Sara Cwynar: Baby Blue Benzo

52 Walker, New York

The main attraction in Sara Cwynar’s big show at 52 Walker is a panoramic video—a meditation on consumer lust, filtered through insomnia. The “Benzo” in question is the 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR “Uhlenhaut” Coupé. On May 5, 2022, it sold at auction for 135 million euros. By coincidence, that’s the day I turned… well anyway, it would have made a nice gift. The most valuable automobile in the world will likely keep its title for a while because the dream car’s backstory is a nightmare.

Art auction results are where you normally see numbers this big. Why something sells for so much is a question asked by too few journalists who report on art auctions. Perhaps they fear getting in over their hermeneutic heads. But then the art world doesn’t fight fair; for instance, it pokes at reporters with duct-taped bananas. Cars are more straightforward. There were only two of these lovely things ever built, and with one excluded from trade in the permanent collection of the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, the other is virtually unique. Why only two were made is the more crucial question; that answer explains the object’s chilling gravitas.

Just as haute couture primes the prêt-à-porter cash pump, success on the track will spark a lucrative production run for the trade in fast cars. The competitive version of the 300 SLR was winning all the big races in 1955. So far so good. But on June 11, with Pierre Levegh at the wheel, Rudolf Uhlenhaut’s masterpiece crashed and exploded into the stands at Le Mans, killing 83 people and injuring another 120. Production was aborted.

Neither the 300 SLR nor the driver who died instantly were at fault, but it remains the gravest motorsport disaster to date. Mercedes didn’t race another car for thirty years. This shiny thing has an aura more blinding than HID headlights. None of the pre-auction history is broached in Cwynar’s piece because it’s beside her point. Still, auras have baggage.

“Benzo” is a double entendre here, a coincidence that structures the work into a conceptual diptych. The pendant reference is to habit-forming benzodiazepines, a class of anti-anxiety medications typically prescribed for insomnia—Atavan, Valium, Xanax; a handful of them flashes on the screen early on. Cwynar’s insomnia is divulged by both the press release and the voiceover, so we can presume her prescription for “benzos.”

It’s no wonder that she needs them. The work is not only complicated, it’s manically ambitious: the nested themes, the bi-coastal production, the old-school 16mm shoot (transferred to video), the tricky script, the dicey symbolism, the filmic formalism, the many and varied costumes, the negotiations with celebrity models, the plethora of props, the eclectic soundtrack, the fretwork editing… it’s a lot. And then there’s the auto-fiction—the artist figure skates a bit, like she did back in the day, and holds her little white “benzo” up to the lens, lining it up with her iris.

Baby Blue Benzo is baroque—there’s something Busby Berkeley about it. As art video’s go, the production is excessive. But it doesn’t rely so much on contemporary digital effects as it does on the same tool kit used by “The Buzz:” an attractive cast, a camera loaded with film, a well-lit and well-equipped Hollywood studio. Also like Hollywood, this antiquarian work recycles the quaint artifice of vaudeville—cut-out sets and props, treadmills (to simulate assembly lines, or to walk without advancing), pratfalls. And it explores basic filmmaking—meaningful close-ups, 360 dolly shots, quickfire montage. Plenty of iconography flies by, drawn from the artist’s image archives. For me, the work recalls some forgotten ‘60s National Film Board of Canada production, perhaps with Marshall McLuhan consulting.

This is the second time I find myself compelled to see a Cwynar film again and again. Maybe I’m hypnotised by the constant stream of pictures, like I am by brain-eating Instagram. Maybe it’s narrator Paul Cooper’s seductive diction—though not his pronunciation—Muybridge is ‘my bridge,’ people, ‘MY BRIDGE’! Or maybe it’s Cwynar’s frequent interjections that rough-up the script. Perhaps I can’t let go because I’m confident that something profound is being imparted, if only I could string together enough of these fragments to ascertain it. But there’s too much going on for the voiceover to form a cogent narrative, despite the tendentious vocabulary—“capitalism,” “value for investors,” “advertisements,” “surveillance.” And Cwynar constantly interrupts the narrator who speaks lines written in her voice. It’s not as if the words stand a chance against the pictures, though—they’re used for flavour.

I feel like a kid at a puppet show intended for adults. The form is familiar, but not quite the content. Complicated and digressive, you keep losing the work’s plot. There’s a theme in there somewhere, beyond fast cars and sleeping pills. I’ll bet that it’s something about consumerism, fetishization, objectification—but there’s no discernible point.

The sum of Baby Blue Benzo’s parts is incoherent, and reminiscent of the wild semiotic party going on in my head when I can’t sleep. I’m inspired to be digressive and conspiratorial in turn, as if catching the artist’s cold. Busby Berkeley’s legendary creative ambition likely had him taking sleeping pills too, at least that’s what he used to attempt suicide in 1946, so he must have had them around. Berkeley made it to 80 in spite of it all, unlike the three people killed in the car he was driving late that night in 1935. A famous drinker, he had been drinking. Come to think of it, that accident may have been a key factor in the failed suicide a decade later. Sleeping pills will get you to sleep, but they can’t help you in the morning. It cost him three trials, but The Buzz eventually got off when it was determined that a faulty tire caused the accident rather than his inebriation. I wish I knew the make and model because I’m searching for a conspiracy at the heart of Baby Blue Benzo; maybe I can decrypt a message among the numberless hints.

