The Wipe: Sadie Benning’s Queer Abstraction

Wipe, Montana Gold Banana and Ace Fluorescent Green (figure 1) is a small painted object hanging on a white gallery wall. The object is composed of two distinct wood panels, and its surface is built up with modeled joint compound and plaster, then sanded and covered with high gloss and matte spray paint. “Montana gold banana” refers to the painted color of a small yellow triangle that fits into a larger panel, painted Ace fluorescent green, while “wipe” refers to the physical break between panels, the line by which they are joined and separated. The soft edges of each panel have the promise of puzzle pieces, yet they never coalesce into a whole. Their taffy-colored monochrome surfaces undulate with shades of spray-painted color, their modeled facades bubbling out to exceed the sharp boundaries that would characterize a painted canvas. They are not entirely smooth and are slightly damaged, marked and scratched by the artist’s hand.

This little object is part of a larger series, Transitional Effects (2010–11), by Sadie Benning. These paintings were made by the same video artist who rose to fame through the gay and lesbian film festival circuit in 1990 and became the youngest artist to be included in the Whitney Biennial in 1993.¹ Using a Pixelvision toy camera and the materials available in the artist’s childhood bedroom, fifteen-year-old Sadie Benning recorded an experience of queer youth in the early 1990s. Gritty and diaristic, Benning’s multiple self-representations through the Riot Grrrl punk aesthetics of the Pixelvision are explicitly queer and feminist in form and content. The grainy, high-contrast black-and-white images and the compressed spatial format of these videos render the young Benning in intimate yet disorienting proximity to the viewer as the artist speaks directly into the camera. This specific aesthetic quality yielded by the technical limitations of the Pixelvision gave it an outsider status associated with alternative subcultures, a subversive medium that lent itself to the personal performances of a young queer artist.

Figure 1.

Sadie Benning, Wipe, Montana Gold Banana and Ace Fluorescent Green, 2011. 21 × 18½ inches. Courtesy of the artist and Callicoon Fine Arts, New York.

Benning’s paintings have developed in continuity with these videos. The paintings expand the artist’s concerns with smallness of scale, the use of unlikely or low-quality materials, and an emphasis on medium-specific properties that also point to the constructed nature of these images. While Benning’s paintings and videos share these concerns, the overall shift from video to abstract aesthetics sparks questions about the viability of painting in queer creative practice and, perhaps more crucially, troubles normative accounts of abstraction. Indeed, how do we approach an artist whose work characteristically addresses queer and feminist concerns but who also works in an abstract painterly style that would seem to obscure the specificity of bodies and lives, where form and content seem to be in total conflict? In other words, how can we understand abstraction as a tactic of queering? I would like to take the artist’s turn from direct reference to abstraction seriously as an opportunity to approach the larger question of whether the queer capacity of a work depends on our knowledge of the artist’s identity or desires.

Benning’s objects do queer work in multiple ways by taking on, occupying, and dramatizing some central aspects of abstraction’s history in order to render them differently and by refusing the particular types of naming by which abstract forms might be settled or made definitively legible. This is not a kind of minoritarian difference that resolves, however, and instead is a differing that is both transitional and destabilizing. Benning’s tactics of abstraction demand an understanding of the term “queer” as a verb rather than simply a noun or stable identity signifier; what I am calling “queer” performs as a disruption of the normative, the expected, and the intuitive. This conception of queering falls in line with that of David Eng, along with J. Jack Halberstam...