James Benning
neugerriemschneider, Berlin
February 10–March 24
What makes society herald one cabin-bound hermit as a genius and cast out another as demonic scum? A nearly 20-year-long string of pipe bombings seems to do the trick. But James Benning halts such reductionist thinking in Two Cabins, 2011, pitting the aforementioned duo—Henry David Thoreau and Theodore Kaczynski (better known as the Unabomber)—against each other. The installation includes a two-channel video documenting the views from the windows of models of those cabins and a couple of ready-mades—an antique desk with a pencil and a Corona typewriter—placed on spotlit pedestals.
From 2007 to ’08, Benning endeavored to build replicas of the two men’s refuges in the woods near his home in California. The videos on view consist merely of stationary shots looking out of the cabins’ windows. One window is a portrait-oriented glass of American hardware-store variety, whereas the other is a square wooden cutout, more medieval than modern. A meditative quality pervades the work, tying it squarely to Benning’s other films. Yet the work is saturated with ambiguity. Modern noises (never mind modern fixtures) emanate from Thoreau’s cabin, while Kaczynski’s view and soundscape suggest a Walden-like calm.
The two essays Benning chose for the publication accompanying Two Cabins meld nearly seamlessly in their examinations of vaguely Marxist questions of freedom and alienation. Over time, God and heaven have been replaced by the panoptic police state, and the reality of this new society strengthens the exhibition’s premise. In one political-historical epoch, seclusion and civil disobedience are lauded as a nation’s manifest destiny, while in another they are grounds for insanity.
This article will appear in the May issue of Modern Painters magazine.