Radar Redux.com is expanding the traditional concept of journalism, to cover a wide array of Baltimore Arts and Culture.
RADARREDUX: Lets start at the beginning…for us anyway. We first became aware of your work right before you graduated from Towson University here in Baltimore. These first works we recall were on paper. They looked like they were created in homage to American abstract painting of the forties, Toby, Graves, or Rothko. Very earthy and nostalgic. What were you trying to do with your work at that time?
Julie Benoit: Those were prints. I am not sure I would necessarily throw them into the abstraction box, though looking back I can see why you might. Nostalgic…yes, definitely definitely definitely nostalgic. Then I started painting because that’s all I knew I could do at the time. They were easy, they were comfortable, and they were what got me into exhibitions. People “got” them.
I thought they were about ideas at the time but in hindsight I am not so sure they were. They were personal and diary-esque. I was looking at a lot of graffiti and that then influenced my work. I was reading poetry and I would try to include some text into most of my work. I was happiest with these paintings when people stopped long enough when viewing to try and read the illegible text hidden beneath the layers.
RR: I recall these paintings as an interesting change. They were brighter, contained the text you mention and were injected with humor. A whole lot of pink, too. They became very painterly. And you were prolific. Going in different directions at once. Your class at Towson included Seth Adelsberger and Lauren Bender, right? It is interesting how certain people go through schools together and they really excel as a group. That’s how I thought of your class – you seemed to influence one another. It occurs to me you all have a strong sense of “logos” and a strong work ethic. First, can you tell us a little about that “Towson class”? Next, why was the word increasingly important at that time, why did you want people to read a painting? ??(Note to reader: for a history of Benoit’s earlier work see her dorment blog: http://juliebenoit.blogspot.com/)
JB: Yeah I went to college with Seth Adelsberger, Lauren Bender and also Laura Amussen. I felt like we were all really driven then and even now, it is really nice to know that we are all still going pretty full on. It is also nice to see the changes in everyone’s work and watch everyone grow and mature as they make their way through life. Each one of us is still making art and I would say all of us are successful in different ways. That is a really great thing.
After I graduated from college, had no access to a printmaking shop and painting seemed to be the next best thing for me. I never really considered myself a painter painter, if you know what I mean. I think I was just drawing with paint back then. The pink was something I became very obsessed with. Maybe too obsessed – I tend to do that. I was painting with pink, wearing pink, the whole bit.
The word and its importance to me…well I would say that most of the words I included in my paintings were fragments that came from lyrics of music that I listen to or pieces of poems that I read or even things I wrote on my own. One thing I can remember is something along the lines of “and tomorrow I will remember to forget”. As I said earlier, very diary-esque.
RR: So your work was always very personal. Autobiographical with the text and all but it wasn’t overt. I would call it oblique text. Next it started to become more obsessive looking – almost “outsider” like. You moved to New York City for a while, correct? And your work changed drastically at that time. Can you describe that work and what it was about.
JB: I did move to New York for a bit, and while I was there my work did change quite a bit. I was still working with the same palette, maybe a little brighter. While I lived in New York I couldn’t afford a studio, my kitchen table turned into my studio. Naturally all of the work I was making was really tiny and I started using pens and markers on paper, envelopes, napkins, whatever I could find. I spent a lot of time drawing at my little table. I started making these kinds of fantastical text drawings that somehow turned into imaginary mountainscapes and landscapes. Still I think I would call these small works “entries” or maybe even notes of sort. What drove me to make work then was simply the satisfaction of making something. I really felt this need to make a lot of drawings, and to accumulate things. I didn’t live in New York too terribly long; fortunately I got into grad school at MICA and was able to come back to Baltimore.
RR: I really liked those mountainscapes. It is funny you made them in NY city. Where did you grow up and when did you start to think of yourself as an artist? By the time you started grad school your work took a very different turn. It became all text. Obsessive across paper, often the same thing over and over. Tell us about this change and what you were doing and why.
JB: Well, I was going to the country a lot while I was living in NY, so maybe that’s why. I like those mountain drawings too. When I doodle I doodle little mountains so I guess I still kind of always make mountain drawings and landscapes.
I grew up in a little place called Gambrills it is in Maryland, pretty much suburbia. Ever since I was a kid I was making things, but I didn’t call myself an artist until I actually finished college. But as long as I can remember I have always been making things. I am not sure how important that is though. Well maybe it is, who knows?
