Opportunities for Engagement & Inquiry: Sadie Benning, Pain Thing

Sequence 1: 69 (five panels)

One way of reading the title 69 is as an abbreviated reference to the year 1969. What details of these images—separately or collectively—might recall the year 1969? Is it the year these photos were taken? Does it signify something specific or reference a general period or age? Does specificity matter?

Often cars are described by their two-digit year of release. The images in this sequence include/reference cars, driving, and related activities and settings. What connections, associations, or narratives can you create around cars using this information as framing and these images as inspiration? What other associations do you have with the title 69? Do these seem resonant with or resistant to the meanings and sense you are making from this selection of images?

Provocations:

If you were to pick a year or time period of your life to represent using Benning’s Pain Thing approach, what year/period would you choose? Why? What would you want to represent from that period? What images would you want to include? How would you arrange and group them? How would you layer them? How many panels would you use in your sequence? 

Sequence 2: Bloody Mickey (five panels)

The title Bloody Mickey literally references the fourth image in this sequence featuring a Mickey Mouse baseball-playing athletic sock with an overlapping black and blood red image of an obscured item. This item could be anatomical, obscurely referencing reproduction; it could be athletic, reinforcing references to violence around sports, childhood, and money. The panels reflect a set of associated references: cracked sidewalk, broken glass, bloody sock, a closet crowded with mostly pastel outfits, its two red items visually startling in their interruption, a black cat glaring behind possible funeral flower arrangements. 

Provocations:

Bloody Mickey, as a title and a concept, is an unusual combination of two disparate images. Develop a list of unexpected image combinations. These can be based on your own experiences/history, or they can be entirely fictional. Rearrange your list as necessary. How would you represent these? 

Sequence 3: Delaware (six panels)

Benning’s reference here to Delaware positions it as a fusion of places and times. The use of layered resin and transparencies is particularly apt in this sequence, where photographic images reference people and places and times, all layered together like experiential palimpsests. The present always contains the past. These fragmented images emerge, scattered and shifting like memories or dreams, echoing familiar touchstones, temporally, tactilely. This set opens with a jarring contrast, with a heavy metal album cover over a literal pastoral background with a horse in a paddock. The combination of images, taken collectively, feels adolescent: fast, close, clumsy, unclear. The set features cars, alcohol, bodies embracing, bodies of water, horizons. There is a push and pull of distance here, of movement, of attraction and retreat, intimacy and emptiness, of becoming.

Provocations:

Think of an important place. Where would you locate this geographically? When would you locate it temporally? How might you represent these two things in combination? Using paper and pencil, sketch a map of your significant location, as general or as detailed as you wish. Then, brainstorm a list of associations you have with this time/place: words, images, events, impressions. You can write these on/over the map you started or separately. Using these texts as a draft, consider how you might represent some of them visually. You might combine maps, photographs, magazine advertisements, news clippings, and other representations into a collage or into a sculptural object. What would your title be? 

Sequence 4: IUD (6 panels)

This sequence of “pain things” again blends literal and metaphorical visual representations, this time of the IUD, a heavily culturally weighted reproductive device, with references to its assorted associations and baggage. Multiple panels position this item as overly medical, invasive, mechanical, and potentially ominous. It literally hangs over everything/the hospital in the first image, floating above it all.

Provocations:

Most of us operate daily, often multiple times a day or even constantly, as some combination of human and tool/machine. From glasses to braces to prosthetic limbs to medications, we have developed tools to manipulate our bodies to achieve specific goals or prevent specific outcomes. Is there some specific tool you use/could use to considerably improve your life or the life of someone else? What would this tool/machine be? What would it do? Who would use it? What would be its outcome?

Alternatively, IUDs are used by people with uteruses to prevent pregnancies. In the United States, controversies still rage around reproductive health care choices and rights. Arguably, developments like birth control pills, IUDs, and abortifacients give people much more control over when, or even if, to have children. How is Sadie Benning positioning the IUD in this series of images? What does it represent? What connections are there between the IUD and the image of the floral print? Between the IUD and the pulsating tunnel of light? Why show the inside and outside of a hospital simultaneously? 

