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Artist of the Week

Sadie Benning

Born April 11, 1973, 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 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. 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.

Interview

Me and Ruby Fruit (1989)

(No Artist Website Exists)

Questions of the week

* Did anyone critique your work this week? If so, what were their impressions?

My work was “critiqued” this week. I quote critique because the process I’m using to create my piece is very hard to critique in class. The comments were definitely helpful and I was very excited to show some footage never screened before. The response was helpful.

* What was the most motivational or creative moment of the past week?

Viewing the more intimate footage recorded at the clinic with the studio group. The footage
made me smile, and it made me feel more open to showing those moments in my work.

* What do you want to achieve in next week's studio practice?
Shoot, shoot, shoot

* What did you achieve in your studio this past week?

Shot some footage from the clinic, screened the footage, got excellent feedback.

* What has been an artistic failure this week?

Not always having the camera next to me. Not thinking in “constant documentary” mode.

* What was the most profound thought in relation to your practice this week?

Showing the private is good.

1 Word

“We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started... and know the place for the first time.”

-T.S. Eliot

Exploration

Exploration. Ex`plo*ra"tion\, n. [L. exploratio: cf. F. exploration.] The act of exploring, penetrating, or ranging over for purposes of discovery, especially of geographical discovery; examination; as, the exploration of unknown countries; (Med.) physical examination.

-Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary

Bill Viola

Viola’s work has always attempted to explore some facet of the human condition. Whether contemplating the death of his mother against the birth of his son, or investigating the natural wonderment of the renaissance painters, Viola has never stopped looking for answers to his own questions.

The Crossing (1996) Video

Acension, 2000 Video

Review:

Can one look a fish in the eye, and what would one see? For most people, warm-blooded animals have the wide eyes and precious smile of a child. In cartoons and fables, they display the warmth and vulnerability, the trickery and genius, of adults. Fish look familiar, too, but also repellant. Meeting their eyes feels like a dead-fish handshake.

One faces a surprisingly similar lens at the Whitney Museum—the video camera of Bill Viola. With a technique rarely matched in art today, not even outside video, Viola searches nature in hope of finding his humanity. What he finds instead are cold comfort and a cartoon of childhood. An earlier review describes my first encounter with Viola's operatic journeys, and a later article reviews his use and abuse of art history. A postscript here brings the saga up-to-date for late 2005.

http://www.haberarts.com/viola2.htm

Derek Jarmen

When Jarmen was diagnosed with AIDS and given months to live he decided to create one last work to explore the waning days of the end of his life. Blue was a beautiful attempt to create a poetic sendoff. Jarmen's works always questioned the purpose of life, even his final piece.

Blue (1993) Video

The Garden (1990) Video

Review:

The spirit of "The Garden," Derek Jarman's virtually wordless 90-minute assemblage of turbulent images, is a peculiar blend of reflectiveness and fury. Mr. Jarman, whose 1987 film "The Last of England" had a comparable free-associative vehemence, this time turns his thoughts to AIDS, Christianity and intolerance, combining these themes into a feverish vision of far-reaching decay.

The passion with which Mr. Jarman attempts this is not accompanied by any fondness for clarity, and so "The Garden" is as mystifying as it is intense. While its larger ideas emerge broadly and unmistakably, there is much to ponder -- in, for instance, an image of the Twelve Apostles as 12 women in babushkas, sitting at a table by the seaside as they solemnly run their fingers around the edges of wine glasses to create an ominous hum.

Cite

Tony Oursler

Oursler's unique direction of video project/installation has allowed him to question and confront human behavior in new and exciting ways. His consistently high crafted works further explore our society in a different way in each creation.

Purple Resonant Dust, (2006) fiberglass sculpture, projector, dvd plaver

Caricature (2002) fiberglas sculpture, projector, dvd plaver

Wall space has always been a hierarchical space. It’s a sacred territory. It seems to belong to the seamless painting. If you’re a painter, you paint from one side of the canvas to the other, and right now ’70s magazine illustration is the vogue.

There’s a history of experimental collage and stuff that’s been glossed over and lost because of people’s notions of craft. If you’re a photographer, it’s like Rauschenberg never happened. You just do huge, gorgeous, seamless photographs, and that’s your craft. It’s a very strange moment. Of course I like to muck it up. It’s just so antithetical to the recent history that I’ve experienced.