Cars, beautiful and fast, embody the tragic dimension of modernity: Jackson Pollock, James Dean, F. W. Murnau, Jayne Mansfield, Marc Bolan, Isadora Duncan, Grace Kelly, Albert Camus, Diana Spencer... But, despite the occasional gas explosion that heats up the screen, that’s not what this work is about.

Life doesn’t imitate art so much as suffer its threats. The muse is a bitch that won’t let you sleep. I don’t think, for example, that insomniac Marcel Proust wrote because he was too sick to do much else. He’s more likely to have been made sick by the obsessive recollecting and compulsive re-writing that kept him in bed. And there was poor Alfred, his beloved chauffeur, secretary and (scholars say) the model for Albertine. He died at 26 when he crashed the plane that, legend has it, Marcel had given him. The muse is death. A Futurist like Marinetti or Boccioni might have said that Pierre Levegh died for art, along with 82 other Martyrs of the Grand Trajectory.

Something not unrelated is happening to millions of us, zombified en masse, not by beautiful things, but by their twinkling digital signifiers. That may be what this work is about. At one point, we hear the words “seeing it is enough” repeated by both narrators—a good moral to a story full of merchandise.

Like so much contemporary art, interpreting this dream parade is dowsing for meaning. Cwynar’s ambiguous ‘pictures with commentary’ awaken the Thomas Pynchon in me. Armed with the clues and comparisons the artist provides, I can’t help but intuit great murky machinations implicating all of humanity. This makes me anxious because I suffer when big existential subjects are treated ambiguously. In its struggle to assimilate the work, I fear that my mind will turn Cwynar’s clues and juxtapositions into fishy coincidences and proof. QAnon and Nostradamus work this way: innuendo in the vocabulary of foreboding. In this case, it’s commerce in the grammar of art. Is Cwynar wagging her red-lacquered index at her complicit viewers? Yet the panoramic video—occluded at 52 Walker by two vexing columns—is so fragmentary and so neutral of affect—Cooper’s suede voice—that you wouldn’t suspect it of intentional communication, let alone foreboding. The whole thing is informal, lively, and oneiric.

And coy. What exactly is being exposed in this wide-awake dream? Capitalism? The patriarchy? Mammon? Herd greed? Art? What is the indictment, if indictment there is? Is it a catch-all denunciation of morality’s usual suspects? A spin-off Refus global? Or is it an indictment of indictment? Questions are all that’s on offer because, unlike crossword puzzles, art doesn’t come with solutions.

Despite the proliferation of pointless goods, the pageant of pretty presenters, and the sweet stench of marketing, not once did it cross my mind that this was anything other than art. That says as much about the cultural maturity of film and video as it does about Cwynar’s gifts. And yet Baby Blue Benzo never amounts to a representation of anything tangible, let alone a full-throated satire, though it’s larded with commercial symbolism. And, for what it's worth, neither the silver car nor the white pill are baby blue. The title isn’t a phrase but three separate propositions, listed in staccato succesion on the screen.

Abstract, the piece distorts its ostensible subject by feeding it through the idiosyncratic mind of an artist who can’t sleep. By blending obviousness and strangeness, is Cwynar concocting a counterpoison for our world of too much stuff? I’m not an enthusiastic consumer, so I can’t tell if her antidote works, but I can say that it’s not as annoying as I might be making it sound.

Instead of a sneering pastiche, the artist uses defamiliarization to throw contrast onto commercial iconography and wink at us about its banality. The work was created not to inform, but to fascinate and to spur neurons in the direction of her insinuated conclusion: we worship crap. I’m going with that noble message, even if it’s full of risks for a contemporary artist.

The same thing happened to cars that happened to clay pots: aesthetics eclipsed purpose as the driver of desire. Should we approach an anthropologist or a sociologist for an explanation? How about an art historian? These things were created for practical purposes but, in time, beauty usurped their teleology. Slippery and light, beauty isn’t a first cause, but shorthand for the cluster of attributes that conspire to make a particular German car über-desirable. It’s the cluster that overwhelms function, transforming useful objects into fetishes.

When it comes to expensive cars, desire-grade beauty results not only from the designer’s talent, the engineer’s genius, and the brand’s prestige. We must also credit singularity, history, and the sublime price for the wizardry that confers authority on elegant shapes and stylish features. Art works precisely this way, when it works. En passant, it’s a great cultural tragedy that price is now the leading attribute of venerated objects. This second usurpation overwhelms the once subtle alchemy of signification.