Sequence 5: Intruder (five panels)

Perhaps more than earlier sequences, this set not only lends itself to narrative, it contains and communicates a much clearer narrative (or narratives). The initial image has multiple layers: a computer keyboard sharply frames a video game onscreen featuring the simplistic linear graphics, primary colors, and simple controls and actions of the first-wave classic video games. These overlay a centered large, sullen, dejected-looking dog. Things are complicated and unfocused. The remaining panels in this sequence all only contain one image, though they are all encased in the same multiple layers of resin as those without. One from outside shows a stark white door open against the back of a small, grey, nondescript garage revealing a rectangle of darkness. The next one is interior, featuring the stove in a “modern” 1970s American kitchen. The next, a typical companion living room—big, bright, airy windows in a well-furnished room. This image is violently ruptured by a large white silhouette of a masculine figure created by cutting out a large section of the middle of the photograph/room. The final one is back outside, into the sunny daylight, tulips along well-manicured brick lawn paths, one set close, another in the distance.   

Provocation:

What story can you tell from this sequence of panels? What happens? Where? Why does only the first panel of this sequence have multiple layered images? Why do the other panels have only one apparent image layer? What sub-stories do each separate panel tell? Could you rearrange the images to create a different story?

Sequence 6: 7Up (four panels)

This sequence of panels also insinuates a character-driven narrative, with all featuring figures prominently. In another divergent move, the first image in the sequence, instead of having multiple images layered, has one feature image of a figure’s back, with smaller inset portraits of two people at opposite corners of the main one. These evoke a sense of looking into a mirror with photos tucked into the edges, but instead of seeing yourself, you see someone else reflected somewhat disconcertingly from behind. Another divergence involves the repetition of an image within this sequence: a woman’s hands washing dishes in an older sink. In one, the image overpowers another, almost intelligible but possible silhouetted portrait of a woman. In the other, it serves as a muted background of domestic duty to a much clearer image of a person holding two six packs of soda, one coke, one 7Up. The third image in the sequence offers another unusual combination: a negative image of two 7Up cans, emphasizing “No Caffeine” and a violent, sharply cropped comic book image suggesting someone striking a woman’s face. Together these images hint at what women can have, what they can’t, of the hidden labor of domesticity and the gendered power exchanges continually enacted.

Provocations:

There are many real-life and fictional examples of becoming aware of previously unnoticed, or obscured, things, and the impacts this can have. In the Harry Potter series, the protagonists become aware of the house elves existing as nearly-invisible slave-like servants, with Hermione actively advocating for their rights. In real life, consumers have organized boycotts to change corporate misbehaviors, from producing unchecked pollution to withholding service provider tips. 

Think of almost any scenario in a public business establishment, like a snapshot taken in action. If you could take a behind-the-scenes or omniscient perspective, what would be the unseen systems, people, and activities happening prior to or in tandem with the visible portions of the scene? For example, in a restaurant you might look around the dining area and see hosts/hostesses and wait staff, perhaps bussers. You might not see the cooks and cleaning staff, the accountant, the manager. You don’t see the preparation of food or facilities beforehand, the work during, or the clean-up and breakdown afterwards.  

Alternatively, think of examples of when you realized something you liked, did, or ignored had invisible or obscured costs, unintended negative consequences, or troublesome side effects. What did you realize? Did this impact you and your opinions? If so, how? Do you consider such consequences “violent” if they “injure” others, even if this injury isn’t necessarily directly physical? If not, what stories do you construct to keep these kinds of things “hidden” from yourself, buried under layers of constant streams of other things?

Sequence 7: Cake (four panels)

Again, Benning’s sequence of four panels suggests a narrative, this one clearly cinematic. The first two panels serve as establishing shots, scenes empty of people but suggestive of characterization or plot. Here, a workerless office shows evidence of recent occupation and perhaps hasty departure: ashtray with cigarette butts, coffee mug on desk, legal pad and pen tossed across it. The second establishing shot is a jumble of layers, like a rush of hurried action: a long, empty hotel hallway, a piece of aluminum foil removed from a dish and tossed askance, a lemon-printed tea towel actively hanging on a kitchen handle. The next two panels shift abruptly to character-centered plot moments. In the third, one layer shows a kid outside at a picnic table next to a cake with candles, waiting. The final one shows two kids—likely siblings—sharing a living room love-seat, eating from the paper plates of food in their laps. The party is already fully in progress when the viewer arrives. 

