Benton-C Bainbridge
I was basking in one of NYC's great pleasures-Summerstage- floating along with the interweaving lines of guitar and mandolin at a performance of jazz and Indian classical music. And then one of New
York's great headaches burst our bubble - we all cringed as a car alarm went off and blared its discordant two-tones. John MacLaughlin's fingers paused as he turned and shared a smile with U. Shrinivas and
then began plucking a lazy, daydreaming mimic of the siren. The audience laughed and was drawn back into the music as its fabric shifted to accomodate the rude guest until it went silent.
'Impromptu' means 'done without planning or rehearsal' but the Latin root "in promptu" means 'in readiness' - a more or less opposite meaning which lays bare the underlying reality; spontaneous creation requires a lot of preparation.
When dancers talk the conversation always comes around to the classes they've taken that week. Musicians, we know, constantly rehearse to maintain fluency. And exhibitions of painters and sculptors often include numerous quick sketches, 'studies' which feed into a final product, however improvised the final work may appear.
Constant study is also key to my practice.
The art you see here at Devotion Gallery, whether prints, projections or miniature installations of light and pigment, all comes out of my video art. Like many artists working in other disciplines, I'm always
studying - often carrying a camera and laptop so I can shoot along the way and try out ideas as they occur to me: always ready to make something new without planning.
I've known since the age of 7 that I wanted to make movies, having been dazzled by the swirling animated words on the Electric Company. As a teen, I was taking piano lessons at the same time I was teaching
myself Super-8 film-making. Each time I sent a cartridge off to Kodak for processing, I was subjected to an agonizing wait to see what I'd shot. When the reels came back and disappointed me, I grew frustrated
with the technology - sure, maybe I had chosen the wrong aperture, but we learn by making mistakes. I figured that waiting a week for my piano studies to come back from the lab would be a ridiculous way to
learn which notes were poorly played, so when I got my hands on video gear I soon abandoned film.
The work on these walls comes out of this 'realtime' way of making movies. Whether abstract or representational, and even if I end up obsessively tweaking a movie or setting up an overnight render, the
immediate feedback loop of electronics is central to my process.
Another pivotal teen discovery was collaboration. The film-making how-to books I read, of course, taught me that Hollywood movie-making is a collaborative art, but I related more to 'auteur' films from
Europe and individualist American artists like Stan Brakhage and Bruce Conner. It was DEVO and The Residents, Nam June Paik's "Good Morning, Mr. Orwell", as well as the ZAP comix artists who showed me that the most dynamic art comes out of jams - that the interplay of independent voices is good for visuals as much as music. In Promptu features works made in an ongoing, freeflowing dialog with many friends.
Benton-C Bainbridge is a video artist using custom digital, analog and optical systems to make movies, installations and live visual performances.
Bainbridge has shown and performed video on five continents in venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris, Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Center, Madison Square Garden, American Museum of the Moving Image, The Kitchen (NYC), EMPAC (Troy, NY), the American Museum of Natural History, SFMoMA (San Francisco), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.), Dallas Video Festival, Boston Cyberarts Festival, Mercat des les Flors (Barcelona), LUX2006 (Sevilla), Auditorium Parco della Musica (Roma), Sonic Light (Amsterdam), Wien Moderne (Vienna), Inventionen (Berlin), Teatro Colón CETC (Buenos Aires), CELCIT (Managua), Korean Festival (Seoul), Good Vibrations (Australia), MTV Networks and Hotwired (global).
Inspired as a teenager by early audiovisual collectives, Benton-C often works collaboratively. Bainbridge co-founded the live video ensembles NNeng, The Poool, 77 Hz, and - as "Valued Cu$tomer" - Lord Knows Compost and Stackable Thumb. As UnityGain's resident (1998-2002) VJ Benton-C designed video networks as systems for realtime visual 'battles'. Bainbridge has collaborated with Pauline Oliveros, Joan La Barbara, Abigail Child, Yasunao Tone, Hoppy Kamiyama, Johnny deKam, Ross Goldstein, Venetian Snares and Jin Hi Kim amongst scores of other artists and performers. His video has been released on numerous tapes and DVDs.
Currently, Benton-C Bainbridge is performing video (and video-as-lighting) with Bobby Previte as "Dialed In". Bainbridge's ongoing collaboration with Minou Maguna continues with the video and staging design for John King's new opera "Galileo Galilei" and installations/performances of the expanded documentary "Brother Islands". With Glowing Pictures, Bainbridge is co-producing the visuals for One Step Beyond, a monthly event at American Museum of Natural History that The New Yorker calls 'New York's Best Museum Party'.
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