My work has changed a bit in the past few years for sure, but there parts of the old work that is still there, like the text and the voice are still there. The collecting and accumulating is still with me. ??Grad school has changed my work. I have tried new mediums. Plus I have been immersed in a really smart critical environment. I learned to think in grad school which I never really did they way that I do now. Someone asked me last night what I have learned in grad school and my answer was that I learned to really think. Funny how things work. I really tried to hang onto painting for a while, but eventually I surrendered myself. The thinking I had been doing made the paintings not make sense anymore, they just seemed arbitrary. I have bigger questions now and I was unable to answer them using painting as a tool.
RR: Ah, another suburban born artist. It seems suburbia is a very futile ground for creativity.
Your work is now more conceptual and thought processed now. Yet it remains just as personal as your paintings, actually more so. By this I mean it is concerned with actual relationships between people (and you?) or how people respond to locations, actions, etc. That is what I find appealing about it. It has clarity -is very real, honest and though it uses technology it is not cold or elitist. Can you tell us about this new work from your point of view?
JB: My new work is sound and experiential based. The work I am currently working on is very much about stillness, the stillness of the everyday. I am shooting these incidental moments as I have been calling them. I am interested in bringing attention to what is often overlooked. I have built a bunch of little microphones and I have been placing them out in the world. I have only been shooting outdoors, both in rural and city environments. I am interested in the landscape.
After I set the microphones up, I take a video of them as they record. I have been shooting in 6-minute timeframes. After I am done shooting I place the shot into a sequence using the program Final Cut Pro for editing. In this process I am not changing anything that I have shot. Honesty is really important to me in my work. I don’t want to hide anything nor do I want to remove anything. I am gathering these small ordinary things that happen, capturing them in real time and giving them back to you in real time. It is important that I am honest in this delivery.
I am very interested in the camera’s “long shot”, the long shot of nothing. I am interested in the act of slowing down. I am interested in what happens when looking and listening. I have been reading a bit of film theory and looking at a few filmmakers and their thinking in terms of the long shot; Andrei Tarkovsky, Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, James Benning, are just a few. I am interested in all the little subtle things that take place within the long shot that are often ignored; the bugs crawling by, clouds passing, the natural changes in light, a blade of grass barely moving, a siren passing in the distance. Seeing these things happen and being aware of them when they are happen is what gets really get me excited.
I am in the process of building an archive of these moments. See here I go again accumulating; I can’t get away from it. These shots were much more personal in the beginning of this project when I was still including text in them and the narrative maybe lyrical voice. The voice of “me” seemed a little bit elitist and I really don’t want to fall into that trap. So I am now to approaching these with a more epic voice I guess, the voice of “the us”, the collective voice. I have been trying to stay away from the “I” and “me” that I was at one point very immersed in. I couldn’t remove the text completely though, so the text you see in this work just puts these moments into a specific place and time, the rest is up to the viewer.
I feel it is working when people tell me how they cant get one of these clips I have made out of their head, or when they tell me they are “seeing” my work all the time now. I feel like those are the people that get it and that is really exciting to me. I still think there is something that ties this video work to my older work. After all, I am still the one making this work.
This work has been a tough to exhibit. I am running into problems in that aspect. I have definitely lessened my opportunities to exhibit with this new work. This is all right with me. I know that there will be places to show this work when the time is right. The work I am making is not really a sellable thing these days, so it doesn’t fit commercial venues. I am okay with that.
RR: I imagine some people find it hard to understand at first because of its potent “nothingness”. Of course this is the aspect that is most appealing. There is beauty and clarity in this sound/video moments, yet they also are playful and real. In what way does your practice differ from film or experimental cinema? How do you see yourself in relationship to current art practice such as video or performance.
JB: Honestly as of now nobody aside from my grad school colleagues (and my boyfriend Mike) – nobody else has seen any of this new work, so I am interested in how it will be perceived by others. This work definitely needs time to contemplate, and if one is not willing to give it time then they definitely will not understand it. I assume many folks will spend a few minutes with it, if that, and be done and they probably wont get it. And that’s fine too. I admire artists James Benning and also Bruce McClure for forcing the audience to give their work time. They leave the audience with no other option but to sit and be a part of the work, and I really like that about them.