Provocations:

Review this series of images a few times. Then, narrate the story of this sequence of panels. Start prior to the first image. What background might you offer? Think through the details you might highlight of the images. What information do they provide? What information don’t they provide? What is happening in them? Before/after? Where are things happening? Who is involved? What are they doing? What is the mood? How does this sequence end?

For further fun, select a scenario from your own life you might encapsulate in a short sequence of images (3-4). What would you try to encapsulate in them collectively? What specific images could you use to represent aspects of the scenario? Would you layer images? If so, what images would you layer? How? Describe each layer.  

Year (69), item (Bloody Mickey), place (Delaware), reproductive tool (IUD), person (intruder), issue/s (women, labor, violence), event (cake), Tylenol

Sequence 8: Tylenol (four panels)

Like other sequences, this set of panels lends itself to storying. It suggests many things. Tylenol is a medication meant to relieve pain. In 1982, Tylenol was at the center of a still-unsolved poisoning epidemic, with someone lacing their capsules with cyanide, rebottling them, and returning them to the store. This episode, and the copycats it spawned, resulting in changes to laws, packaging, and medication form (primarily away from capsules toward tablets instead, like those in the fourth panel). This sequence suggests attention to and questions around gender roles, power, and history. The medication, the women, and the water conjure stories about famous women committing (or attempting) suicide by drowning, both real (Virginia Woolf and Mary Wollstonecraft) and fictional (Ophelia in Hamlet, Edna Pontellier in The Awakening). Mostly, these images, even when almost happy, seem slightly off-kilter, disturbing, ominous.

Provocations:

While Benning has deliberately arranged these panels in a particular order, the order is unclear to viewers, except that they are not chronological. In crafting a narrative from these panels, would you build it around characters? Events? Settings? Plot? How would you describe each panel in one phrase?

This sequence also 'reads’ like a montage or set of flashbacks. Why does it seem like this? How does Benning achieve this effect? What would it change in your story if the panels were rearranged? How? Would it matter? 

Sequence 9: Untitled (two panels)

In this pair of panels, both are double exposures featuring the repeating image of an adult woman. In the first, her portrait somewhat obscures the features of a young boy emerging from a lake toward the camera, happy. In the second, the woman’s portrait shifts to the left and closer, while this time the other image is a ¾ view profile portrait of a little girl, shifted off-center to the right. Both portraits, with their subjects similarly sized and framed, vie for foreground. The sense is that this woman looms large in the lives of these kids, that they are interconnected. 

Provocation:

What is the story of this woman and these two children? Who is she? Who are they?

How are they connected? Are these relationships positive or negative? Are there people who loom large in your own life? People whose lives you impact significantly. In what ways do you see yourself in them? See them in you? If you wanted to visually communicate some sense of how you overlap, what kinds of images might you combine? What would they show of each of you? How would they fit together? 

Sequence 10: Epcot (three panels)

This sequence of three panels starts as the most legible story yet: a trip to the Epcot theme park at Walt Disney World Resort in Florida. The first panel features a plane in the midst of take-off, taken from the interior of another plane: the beginning of a journey. The second panel documents the theme park experience—a performing dolphin photographed mid-jump, completely in action, yet suspended in a moment that captures almost none of that. In the final panel, a person silhouetted in front of sheer curtains drinks alone, staring into the distance, strangely somber and isolated for images reflecting one of the happiest places on Earth, the Magic Kingdom’s sidekick.    

Provocations:

Things are not always as they seem, and things do not always go the way you imagine.

Consider the emotional feel or tone of each of these panels. What feelings does the first one evoke? The second? The third? How do they fit together? What is the mood of the “story” they suggest? Is it humorous, lighthearted, fun? Is it dark, sinister, and depressing? Can it be other things? What are other options? 

Reflect on something you anticipated for a long time then finally got. What was the waiting like? What was it like to get or achieve this? Did it feel like you expected? Were there feelings or issues you did not imagine? How did you deal with the mismatch between expectations, reality, and your resulting feelings?

Sequence 11: Peaceful Look (three panels)

Like sequence 10, Epcot, Peaceful Look uses a repeating image/person. In this set of three panels, the focal subject remains the same, the only discernible differences being the shift from lighter to darker across the set, and the inclusion of differently colored images/layers to achieve and complement this color shift.

