James Wickstead designed the Fischer-Price PXL Pixelvision, one of a small number of starter camcorders marketed to children in the late eighties, to produce cheap home videos that mimicked the densely textured monochrome cinematography of Ingmar Bergman. Unsurprisingly, it was discontinued after only a year – the average young American being less appreciative of the European auteur than Wickstead anticipated – but the qualities that made it a commercial failure as a toy secured its status as a cult object. Pixelvision has enjoyed an esteemed afterlife, according to The New York Times, as a “serious cinematographic tool” and DIY countercultural marvel.1 For Gerry Fialka, the director of the video and film festival PXL THIS, it is a revolutionary, democratising medium: “Jean Cocteau said film will become an art when its materials are as cheap as paper and pencil. Pixelvision is like a charcoal sketch.”2 What mattered wasn’t only that the Pixelvision shot hypnotic, ghost-like film that could turn the most mundane event into the kind of video you’d expect to unearth in a rusted time capsule, but that it cost $179 and could record everything, audio and visuals, on a single audiocassette tape. It was both accessible and rarefied – affordable, but increasingly hard to track down. It’s easy to look back now at the lo-fi/high-brow origins of Pixelvision and imagine that it was always destined to become part of the visual arsenal of filmmakers like Michael Almereyda, Richard Linklater and Peggy Ahwesh. But if it wasn’t for a series of short videos shot in the bedroom of Milwaukeean teen Sadie Benning perhaps Pixelvision would’ve gone the same desultory way as its competitor, the TOMY Kid Cam.
In 1989, when they were 15 years old, Sadie Benning was given Fisher-Price’s Pixelvision camcorder for Christmas by their father, the experimental filmmaker James Benning. “This is a piece of shit,” Sadie recalled thinking when they first picked it up. They wanted a real video camera, not a toy. But the Pixelvision was one tenth of the cost of a run-of-the-mill camcorder and it gave Benning the freedom to make videos in their room, on their own, with that charcoal-and-paper independence Pixelvision’s admirers so cherished. The films they ended up making were scripted and edited video diaries, artful and spontaneous, the artist quick, like all teenagers, to expose the gap between presupposed norms and lived reality. They speak to the camera, sometimes directly, other times obliquely, often about the harassment they face as a lesbian, but also about skipping school and hanging out at the bus stop, about the crack problem in their neighbourhood and getting beaten up by a bully, about a friend who got run over by a drunk driver and girls using dyke as a slur, about stomach-churning desire and panic attacks, feeling vengeful, feeling low, or sometimes free, about how capitalism is wrong and men touch themselves at bus stops: “I just realised how crazy everyone is”, “Don’t look at me like that”, “I’ve been feeding my dog”, “I only have one friend”, “Some people are really sick and I’m one of them”, “It’s only been a year ago that I crawled the walls”, “I’m not kidding you”, “We knew enough not to go kissing in front of everyone”, “I know somebody who hates mimes then I told him I was a mime”, “To be alone is to know yourself for you”, “I can imagine a million places I’d rather be”. There are moments of lyrical introspection and macabre anecdote, cut through with a healthy distrust of sympathy or identification. The ability to shoot and edit film in private might have allowed Benning the space to figure out their identity without having to confront the violence it exposed in others, but they never forget that the violence is there. Around the time they got the Pixelvision they stopped attending high school to avoid being subjected to daily institutional harassment: “The world’s not safe, my bedroom is. It’s my space and all my things are mine, and there’s no one there, passing judgement.”3
All of Benning’s early films take place in a bedroom where the blinds are half-closed and the plants dying. There is no way to tell the days apart. The room doesn’t look like a bedroom because there are filing cabinets in the corner, but as Benning is the only one ever in there I think it must be. They talk to themself, and replay a message they left on their own answerphone as if, at one point while they were still outside and engaging with the world, they knew were going to be stuck here soon and for a while, in need of news and human contact. The only dialogue is written on scraps of lined paper, just like you would in a diary, and either panned over or held up to the camera like title cards in a silent film. Sometimes they read the lines out loud but often they don’t; it’s a clever way to stage a conversation with only one performer. Pixelvision’s flat and narrow field of vision distorts what little space there is – one minute we see a kingdom, the next a nutshell. The camera’s slow movements make the air feel heavy and listless, and Benning is too. They drag a comb across carpet, eat pudding from a tin, use the lens as both mirror and filter, peering at themself and pulling faces, using the curved glass to distort and stretch out their features, before flattening them like a shark’s. The Pixelvision demands a leaden pace – any faster and the image would stutter – but this suits Benning, who uses it to conjure the stale air of loneliness and the tenderness of self-exploration. In ‘If Every Girl Had a Diary’ (1990) there are moments when their hands, their eyes, their cheek, are offered up to the camera and glow with pixelated light and an eroticism that borders on spiritual. Moments later, Benning chews something sticky with their mouth open and looks glumly into the distance. Solitude is transcendent and slightly grubby. Watching the films almost feels like experiencing a second adolescence, just hanging around, listless, dreamy and frustrated, waiting for life to start.
