Margaret Sundell
Benzes and benzos, images of images: in a two-channel film, the artist explores fantasy, desire, and duplication.
Sara Cwynar: Baby Blue Benzo, installation view. Courtesy the artist and 52 Walker. Pictured: Baby Blue Benzo, 2024.
Sara Cwynar: Baby Blue Benzo, curated by Ebony L. Haynes,
52 Walker, 52 Walker Street, New York City,
through December 21, 2024
• • •
I have a little blue pill. I take it when I need to sleep. But first I hold out, until my nights are endless stretches of wakefulness and my days are an unbearable haze. Sara Cwynar likely knows the feeling; she has insomnia, too. “I can’t sleep,” her narrator and alter ego confesses in Soft Film (2016), “so I comb Ebay.” That only makes the problem worse: “Course I can’t sleep; there was too much to look at.” Based on the title of her latest work—Baby Blue Benzo (2024)—now on view at 52 Walker, with related photographs, Cwynar is familiar with how I escape the demands of consciousness: through benzos (short for benzodiazepines), a class of highly effective, but highly addictive, sedatives.
Projected at a monumental scale in a darkened room, the twenty-two-minute, two-channel Baby Blue Benzo opens with a black screen and a man’s voice (that of actor Paul Cooper). The theme of insomnia returns: “It started,” he intones as a blue sky filled with fluffy clouds appears, “because I couldn’t sleep.” Cwynar then picks up the narration: “It was like my body was being dragged behind an endless burning light.” Accompanied by pop songs and the swelling strains of classical music, the two tag-team a voice-over that recurrently invokes sleeplessness while plumbing the nexus of fantasy, identity, and desire in our image-saturated society. The piece combines new video, 16mm film, and photographs with stock footage and selections from Cwynar’s ever-expanding digital archive, which comprises thousands of photos, some personal, the rest culled from print and online sources. Video clips alternate with filmed collages of still pictures. What results is a disjointed parade—wristwatch follows women’s basketball team, follows kitsch figurines.
Sara Cwynar, Baby Blue Benzo, 2024 (still). Courtesy the artist and 52 Walker. © Sara Cywnar.
Through the use of animation, Cwynar’s film moves forward from left to right (and occasionally hiccups backward). It’s as if we were reading, or, maybe better, scrolling through the perpetual image stream we encounter on our screens; or walking on a treadmill; or working on a Fordist assembly line. (The inventor of the Model-T and his methods are discussed in the voice-over.) Perhaps the artist is thinking of the industrial substrate of our digital realm—and of the labor required to inhabit it. Still another association: panning shots, such as the ones Cwynar created for Baby Blue Benzo on a soundstage with circular tracks on the floor that support a dollying camera. They capture models in elaborate costumes and a plywood cutout of a sleek automobile, with a bikini-clad woman propped up to look like she’s lounging on its hood. Here, we encounter the title’s second referent, what the narrator refers to as “a dream car”—the most expensive ever sold at auction—a pale-blue Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR. A linking coincidence: the car was made at the time benzos were first developed, in 1955. Fittingly, the grainy 16mm segments have a retro, mid-century feel.
Sara Cwynar: Baby Blue Benzo, installation view. Courtesy the artist and 52 Walker. Pictured: Baby Blue Benzo, 2024.
The vehicle pops up throughout the film in varying proximities to reality: as the cutout; as photographic reproductions; as promo images that circulated at the time of its sale; as a life-size replica at the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, Germany, which Cwynar circles, sits in, and strokes. With so many copies, do we actually need the real thing? Certainly not in order to lust after it; indeed, a reproduction might be more effective in inciting our appetite. “Question,” the narrator asks: “Is it just as good to have a picture of the car?” “Looking,” Cwynar observes, “is a little bit like owning.”
Sara Cwynar: Baby Blue Benzo, installation view. Courtesy the artist and 52 Walker. Pictured: Baby Blue Benzo, 2024.
Baby Blue Benzo features a number of secondary motifs. Some relate more directly to the Mercedes. There is a bright red Ferrari—seen life-size and as a toy—a chromatic counterpoint to the dream car’s blue finish. There are figure skaters, clad in race-car drivers’ coveralls. Sometimes the connection is fuzzier, such as the streaming traffic on the Manhattan Bridge, surrounded by office blocks that become their own theme. Sometimes the only association between the Mercedes and the secondary image is that both are objects of desire, as is the case with Pamela Anderson. We see her first in her prime and then in Cwynar’s photo and video shoot for the New York Times last year, for which the still-beautiful ’90s sex symbol posed against a dusty-blue paper backdrop wearing a tulle skirt, a white T-shirt, and a sparkling silver bra slung casually around her neck.
Sara Cwynar: Baby Blue Benzo, installation view. Courtesy the artist and 52 Walker. Pictured: Baby Blue Benzo, 2024.
As the work progresses, we plunge ever deeper into the space of representation. A mass-produced series of plastic coin banks shaped like long-eared rabbits that appears early on in a film clip returns as a single bunny bank in a large photograph unfurled by a model. This transformation of the object—itself both multiple and a reproduction—into yet another picture further attenuates its already simulacral connection to the real. A long sequence drawn from the artist’s shoot of Anderson works in a similar way. First, the actress fills the frame, staring out at the viewer with a come-hither gaze, then the picture we’ve just seen suddenly materializes on a computer screen shot upside down, then we return to the full-frame, right-side-up image. And then the frame stutters; we see video clips of one Pamela after another, as the piece continues its rightward march—each moving or gesturing in a slightly different way. Just when we’ve gotten our bearings, when we feel some purchase on this repeating Pamela, a still image shows Cwynar writing “PAM” with a red grease pencil over the body of the star. Images, it seems, are just as fungible as commodities. In Baby Blue Benzo, they recur seemingly at random, over and over, as in an insomniac’s dissociated dérive, or perhaps just like late-capitalist life online.
Cwynar’s film conflates the haze of insomnia with the normal state of being awake in contemporary culture, but the piece doesn’t dead-end with that proposition. Like her Pictures Generation forebears, Cwynar traffics in allegory, what Walter Benjamin calls “speech in a dead language.” For Benjamin, this mortification results from the splitting that occurs with commodification—the object’s loss of inherent use value and its emergence as a surface of pure exchange. The allegorist redeems the object not by reuniting its sundered halves but by duplicating its original division and assigning new meaning to its empty shell—in the case of Baby Blue Benzo, as a work of art.
Margaret Sundell is the editor-in-chief of 4Columns.