Provocations:

Why is this sequence called “peaceful look”? Is the look peaceful? How would you describe it?  What might you rename the set? Why did the artist use the same image three times? Why are the colored image layers illegible, almost reduced to color filters, in the two panels using them? Why does the tone shift from dark to light?  

Is there an image that immediately comes to mind for you when you imagine the term “peaceful look”? What would this image be? What would it contain or show?

Sequence 12: Hands (three panels)

In some ways here, Hands serves as the visual equivalent of literary synecdoche, or using the term for the body part to refer instead to (whole) people. Here the first image combines a section from a cross-stitched alphabet over a photo of a computer monitor image showing electrical outlets and digital surveillance/communication tools. The second panel blends 3 images: a close-up of the fingers of a hand, a line drawing (tattoo) of a hummingbird, and a photo of trees behind a guardrail which fills the bottom half of the frame. The last panel is a blur of layered images of blurred images: a jumble of coins, neon lights, casino fronts, slot machines, and a pair of handcuffs prominently centered.

Provocation:

This sequence, at its essence, reads like a visual synopsis of a cliche country song: someone lured away from a simple, country life by images of contemporary sophistication, luxury, and ease heads out alone on a journey to the big city, with all its temptations, glamour, sin, and consequences.

Try writing this sequence as a three-stanza (minimum) country song, each panel as a verse telling part of a protagonist’s doomed journey from small town to big city, and even afterwards.

Remember that country songs usually use a straightforward, strong ABAB rhyme scheme: 

I love to drive my car,

I drive it all day long,

It takes me pretty far,

And drove me to this song.

 You can also develop a chorus that relays something key to your story: a moral, a message, a warning, advice.

 Sequence 13: Ponytail (4 panels)

This sequence of panels clearly engages issues of gender and identity, though without providing any overall clarity with regards to the issues. More, the sequence hints at simmering tensions; sublimated desires and designs; distress, constraints, and distortions. The simple silhouette uses the ponytail as a clear gender marker, but Benning layers in murkiness with shadows and whispered trails of color, then absurdity with the surrealistic figure of a mouth personified, wearing a red-striped jumpsuit, striding bizarrely through the center. The '50s housewife dutifully performs domestic duties, comic men struggle valiantly against unseen challenges, together they frame and contain a fictional cartoon villain. The third shows women in separate hotel beds. With the fixed points superimposed over their heads, the dangling chain ominously links them, filling the room, obscuring their individual identity, trapping them. The last panel layers images of drawings, one a close-up focused on the area where a woman’s hair cascades from her head, around her ear, and down the nape of her neck, centering on the banded cinch of her ponytail. Another, less visible layer, shows a drawing of a woman’s head and torso from behind, her hair balanced into a bun on top.  

Provocation:

Gender roles can feel very natural and almost unnoticed to some people, while others find them awkward, insufficient, constraining, and punitive. For each of these panels, consider how many multiple ways they comment on gender, in straightforward, obtuse, and conflicting ways.

Consider using phrases like:

In this image, there is a  _______________________.

Followed by phrases like:

This implies ___________________________________.

This makes me think/wonder (about) ____________________.

This reminds me (of) _____________________ or Maybe this means _______________.

Example:

In panel 1, there is a distorted walking mouth.

This makes me think about the stereotype that women talk more than men.

Maybe the weird mouth inside the girl’s head, walking away from her mouth, is about women trying not to talk so much, or the fear of people distorting what women are trying to say.  

Sequence 14: Closed Circuit (two panels)

Closed circuit cameras are frequently used for security and surveillance within a building, organization, or area. Generally, this involves multiple cameras that broadcast into a central location for monitoring. After initially noticing them, they often tend to fade into the background for most people who often forget the cameras are there. Given their “always on” capabilities, in addition to possibly preventing or detecting crime, they mostly capture mundane moments, the overwhelmingly undramatic flow of daily life. Here, the main images in both panels feature sleeping subjects, but in different contexts, the most obvious being one taken inside and one outside. The additional layers in each obscure more than they reveal, blurring the overall composition.