I am not sure where my work fits in terms of film/video studies. I don’t feel as though the work has any sort of a linear narrative, so it is experimental I guess, but really what does that mean anymore. And if one goal of experimental film is to place the audience in a more active and thoughtful relationship to the film well then I guess is shares that goal. But do we call it experimental video? I have no idea…not yet at least. I suppose I haven’t given this a whole lot of thought…. I sort of see myself as maybe an experimental landscape video maker or something. How is that? Is that allowed? I don’t set out to make a “film” film. But these clips are a part of an archive; maybe I am an experimental documentary landscape video maker. Yeah that’s it, that’s what I feel like right now.
RR: That works. It exemplifies another aspect I find appealing about these videos and your body of work in general. It is what it is. It is based in reality. Little artifice. It does demand people stick with it but in a meditative way. You walk dogs for a living. These current video “documentary landscapes” have a kind of “dog perspective”. There is something very down to earth hyper sensory about them. Have you considered this?
JB: I am part owner of Walk the Dog, and have been walking dogs for like 10 years now. It is my job. I do love walking dogs, it has enabled me to have a lot of freedom that I could not have if I had a 9-5-type job. That said I do not consider these shots to be of a “dogs view”. They are shot the way they were because that is how I ended up shooting them when I brought video into the work. I was shooting them prior with a still camera and sort of a bird’s eye view but that wasn’t working for me because it was leaving out the background and I really found the background to be important. Setting the video camera up on the ground was good for keeping the shot still when I didn’t have a tripod around.
The “down to earth” thing, well I think that is just who I am. The hyper sensory part, yes I have become really aware of this. A while ago I read a book called Deep Listening by Pauline Oliveros and it made me really become more in tune with my own awareness and consciousness. It made me become interested in listening vs. hearing; seeing vs. looking. There are a bunch of listening exercises in this book and I was like I am going to try this. The exercises caused me to really slow down and pay attention to my own everyday. As a result of doing so I began making this work and became I have become hyper aware like all the time. There is this button and I can’t turn it off sometimes. It is like having eyes in the back of your head.
RR: Pauline Oliveros is amazing - a major new music pioneer. I can see her influence. But with your work you get rid of the instruments and use found “life” as sound, which takes it a step further. Your compositions are of the world.
This sort of “hyper awareness” sounds like it could be overwhelming at times. Is it?
JB: Oliveros is amazing, she is a great musician. I am less interested in her actual music-I am really most interested in her deep listening practices. I am interested in what she has to say about listening and awareness and her techniques in helping to do so. I am not interested in playing instruments, as I am not a musician. I mean don’t get me wrong I love music, and it is a huge part of my life, but I have no interest in playing it. Well at least not in any traditional sense. I enjoy the sound of the environment, of the city, of the country, of the suburbs, everywhere. I guess it would be easiest to say I love the sound of the outside world. I love that silence never happens when one puts their self in that place outdoors. I love all of the layers of what happens in the world constantly and the simultaneity of everything that is happening all around us, it is really exciting. It’s like you could be so visually focused on this little ant walking on your porch while in the distance there is a siren nearing, and further away I can hear a train is honking its horn, and before I know it there is a group of kids screaming at each other as they are walking down the street, the neighbor slams the door, the dogs are barking, all of a sudden the ant is gone you lost it, that’s what happens it is life is happening. These little things are all part of real life, and we often tune them out. I can’t tune them out. Sure it is intense sometimes when you allow yourself to get into that place in your mind where you become aware of everything that is happening. I guess you have to know when to turn it off. I don’t like to miss anything so I am not into turning it off. My interest is in all of this. I guess that’s why I am working with these found moments, these found sounds, maybe one could call them found songs or found poetry.
RR: You have agreed to become a regular contributor to the PROJECT section of RADARREDUX.COM for now. We are very excited about this. Can you give us some kind of introduction to what you plan to present. Anything you want to say about it?
JB: For my RADARREDUX project I am going to present a new short video of about 2 minutes in length every week. Perhaps on Mondays. In the midst of this project I will also be finishing up my MFA, so please bear with me. My thesis show will consist of much longer videos/installation of some of these shots and a bunch of other ones too. I can’t remember the exact dates, but I do know that the opening is at MICA July 10. 6-8 I think. I will keep you posted on those dates and times for sure.
RR: ??Readers should visit the artists’s website, http://juliebenoit.com/ for up other work and to follow Ms. Benoit’s writing on the topic.
The author of http://www.radarredux.com has written an excellent article. You have made your point and there is not much to argue about. It is like the following universal truth that you can not argue with: Whenever trouble arises, there is always one individual who realizes a solution, then rises from obscurity to take command, ushering in a new era. Very often, that individual is utterly insane. Thanks for the info.
January 24, 2010 2:25 am