We covet people like we covet things, and vice versa, which Cwynar has no choice but to get into. She pulls off something of a coup by conscripting hyper-objectified Pamela Anderson. Cwynar’s sister British Columbian holds the title for gracing more Playboy covers than anyone. On the artist’s instructions, Anderson avoids looking into the lens when we see her in close-up, turning us into voyeurs. We spy the famous beauty mugging girlishly with her tulle, chewing something unspecified, trying out some pouts. We also see her face in temporal evolution on the papered walls of the larger show beyond the screening room: a baby, a girl, a woman: a siren’s progress. Anderson recently made news for not wearing makeup at a high fashion event in Paris. That this was news, is news. Unsurprisingly, the 57-year-old actor’s refusal to paint her face made her famous all over again. Who remembers ever seeing such a creature? It’s heroic dissent.

But just as the expensive car’s backstory is beside Cwynar’s point, Anderson’s rejection of artifice in favour of nature is not why she’s in this piece. She was cast to play a commodity, which she does with a shrug. Anderson demonstrated in Paris that humans are unique among commodities—they can resist turning into works of art. But Cwynar doesn’t go there. Like the crash at Le Mans—acknowledged cryptically by gas explosions here and there—Anderson’s dissent also affects my reading of Baby Blue Benzo in ways that are out of the artist’s control. That’s the risk of playing with loaded icons.

As coincidence would have it, my pesky Instagram algorithm has been tormenting me lately with a 21-year-old race car driver from Argentina. I had never heard of Franco Colapinto and have no interest in motorsports, but the algorithm thinks I’ll click. The charismatic ephebe pops up on my feed now most days because I did click once in a moment of weakness. Instagram now ‘thinks’ I care about Franco, but not for the reason that Cwynar thinks I’ll care about Pamela. In the first case, I’m being lured into ceaseless platform engagement by a cyberpimp. In the second, I’m being turned into a voyeur by an artist who (maybe) wants to warn me that I’m vulnerable to merchants, marketers and other artists. Another difference is that the algorithm is mindless and blunt.

We evolved to look for patterns and movement in the underbrush; it’s automatic. Cwynar exploits this trait throughout the work, but especially when she crafts signifier clusters, such as the figure skaters wearing auto mechanic overalls emblazoned with the Marlboro logo. We can’t help but notice all that and attempt to make sense of it. But like the dreams the work emulates, it ultimately has no meaning (pace Freud), beside stitching the Benzo and the benzos together dreamily, like the dream-within-a-dream sequence when Cwynar sits behind the wheel of the actual Benzo at the museum in Stuttgart. The camera fades mistily as it zooms in on the artist’s red talons clutching the glamorous steering wheel.

Sleeplessness is fertilizer for correlations, coincidences, and conspiracies. If you don’t sleep, your mind corrupts and the whole world becomes meaningfully coincidental as conspiracies invade your consciousness. It’s called psychosis. The list is long of tortured geniuses psychologically disturbed by the intense creative drive that pre-empts sleep. Benjamin Labatut recounts notable examples from science in his fictionalised When We Cease to Understand the World—Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and especially Grothendieck. A tragic example from art history is poor Carpeaux. Among the finest and most ambitious sculptors who ever lived, he was also a perfectionist who became violently paranoid from the pressures of his success. Having alienated family and friends, he ended his days alone in reclusion, dying at 48.

Cwynar’s autofiction opens with the line—spoken by her male proxy—“It all started because I couldn’t sleep.” Proust’s In Search of Lost Time opens similarly with talk of intermittent somnolence: “For a long time, I went to bed early…” it begins, and continues to describe what it’s like for a child to fall repeatedly in and out of consciousness. Baby Blue Benzo joins other remarkable videos about sleep that emerged from the Vancouver scene. Speaking of Proust, Overture, 1986, by Stan Douglas, projects found 19^th century footage of a train going in and out of tunnels in the Rockies as a narrator quotes the opening scene of Proust’s exquisitely neurotic colossus. The piece was recently up at Zwirner on 19th Street. Also by Douglas, and better known, Der Sandman, 1996, is a riff on E.T.A. Hoffman’s classic tale of sleep, dreams, and psychological disturbances. And there’s Rodney Graham’s Halcion Sleep, 1994. After taking a double dose of sleeping pills, the artist is recorded unconscious in the back seat of a car moving through a city at night. Just as Paul Cooper speaks Cwynar’s lines, someone else made Graham’s work while he slept through the production.

Inspired by Cwynar to channel my inner Pynchon, I couldn’t sleep the other night. Instead, I prowled the internet for intriguing coincidences. Here’s a novel one I stumbled upon: Benzo driver Pierre Levegh also played ice hockey. Ghoulishly, I imagined him skating by in pursuit of a puck wearing a Marlboro jumpsuit. But there’s a better one. 52 Walker is a David Zwirner project space in Tribeca. If you want a clue about how to pronounce Cwynar, just remember that it’s the Polish transcription of Zwirner. Where did I put those pills?