I’m really interested in what I call a “shadow history of art.” I’ve written a timeline that’s on my Web site that’s an alternative moving-image history. It begins with the first camera obscura and it ends with somebody injecting glowing jellyfish genes into monkeys. It came out of a feeling that there was no art history written for a video artist or a performance artist or an installation artist. It’s just not there.

-Oursler Artist Statement

Nam June Paik

One of the original pioneers of video art, Nam June Paik embodies the spirit of exploration. His early experiments with the emerging medium of video began a long and fruitful journey of looking for answers to his own questions. His later years saw him trek into the world of modern technology and the connection it has to our society.

Tv Budda (1974) Closed Circuit video installation with bronze sculpture

Video Flag (1985-1996) 70 Video Monitors

Review:

In 1993 for the Venice Biennale, Nam June Paik initially proposed to title his exhibition in the German Pavilion Electronic Super Highway: "Bill Clinton stole my idea!" His brash claim comes from a 1974 document commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation, in which Paik proposed connecting Los Angeles and New York with "multi-layer to broadband communications networks, such as domestic satellites, wave guides, bunches of co-axial cables, and fiber-optics. The expenses would be as high as the moon landing, but the ripple effect 'harvest' of byproducts would be numerous."

As an incredulous curator said: "Frankly, we did not believe you [about Clinton's plan, not Paik's]. However after reading Time . . . we have grown wiser: the Electronic Superhighway is no longer the crazy fiction or an intellectual utopia of a little Korean Guy."(2) Paik concluded his 1974 "media plan" with a second prophesy that had already come true: "One hundred years ago Thoreau wondered: 'Even if the telephone company succeeded in connecting people in Maine with people in Tennessee. what would they have to say to each other?' The rest is history."(3) More of Paik's highways, later.

The old and the new: Nam June Paik - video artist and sculptor

Ross Mcelwee

When I first viewed Mcelwee's film Time Indefinite I was amazed at the wonderful construction of the piece. Mcelwee has been a symbol of exploration, searching for answers about himself and his world in all of his films. If I were to decide the best candidate for this word "exploration" it would be Mcelwee.

Time Indefinite (1993) Film

Sherman's March (1986) Film

Review:

Ross McElwee dismisses the notion of personal documentary, a descriptor that too neatly identifies his style. Though the term “personal” might appeal to his ontological beliefs, his films are never “purely” or systematically autobiographical: each looks to other people for its content. Like all vérité filmmakers, he relies heavily on serendipitous events – what Dziga Vertov called “life caught unawares” (1). His method can be more aptly described as deflective than reflexive. He enters the frame as a person primarily to neuter his presence as a filmmaker. While his films might include a large amount of autobiographical content, McElwee can never be said to be the subject of his own films. Having begun his creative life as a writer, studying under John Hawkes, he accepts William Faulkner’s maxim that “[i]t is himself that every southerner writes about.” However, McElwee’s vision, like his ironic posture, is always double. He finds in his own story the key to unmasking deeper social truths about racial inequity, Southern heritage and white masculinity.

Backyard and Ross McElwee’s Observational Comedy

Alan Berliner

Berliner's documentaries have been a career long search for understanding. Many of his films follow a path of exploration whether it be within in his own family or within himself. His films represent the essence of discovery.

Wide Awake (2006) Film

The Family Album (1986) Film

Review of Wide Awake:

It's possibly Berliner's most personal documentary ever. Though he's investigated his own family in other films, to my knowledge Berliner's never turned the camera on himself in quite such a penetrating manner. Of course, there's a danger there: anyone not familiar with the realm of experimental personal documentary (by now a discreet genre of art film which Berliner's work crucially helped to shape) will wonder how Berliner thinks he can get away with such solipsistic narcissism. But there's something undeniably engaging about the way Berliner presents his fatigue-drunk persona. It's not enough that he sits in his underwear, speaking passages clearly scripted as "natural" directly to the camera with a big radio-style microphone in his face – it's that, as the film goes on, he breaks from the script increasingly often to yell at his crew or to fuss over a line reading. This kind of intertextual awareness doesn't often creep into films like this – if we see a director like Berliner talking into the camera, we're usually just supposed to believe that he's talking directly to us, and directly off the top of his head. Berliner is not just being self-referential by allowing us to see the seams; he's being self-destructive.

Sundance Review: Wide Awake

Su Friedrich

Friedrich’s frustration with the complexities of sexuality and her exploration for answers to the personal dilemmas she has faced in life makes her an excellent candidate for this word: exploration. Her films categorically fall into the realm of the personal while uniting the viewer within the universal.