Provocation:

Sleeping puts people in a very vulnerable position, unaware of their surroundings, unprepared to react. Closed circuit cameras are meant as tools for protection. What happens at the nexus between being protected and being watched. How do these images depict sleeping? The relationship between the watcher and the watched? The boundaries between surveillance and security?

Sequence 15: Dim Light (three panels)

This sequence of panels holds a much more encapsulated sense of memory than some of the others. The photos are all interior shots, looking out the windows of a house, with the outside almost absent, a blinding light, a bright emptiness. Instead, the detail and engagement are inside: the plants in the windowsill, the family photos on the television, the tree next to the door. The people in the panels are all doubly displaced. Not only are they captured here in photographs, they originally exist on television. 

Provocation:

What story do these three panels tell together? Who is in the story? What is the plot? What happens? What is the conflict? The resolution? Why the title “Dim Light” for the set? IS it only about the quality of lighting? What happens when we use simulations or representations to “stand in” for actual real life people, places, and things?

Sequence 16: Microwave (one panel)

The abstractness, the blurry shakiness achieved through the offset of multiple layers of resin applied over cryptic, perplexing shapes and forms—these form an unstable image, the lines blurring the boundaries of space and time and distance. The layers, like amber, trapping parts of our world around us, even unintentionally. The image of trees reflecting on a lake ripples differently through layers of resin and time, more through depth than across distance. 

Provocation:

Why is it named Microwave if the main visible image is a verdant lakeshore? Why is there a rainbow suspended cloudlike, centered, hovering? What messages does this image convey? If you could ask Sadie Benning three questions about this image, what would they be?  

Sequence 17: Noise Nerves (one panel)

One of the images layered into this panel is a close-up of a plastic woven bicycle basket, its weave pattern filling the entire surface, its lines geographic, textural. Another image centers a mass of thread-like frayed and fraying tendrils, jutting, stabbing, and wildly stretching outward.  

Provocation:

This image contains a very clear example of how contemporary artists often use the concept of juxtaposition in their works. Layering a tightly-woven, repetitive, mechanical patter with an unruly eruption of fibers creates a jarring contrast. How do you connect the panel with the idea of noise? Of nerves?

What does this do to/for/with the viewer? What feelings/responses do you have when viewing this panel? Do you struggle to reconcile their opposition? Are you untroubled by the differences?

Sequence 18: Mr. Rogers (one panel)

In this panel, the easily recognizable image of Mr. Rogers is almost unidentifiable, hidden under the shiny organic oval shape filling the image.  

Provocation:

The enigmatic nature of this panel elicits an almost unending stream of questions. What is the top object? Why is it so dominant in the piece? How does the image work in conjunction with its title? Why name the work “Mr. Rogers” when Mr. Rogers is not the primary focus? What stories does this image tell? What stories does it not tell?

Sequence 19: Dr. Naïveté (one panel)

Clouds, maps, exam table

An empty, ready-to-use medical examination table feels almost like it's floating, supported in the clouds layered above and below it. The clouds, the horizons, seem to face two ways at the same time, one pretend sky twisted onto another. The emptiness, the waiting, the wispiness, the slightly-washed out blues all form a gauzy haze, softening the entire scene.

Provocation:

Sometimes under stress, people experience disassociation, where we feel separated from our bodies, floating. There can be negative and positive aspects of disassociation. Overall, medical encounters and treatment can sometimes be comforting and sometimes very disconcerting. Sometimes these happen concurrently. In meditation practices, in order to clear our minds, we often learn to acknowledge our thoughts and feelings as they arise and we notice them: to name them, or think them, then let them go. How does Benning explore these kinds of issues here? How does this speak to medicine? To our culture around medical issues? To our psyches?

If you were to change the focus/subject of this image to something that worries you, what would it be? Would you surround it with clouds and sky? Something else? Can you imagine ways to use this kind of visioning exercise productively in your life? 

Bio

Mindi Rhoades’s research interests include interdisciplinary and multimedia-based approaches to pedagogy and issues of educational equity and diversity with a focus on LGBTQ+ populations. Rhoades’s research supports the benefits of implementing creative, playful, challenging, and engaging educational opportunities with all students. Additionally, Rhoades is interested in contemporary art and artists and the personal, pedagogical, and public possibilities of artmaking as meaning-making.