This mood hangs over the whole house. ‘Living Inside’ (1989) opens with the observation, “My mom watches Oprah 24-hours a day.” Although both Benning and their mother seem to be alone in their separate rooms, the world finds its way into both through the television. Segments of game shows and soap operas populated by competitively heterosexual blond(e)s, love songs by James Brown and Prince, the front page of a tabloid reporting UFO sightings and sex crimes, a porno mag – mass media gains a heady monopoly over reality when you stop leaving the house. It is a reminder that, even shut away, Benning can’t escape the structural inequalities that forced them inside. “I don’t see my images on TV. That means I’m not valuable,” they told Yablonsky, “even if you’re straight, the representation of women and minorities is just completely warped and constructed to entertain and oppress you.”4 One of the reasons Benning started to make the video diaries was to create their own images, their own language. The consequences of queer erasure are felt in ‘Me and Rubyfruit’ (1989), a video-diary adaptation of Rita Mae Brown’s 1973 lesbian romance novel, when Benning says, after narrating a kiss between the two girls, “My stomach felt funny, does your stomach feel kind of strange?” When it comes to desire language falls away and the teenage couple must sound out their own bodies for clues. Benning splices together the dialogue from Rita Mae Brown’s novel with pornographic images of heterosexual couples in a clinch so that – like a visual punchline – one kind of lust drowns out another. This sense of being overwhelmed (of “wanting to cry out”, of “crawling the walls”) by the images of a society that would rather pretend you didn’t exist permeates the video diaries. Even as Benning retreats home, the only place where you “can know yourself for you, and not who you’re with”, the culture that drove them there presses in on all sides.
Who among us hasn’t longed to detach themselves from society as completely as a bricked-up anchorite or an untethered astronaut? But the solitude in Benning’s video diaries is more like our own compromised, crowded quarantines – on the other side of a thin wall, parents and siblings shift in their seats, make a plate of food, change the channel. Sometimes watching Benning feels like looking inside a cocoon. They are honest. They share more about what it’s like to be inside for longer than three days, what it does to your body and your mind, than most people admit or even have words for. It is depressive. It can be transformative. It has the weight of a John Berryman poem (“heavy bored”) and the density of a journal scribbled by a hungover John Cheever (full of “morbid conclusions”). “When I talk with people,” Cheever wrote, “when I ride on trains, life seems to have some apparent, surface goodness that does not need questioning. When I spend six or seven hours a day at my typewriter, when I try to sleep off a hangover in a broken armchair, I end by questioning everything, beginning with myself.”5 But perhaps these questions need to be asked. Perhaps they’re the kind of questions that only start to get asked when you’re stuck inside. “I’m locked up in this room and I can’t get out,” Kathy Acker writes in Blood and Guts in High School, “Because I’ve been locked up in this room for so long whatever desires are arising in me are rampaging around everywhere as wild and fierce and monstrous as gigantic starving jungle beasts.”6 In Acker’s philosophy, this maddening desire is something to be cultivated, stoked, tended to and nurtured because “every position of desire, no matter how small, is capable of putting to question the established order of a society.”7 Loneliness stokes the self and, whether through a surfeit of desire or doubt, threatens to unravel the social fabric – which is what makes it such a good starting point for the creation of new images. David Wojnarowicz described this social fabric as “pre-invented society”. In a series of tape journals recorded between 1981 and 1989, he lay on his bed and mused that much of his art was made in opposition to the fact that “we’re born into something that’s invented before we’re even conceived.”8 He started making the tapes the year the first cases of AIDS were diagnosed, and he stopped making them not long before his death at the age of 37. In order to separate yourself from the pre-invented world, Wojnarowicz believed, you need to have some time alone. Undistracted, undistilled, uninfluenced. But it is unlikely that his long retreats were freely chosen. Often on heroin, ill or just plain exhausted, Wojnarowicz was an outcast enduring a pandemic that killed his friends and gave pre-invented society the perfect excuse to ramp up their persecution of queer people. The condition of solitude was forced on Benning too. The fact that both artists succeeded in turning this distance into a condition of their self-formation and art-making perhaps says more about their work, their determination, than solitude itself. But chosen or not, privacy and isolation shape the contours of a work. Like most diaries, Wojnarowicz’s tapes are digressive and elliptical, flitting between yesterday’s dramas and last night’s dreams so often that, reading the transcripts, it’s sometimes hard to tell which you are in. Benning’s video diaries, shot in Pixelvision’s fuzzy dream film, resist narrative resolution too. They are, after all, private – or at least mimicking privacy – and free from the burden of having to communicate with an audience. If we want to be understood then we have to submit to language, but diaries (ostensibly) don’t exist to be understood by anyone but their own author. This surfeit of ambiguity was an essential aspect of Wojnarowicz’s work. He thought artists should cultivate “the possibility for unlimited interpretations” through unexpected combinations and collage, and that this was how (by privileging plurality and fluidity) art might fulfil its duty to “apply a tiny amount of pressure against a system that would love to overstep the boundaries of itself. The system of control would willingly jump to fascism if there wasn’t enough pressure on its throat.”9
