, it’s all hand written text, music; I wanted to substitute objects, things that were around me, to illustrate the events. I used objects in the closest proximity – the television, toys, my dog, whatever”
Throughout her body of work the themes explored in A New Year repeat with the theme of exploring her sexual identity and growing up. Benning often used pop culture, such as music, television or newspapers as a means of amplifying her message while parodying the same pop culture at the same time. Often the images she would see on television or movies would piss her off and inspire her further, "They're totally fake and constructed to entertain and oppress at the same time -- they're meaningless to women, and not just to gay women. I got started partly because I needed different images and I never wanted to wait for someone to do it for me". Given her confinement, the use of these mediums in her work is practical and gives insight to the viewer of how Sadie has been mostly interacting with the world.
In 1991, the first article about Benning's work, written by Ellen Spiro
, appeared in the national gay magazine The Advocate
. As her work progressed, Sadie became more comfortable with herself in video she used images of her own body and her voice, creating another important texture to her videos. In works such as If Every Girl Had a Diary, Sadie uses the limitations of the PixelVision to get extreme close ups of her face, eyes, fingers, and other extremities to bring the viewer to a much more intimate and personal level with Sadie, literally pulling the audience right next to her face as she narrates her life and thoughts. Without any regard for a person’s background, race, or sexual identity, Sadie permits the viewer into enter her world, her mind, her cell, her place of refuge and recovery. “Benning’s daring autoerotic and autobiographic videos, her ability to make the camera seem a part of her self, and extension of her body, invite the audience to know her.”
Later in the decade, she co-founded Le Tigre
, the feminist post-punk band whose members include ex-Bikini Kill
singer/guitarist Kathleen Hanna
and zinester Johanna Fateman
. She has since left the band.
In 2004, Bill Horrigan curated a retrospective of her works on video. In 2006, in collaboration with Solveig Nelson, she created Play Pause - a two-screen projected video installation. It was debuted at the Wexner
in 2007 as part of the exhibition, "Sadie Benning: Suspended Animation." In September 2007, "Play Pause" was exhibited at the Dia Center
in NYC. Concurrent with the Dia installation, the collaboratively run Orchard Gallery exhibited her abstract drawings, video installation, wall sculptures, and "play/pause" records in the solo show, "Form of...a waterfall." Two works from this exhibition were included in the 2007 White Columns
Annual.
Recent exhibitions include Play Pause, Power Plant Gallery (2008) and 7th Gwangju Biennale (2008).
Benning has received grants and fellowships from Guggenheim Foundation, Andrea Frank Foundation, National Endowment of the Arts, and Rockefeller Foundation. Awards include Wexner Center Residency Award in Media Arts, National Alliance for Media Arts & Culture Merit Award, Grande video Kunst Award, and the Los Angeles Film Critics Circle Award. She received her M.F.A. from Bard College. Her videos are distributed by Video Data Bank.
Directed by Sadie Benning in collaboration with Solveig Nelson, Drawings and Sound by Sadie Benning
2003: One Liner (5:07, installation, b&w video/ Pixelvision)
2003: The Baby (5:40, installation, color digital video/ drawings on paper)
1999: Le Tigre Slide Show (slide installation projected during Le Tigre performances, 40:00, drawings & color slides)
1999: Le Tigre, recorded with Kathleen Hanna and Johanna Fateman (vinyl & cd)
1998: Flat is Beautiful (56:00, black & white video/ Pixelvision, 16mm, and Super 8), co-starring Mark Ewert
1995: German Song, collaboration with Come (6:00, black & white video/ Super 8 film)
1995: The Judy Spots (12:30, color video/ 16 mm film), produced by Elisabeth Subrin
1992: Girl Power (15:00, black & white video/ Pixelvision)
1992: It Wasn’t Love (19:06, black & white video/ Pixelvision)
1991: A Place Called Lovely (13:40, black & white video/ Pixelvision)
1990: Jollies (11:18, black & white video/ Pixelvision)
1990: Welcome to Normal (20:00, color video/ Hi 8)
1990: If Every Girl Had a Diary (8:56, black & white video/ Pixelvison)
1989: Living Inside (5:06, black & white video/ Pixelvision)
1989: Me & Rubyfruit (5:31, black & white video/ Pixelvision);
1989: A New Year (5:57, black & white video/ Pixelvision)
Video
Video is the technology of electronically capturing, recording, processing, storing, transmitting, and reconstructing a sequence of still images representing scenes in motion.- History :...
maker, visual artist, and musician
Musician
A musician is an artist who plays a musical instrument. It may or may not be the person's profession. Musicians can be classified by their roles in performing music and writing music.Also....* A person who makes music a profession....
