Love Begins with a Crush
I’m not even sure where to begin with my art crush on artist Sadie Benning. It’s hard not to get tongue tied when trying to put into words the way her early films made an impression on my UChicago undergrad art school mind. I was studying photography at the time and spending free time going to noise shows and experimental sound events. I was doing the things one does in a privileged academic bubble; trying to live life a little on the edge while simultaneously wanting to hold onto the mundane of the everyday for as long as possible before real life began.
At that time, even though mix CDs were already thing (yep, sigh, I know), I was recording scratch mixtapes by stuffing paper in the small square hole on the underside of the cassette tape to override the prerecorded material. Sometimes I would start by recording my own voice over a song (on tape 1) and then slowly get softer as I faded into another song playing on a second tape (tape 2) and then hit pause part way through the first one. The process involves rewinding a little bit (on tape 2) and then unpausing and starting the process all over again.
There is something magical about looping sounds and disrupting the organized master to produce an audio experience meant for casual listening, when there was absolutely nothing casual about the process of making the tape itself. I still get giddy reminiscing about the hissing sound of tape being smooshed against the interior felt and metal pads. As an act of love, I would give the wily titled mix tape to a friend knowing, full well, that this strange hard object by design would intimately bring us closer together- an audio immersion of unspoken understanding.
There must be a word for this feeling of embodied nostalgia that I am trying to describe here. If you know it, please share it below in the comments. The closest I can get to distilling this feeling is by describing what I call analogue time. Not to be confused with an analogue watch, analogue time is a feeling of love and loss and weird and strange and familiar and new and heartsickness; it’s being in THE FEELS, like a moment of a slow recorded processed images and conversations with interventions mimicking the experience of trying to connect all the things we don’t yet fully comprehend. (No need for a that word, I think we got it, lol.)
Benning attributes this experimental process to a lack of formal training as a painter, explaining, “The history of painting is heavy with arguments, and as much as I am interested in knowing about them conceptually, I don't want to feel oppressed in the studio. I want to be free to try things that don’t make sense yet. I put materials together that maybe shouldn’t be and don’t follow hierarchies.” - Moma Artists Website
You know how sometimes you see art and it’s great, but like not what you are really needing to ignite that feeling of feeling, or what artist Helen Miranda Wilson would later teach me is really a feeling of being turned on? When I saw Sadie Bennings Films during my DOVA (department of visual art) Seminar Class in the early aughts, I was turned on in such a way that only really good unpretentious visual art can do.
These films cut to the quick. They are a lightning connection, like meeting a new friend and deciding that you are going to pass the small talk and dive straight into asking what the definition is of being. These films felt like that then and thankfully still feel like that, making this a rather satisfying long game art crush.