Benning’s video diaries work to resist the very real threat of violence, both physical and existential, that the outside world poses, but they also raise a conundrum that threatens to deflate Wojnarowicz’s hope. How do you speak about your experiences, or build a shared record of what living feels like, without feeding that same system of control? Privacy and solitude, a space to think and be, might be essential to the creation of new images but what happens when those images go public? Are you alone if you’ve got a camera pointed at you? We still think of privacy in much the same way that we always did – an empty room, a desk – even though privacy, in the old sense, barely exists anymore. The pandemic is a lesson in how quickly the public sphere can move into our private spaces, and how hard it is to re-introduce boundaries once it’s there. We know what it looks like too: multinationals installing spyware on their workers’ computers, managers quietly assuming weekends are theirs to profit from, the daily hum of data-mining. As Sadie Benning said themself, “You can reach more people through the Internet, but who are you reaching?” There’s an uncanniness to the dynamic of an exposed artist and an anonymous audience; as Jacqueline Rose notes, “even the most engaged, enthusiastic audience may have a prurient, or brutal, agenda of its own.”10 Benning was 16 years old when they started making the video diaries; the works document a process of becoming with all the openness of privacy but none of its protections. At the time, however, this intense vulnerability was mitigated by the way the videos were screened and shown. As Lia Gangitano has noted, the systems of distribution were very different in the early nineties, especially within subcultures: “the circulation of Benning’s early video works reflected a pre-Internet sphere of communication (in which letters, zines, and cassettes were sent in the mail), with videos distributed and shared using communal methods, belying notions of the mass consumption of media.”11 Between the loneliness of the private sphere and public violence, there was a community.
The early promise of Pixelvision, as pioneered by Sadie Benning’s video works, was that people would be able to make own images outside systems of control. It’s strange to think that much of the works’ aesthetic – from the short video and close-up monologue, to dramatic re-enactment and spliced appropriation of popular music and entertainment – is now associated with TikTok and its 700 million active users. But I don’t think many people would call this the fulfilment of Cocteau’s dreams. What the form represents now is no longer revolutionary democratisation of self-making, but the commodification and professionalisation of identity. By the time most people in the States had a smartphone in their pocket, Benning’s practice had shifted away from film to three-dimensional, wall-based artworks in coloured resins and enamel – like stills sunk in amber, the newer works look like they’ll outlast us all. Although the video diaries circulated via communal methods, Benning began to have doubts about the Pixelvision itself: the problem with shooting video is that “you need all these tools – the computer, editing software – and are indebted to all these corporations in order to make your work.”12 Benning made the video diaries alone in their room and created every aspect of the work, from the scripts to the music and lighting, independently, but, in reality, they were dependent on displaced labour and decision-making that they had no control over. “During most of the ‘90s I was a stressed-out mess,” Benning admitted, “I was using Hi8 and VHS and Beta – all these mediums that had a limited shelf life and don’t quite exist anymore.”13 Film is particularly defenceless to each new technological update; it’s always at risk of being left behind, lost in the archive, decaying in an obsolete format – like floppy disks and rusted paper clips. The system of control has its own way of keeping up the pressure. Benning started out by wondering who they were when they were alone, and so it makes sense that they would eventually begin to ask what kind of art they would make without Fischer-Price. It’s possible to see their renunciation as prefiguring a general loss of faith in the emancipatory powers of the internet and social media – a sense that the mediums we use to share our thoughts shape them in ways we couldn’t have imagined. In the end, Sadie Benning’s continued search for a shared experience and language outside the pre-invented world led them to choose independence over legibility, ambiguity over meaning.
1. Andrew C. Revkin, ‘As Simple As Black and White: Children’s Toy Is Reborn as an Avant-Gar- de Filmmaking Tool’, The New York Times, 2000. 2. Ibid. 3. Linda Yablon- sky, ‘Sadie Benning by Linda Yablonsky’, BOMB magazine, 1993. 4. Ibid. 5. John Cheever, The Journals of John Cheever, Vintage Classics, 2009. 6. Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School, Penguin Clas- sics, 2017. 7. Ibid. 8. David Wojn- arowicz, The Weight of the Earth: The Tape Journals of Da- vid Wojnarowicz, MIT Press, 2018. 9. Ibid. 10. Jacqueline Rose, ‘Who do you think you are?’, London Review of Books, 2016. 11. Lia Gangitano, ‘Sadie Benning by Lia Gangitano’, BOMB magazine, 2016. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid.
Octavia Stocker is an editor at Juxta Press and ghostwriter based in London.