.
She first made her name in the early 1990s as a teenage video maker from Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Milwaukee is the largest city in the U.S. state of Wisconsin, the 28th most populous city in the United States and 39th most populous region in the United States. It is the county seat of Milwaukee County and is located on the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan. According to 2010 census data, the...
. Raised by her mother in inner-city Milwaukee, Benning left school at age 16, primarily due to the homophobia she experienced. Her earliest works, made from the time she was 15, were shot with the Fisher-Price Pixelvision camera, which recorded pixelated, black and white video images onto standard audio cassettes. The Fischer-Price PXL-2000 camera used in her early works that brought her to the spotlight was a Christmas gift from her father, experimental filmmaker James Benning
James Benning (film director)
James Benning is an American filmmaker. He is the son of German immigrants and studied film at the University of Wisconsin–Madison under the tutelage of David Bordwell. Working as an independent filmmaker, Benning's films focus on a sense of place, and are often built from long, unedited takes...
. At first Sadie was standoffish to the PixelVision camera. "I thought, 'This is a piece of shit. It's black-and-white. It's for kids. He'd told me I was getting this surprise. I was expecting a camcorder." The majority of her shorts combined performance, experimental narrative, handwriting, and cut-up music to explore, among other subjects, gender and sexuality. Her work was twice included in the Whitney Biennial
Whitney Biennial
The Whitney Biennial is a biennale exhibition of contemporary American art, typically by young and lesser known artists, on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, USA. The event began as an annual exhibition in 1932, the first biennial was in 1973...
.
In Sadie’s earlier works, A New Year, Living Inside, Me and Rubyfruit, Jollies, and If Every Girl Had a Diary all use Benning’s isolated surroundings and herself as the main focus in her videos. In her earliest work, A New Year Sadie shies away from the front of the camera, using her surroundings, which was primarily the confines of her room and her bedroom window, to portray her feelings of angst, confusion and alienation. Sadie said in an interview, “I don’t talk, I’m not physically in it, it’s all hand written text, music; I wanted to substitute objects, things that were around me, to illustrate the events. I used objects in the closest proximity – the television, toys, my dog, whatever”
Throughout her body of work the themes explored in A New Year repeat with the theme of exploring her sexual identity and growing up. Benning often used pop culture, such as music, television or newspapers as a means of amplifying her message while parodying the same pop culture at the same time. Often the images she would see on television or movies would piss her off and inspire her further, "They're totally fake and constructed to entertain and oppress at the same time -- they're meaningless to women, and not just to gay women. I got started partly because I needed different images and I never wanted to wait for someone to do it for me". Given her confinement, the use of these mediums in her work is practical and gives insight to the viewer of how Sadie has been mostly interacting with the world.
In 1991, the first article about Benning's work, written by Ellen Spiro
Ellen Spiro
Ellen Spiro is an American documentary filmmaker. Spiro is known for making humorous social issue films for national and international television broadcasts and theatrical release....
, appeared in the national gay magazine The Advocate
The Advocate
The Advocate is an American LGBT-interest magazine, printed monthly and available by subscription. The Advocate brand also includes a web site. Both magazine and web site have an editorial focus on news, politics, opinion, and arts and entertainment of interest to LGBT people...
. As her work progressed, Sadie became more comfortable with herself in video she used images of her own body and her voice, creating another important texture to her videos. In works such as If Every Girl Had a Diary, Sadie uses the limitations of the PixelVision to get extreme close ups of her face, eyes, fingers, and other extremities to bring the viewer to a much more intimate and personal level with Sadie, literally pulling the audience right next to her face as she narrates her life and thoughts. Without any regard for a person’s background, race, or sexual identity, Sadie permits the viewer into enter her world, her mind, her cell, her place of refuge and recovery. “Benning’s daring autoerotic and autobiographic videos, her ability to make the camera seem a part of her self, and extension of her body, invite the audience to know her.”
Later in the decade, she co-founded Le Tigre
Le Tigre
Le Tigre is an American electroclash band, formed by Kathleen Hanna and Johanna Fateman in 1998. It also featured Sadie Benning from 1998 until 2001, and JD Samson for the rest of the group's run...