Sink or Swim (1990) Film

Hide and Seek (1996) Film

Review:

“The Ties That Bind” (1984) is a portrait of Lore Bucher Friedrich as a young woman in Nazi Germany (where she resisted the regime as best she could) and as a long-divorced office worker in 1980’s Chicago. In form, the film might be called a half-interview: the mother is seen and heard, responding to Ms. Friedrich, but the filmmaker is almost always off screen, with her questioning voice represented by those scratchy white letters. The rhythmically patterned silences, coupled with off-center compositions (which give the impression that Ms. Friedrich was cocking her head to one side), make “The Ties That Bind” tender and melancholy, fluid and musical.

The film is confrontational only toward Su Friedrich herself. Would she have done as much in the 1930’s as her mother did? Was she doing nearly enough then, in 1984?

New York Times: Film Review

Jay Rosenblatt

Rosenblatt’s search for a better understanding of self and the world is the reason for his addition to this list. His films have dealt with many issues including boyhood identity and the inherent struggles of being an artist.

The Smell of Burning Ants (1994) Film

Prayer (2002) Film

Review:

The program's other three films -- the 21-minute "Smell of Burning Ants," the 10-minute "Short of Breath" and the one-minute "Restricted" -- distill Mr. Rosenblatt's grim deterministic vision of the socialization process. In "The Smell of Burning Ants," silent home movies accompany Mr. Rosenblatt's first-person interpretation of his boyhood. It is a bleak tale of ritualized desensitization through sports, running with the pack, torturing insects, beating up weaklings and learning not to cry.

In the movie's most ambiguous image, one in which Mr. Rosenblatt implicates himself, the same little boy is shown pointing a gun, then putting his eye to a lens and aiming a camera. Shooting people and shooting movies about people, he suggests, requires a certain detachment. By implication, an extreme disengagement is what allows despots to wreak evil with a clear conscience.

New York Times Review


Sadie Benning

With an experimental filmmaker for a father, Sadie Benning has been taught from an early age the techniques for exploration. Her formative work, dealing with her own identity and sexuality are excellent examples of the exploration of identity.

It Wasn't Love (1992) Video
















If Every Girl Had A Diary (1990) Video
















Review:

Benning's subsequent Pixelvision works - If Every Girl Had a Diary (1990), Jollies (1990), A Place Called Lovely (1991), It Wasn't Love (1992), and Girl Power (1992) - all manage to retain the freshness of the first works, gaining self-confidence and often a sense of self-amused irony along the way. Using the most limited means imaginable to fill the visual field (her own image, written words, bedroom and household objects as props, blurry images abducted from the television screen), Benning has become increasingly adept at masterful sound editing, with her sound tracks acquiring a texture and a frame of reference that's strikingly beyond her years. Possibly her most complex tape thus far, It Wasn't Love has as one of its set pieces a brilliantly constructed montage using Prince's libidinal "I Want To Be Your Lover" to reconceive a sequence from Hollywood's Bad Seed (1956), in which the demonic girl Rhoda caresses her horrified mother with all the moves of an accomplished femme.

Sadie Benning or the secret annex - video artist

Jonas Mekas

Mekas was one of the first to experiment with the self-documentary and helped foster a movement with the experimental film community on his search for answers and exploration.


I am Searching for Nothing (1966) Film

















The Monks of Cinema (1964) Film

















Review:
In retrospect, it seems that Mekas was destined to create a bridge between European avant garde film and the artistic community of 1960s New York. Born in Lithuania in 1922, he emigrated to the US and settled in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 1948, glad to be alive after surviving personal horrors during WWII. Mekas has said that he's in every frame of his films; they're his way of being in the world and touching it at the same time. Film became a way of appreciating, almost literally, every second of his life. He bought a Bolex movie camera — a type powered by a hand wound spring — and began the practice of what he called "single frame filming." That meant he'd load the camera with a roll of movie film, some 2 1/2 minutes' worth, but shoot it ever so slowly: one frame at a time. Projected at slower than the normal 24 frames per second, the objects, people, and landscapes are seen in a kind of animation effect. When he began to screen these films in the early 1950s, his technique was likened to the vision of Cubist painting. But he didn't feel he truly got the hang of the Bolex until about 1965 — just in time for the Vietnam - hippies — Beatles era. Artists and celebrities began to find Mekas and be filmed: John and Yoko, Jacqueline Kennedy, Salvador Dali — the list goes on.

Art Review: Jonas Mekas