Videos 1991-1995
'When you have lost the words, that’s when you experience what language really is'.
Martin Heidegger
"I am watching It Wasn't Love, Sadie Benning's Pixelvision videotape
from 1992. In it Benning tells the story of a shortlived love affair
that began as a road trip to Hollywood but never got much further
than the parking lot. Not much happens in its plot. The most
arresting moment is when Benning slowly sucks her thumb, inches
away from the unfocusable, low-resolution camera. Yet watching the
tape feels like going on a journey into states of erotic being: the
longing for intimacy with another; the painful and arousing
awareness that she is so close to me yet distinct; being drawn into a
rapport with the other where I lose the sense of my own boundaries;
and the uncanny loss of proportion in which big things slip beyond
the horizon of my awareness while small events are arenas for a
universe of feeling"
Laura U. Marks
There is an erotics to video, a haptic space that is a personal interface, transported to a public shere through technology. My interest in working with video, was intially to document my performances, but I soon realized that the space of video allowed for more intimate play between self, camera, world, other. Public and private collapse and when video can be used as a pencil, paintbrush, or a tube of lipstick.
My early video's employ POV, and each persona I play acts as a video confession. I also employed some van guard tactics, sewing holes in my purse to house a video camera, to take it into a strip club, or ambushing a walgreens with a video camera. These early videos, were experimental in narritive, approach and kind.
Video is a self-reflective device for me to mirror my selves and collective others. Video is a space to draw out the selves, it's an arena to activate the inner performance. Video is the shifting site of contemplation and a mutating place of ideas. Video began has a document of my performances and soon became a narrative itself, where I dramatize the voodoo of the disembodied eye of the camera through space and time.