, the feminist post-punk band whose members include ex-Bikini Kill
Bikini Kill
Bikini Kill was an American punk rock band formed in Olympia, Washington in October 1990. The group consisted of vocalist and songwriter Kathleen Hanna, guitarist Billy Karren, bassist Kathi Wilcox, and drummer Tobi Vail. The band is widely considered to be the pioneer of the riot grrrl movement,...
singer/guitarist Kathleen Hanna
Kathleen Hanna
Kathleen Hanna is an American musician, feminist activist, and punk zine writer. In the early- to mid-1990s she was the lead singer and songwriter of Bikini Kill, before fronting Le Tigre in the late 1990s and early 2000s...
and zinester Johanna Fateman
Johanna Fateman
Johanna Fateman is a writer, songwriter, musician, and record producer. She is a member of the post-punk rock band Le Tigre and founded the band MEN with Le Tigre bandmate JD Samson.-Background and career:...
. She has since left the band.
In 2004, Bill Horrigan curated a retrospective of her works on video. In 2006, in collaboration with Solveig Nelson, she created Play Pause - a two-screen projected video installation. It was debuted at the Wexner
Wexner Center for the Arts
The Wexner Center for the Arts is The Ohio State University’s multidisciplinary, international laboratory for the exploration and advancement of contemporary art...
in 2007 as part of the exhibition, "Sadie Benning: Suspended Animation." In September 2007, "Play Pause" was exhibited at the Dia Center
Dia Art Foundation
Dia Art Foundation is a non-profit organization that initiates, supports, presents, and preserves art projects. It was established in 1974 as the Lone Star Foundation by Philippa de Menil, the daughter of Houston arts patron Dominique de Menil and an heiress to the Schlumberger oil exploration...
in NYC. Concurrent with the Dia installation, the collaboratively run Orchard Gallery exhibited her abstract drawings, video installation, wall sculptures, and "play/pause" records in the solo show, "Form of...a waterfall." Two works from this exhibition were included in the 2007 White Columns
White Columns
White Columns is New York City’s oldest alternative non-profit space and one of its most prestigious. White Columns is known as a show case for up and coming artists....
Annual.
Recent exhibitions include Play Pause, Power Plant Gallery (2008) and 7th Gwangju Biennale (2008).
Benning has received grants and fellowships from Guggenheim Foundation, Andrea Frank Foundation, National Endowment of the Arts, and Rockefeller Foundation. Awards include Wexner Center Residency Award in Media Arts, National Alliance for Media Arts & Culture Merit Award, Grande video Kunst Award, and the Los Angeles Film Critics Circle Award. She received her M.F.A. from Bard College. Her videos are distributed by Video Data Bank.
Works
2006: Play Pause (29:21, two channel video installation from hard drive, color digital video/ drawings on paper).Directed by Sadie Benning in collaboration with Solveig Nelson, Drawings and Sound by Sadie Benning
2003: One Liner (5:07, installation, b&w video/ Pixelvision)
2003: The Baby (5:40, installation, color digital video/ drawings on paper)
1999: Le Tigre Slide Show (slide installation projected during Le Tigre performances, 40:00, drawings & color slides)
1999: Le Tigre, recorded with Kathleen Hanna and Johanna Fateman (vinyl & cd)
1998: Flat is Beautiful (56:00, black & white video/ Pixelvision, 16mm, and Super 8), co-starring Mark Ewert
Mark Ewert
Marcus Ewert, previously known as Mark Ewert, is an American writer, actor and director, living in San Francisco.Marcus Ewert began making and appearing in films in the 1990s. He has appeared in the Gus Van Sant short film Four Naked Boys and a Gun, in Sadie Benning's Flat Is Beautiful, and the...
1995: German Song, collaboration with Come (6:00, black & white video/ Super 8 film)
1995: The Judy Spots (12:30, color video/ 16 mm film), produced by Elisabeth Subrin
Elisabeth Subrin
Elisabeth Subrin is a Brooklyn-based film and video artist and curator.-Biography:In 1990 she received a B.F.A. in film from Massachusetts College of Art. She then received an M.F.A. in video from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1995, where she stayed to teach in the First Year...
1992: Girl Power (15:00, black & white video/ Pixelvision)
1992: It Wasn’t Love (19:06, black & white video/ Pixelvision)
1991: A Place Called Lovely (13:40, black & white video/ Pixelvision)
1990: Jollies (11:18, black & white video/ Pixelvision)
1990: Welcome to Normal (20:00, color video/ Hi 8)
1990: If Every Girl Had a Diary (8:56, black & white video/ Pixelvison)
1989: Living Inside (5:06, black & white video/ Pixelvision)
1989: Me & Rubyfruit (5:31, black & white video/ Pixelvision);
1989: A New Year (5:57, black & white video/ Pixelvision)