Named after the Shoshonean word for "Earth", this is the third and final part of Benning's "California Trilogy" and his approach to the Californian wilderness in 35 static scenes.
Experimental filmmaker James Benning returns with this abstract documentary about California's Central Valley, part 1 of his "California Trilogy". Consisting of 35 shots, each over two minutes long, the film quietly portrays nature's subjugation to encroaching commercial interests. This film was...
James Benning’s PLACE is a multi-part work that deepens the artist’s longstanding engagement with marginalized artists and creators. Over the course of nine months, Benning traversed the United States in pursuit of traces left by eight so-called ‘outsider artists’.
[...] And then there’s the largest and fastest growing archive of all time, the Internet, and in particular YouTube. I started here playfully looking in different directions—an early performance by Lambert, Hendricks & Ross, a Ché Guevara interview, an instructional video on glock...
Scrolling excerpts from the diary of George Wallace's would-be assassin Arthur Bremer at screen bottom, Hank Aaron cards and ephemera from his entire career up top, and alternating audio clips of popular songs and highlights from the news throughout Aaron's career.
Exploring the Panama Canal is a fascinating journey through the land of mystery and adventure and the Canal that divides it. Through rare archival footage, you'll experience the history of the Canal, from its failed beginnings to the Herculean effort of 35,000 men to build this most strategic of...
For his performance Reforming the Past, James Benning turns towards his own film North on Evers, shot in 1991. After seeing Andy Warhol's Screen Tests again, Benning re-filmed all of the 59 portraits that occur in North on Evers with his HD camera, reframed them and slowed them down 8 times. This...
Presented on a computer, "Pascal's Lemma" features mathematics (diagrams, equations, questions), biographical information about Blaise Pascal, and scrolling text sourced from the news.
In summer 2011, James Benning returned to his hometown of Milwaukee to make a third version of his seminal 1977 film 'One Way Boogie Woogie'. In 1977 he filmed 60 locations in Milwaukee’s industrial valley each for 60 seconds, creating short, minimal, playful narratives. In 2004 he remade the...
Iron ore is super heated in a blast furnace to make pig iron, which in turn is used to produce steel. The making of steel is a continuous process. Pig iron is moved from the blast furnace to the steel plant by railroad. The trains are operated by remote control.
Last week I made a film of 49 of my T-shirts called Fresh Air. It was to be purely structural. For sound I recorded (in sync) the quiet ambience of my Val Verde neighborhood. Then I decided to add the sounds of a radio playing. I set up my Sound Devices and began to record NPR’s All Things...
Casting a Glance is a tribute to the American artist Robert Smithson. Between May 15 2005 and January 14 2007, I made 16 trips to the Spiral Jetty. Created in 1970, the Jetty is a 1,500-foot long spiral-shaped jetty extending into the Great Salt Lake in Utah constructed from rocks, earth, salt and...
