Sara Cwynar’s Baby Blue Benzo

Sara Cwynar’s new twenty-one-minute semi-autobiographical video, Baby Blue Benzo, 2024, premiered along with related photographs this fall in an exhibition of the same name at 52 Walker in New York. Like a sampling from a restless night filled with symbolic dreams, the video limns a battle with insomnia that arouses a fixation with the rare, vaguely pill-shaped 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR. At the beginning of the video, the forty-year-old Canadian-born, Brooklyn-based artist compares insomnia to being “dragged behind an endless burning light” as a generic race car surges through a pit stop. Notably, a Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR wrecked on a racetrack in France during its first year out at the Le Mans 24 hour race in 1955, killing over eighty people and eventually leading to safety reforms in racing. Another went for €135,000,000 at Sotheby’s in 2022, making it the most expensive car ever sold at auction. Cwynar’s video suggests that living in an image- and market-driven culture is enough to hasten anyone to sleeplessness and obsession or make them reach for Benzodiazepines, a.k.a. “Benzos” like Xanax and Klonopin that often come in blue pill casings. There’s so much to see and so much on offer in the video, but none of it is comforting. Much of it is fashionable yet cold.

Formally, Baby Blue Benzo is a layered, agitated cut-up, a hoard of pictures within pictures and side-by-side clips—found images, stock photographs (many watermarked by Getty Images), and short scenes Cwynar staged or rephotographed, often suggesting outtakes from sporting events or fashion and advertising campaigns with lots of kitschy knick-knacks thrown in. Everyone is repositioning themselves or an object, working, or falling without a clear goal or finish line in sight. The video has a narrow aspect ratio. It’s long and thin. As it progresses, its rightward slide makes the overall viewing apparatus seem like a factory conveyor belt or a touch screen controlled by the swipes of an unseen hand shopping and shopping. Hired models, a disembodied male voice (the actor Paul Cooper), and the artist muse about commodification, photography, and power. A model speaks a line penned by Cwynar, “I can’t relate to those philosophers who wrote about visual representations as if they were private property.” Other models walk on treadmills or pose with a cut-out of the SLR, but no one looks or sounds happy. We hear T. S. Eliot’s lament from The Wasteland that in modern times, the past can be reduced to a series of images, “a heap of broken images,” he says. We also hear about promotional materials calling the SLR “the Mona Lisa of cars,” as toy cars and postcards of da Vinci’s painting flash on the screen. We glimpse an auto workers’ strike and a fire. Towards the middle of the video, Cooper gives the kind of instruction one gives these days to an artificial intelligence large language model, “Write a text about surveillance in the style of a car.” Central in the response: “I am more than a mere automobile.” In the computer’s formulation, to be surveilled and made into an image is to be more. More valuable, liked, purchased, and adored. A mere automobile goes from place to place. A fully considered commodity is elevated and seen.

Cwynar is all over Baby Blue Benzo, standing in for both the cultural producer who manufactures desire, and the eager, if self-conscious, consumer. She films models in warehouses in Los Angeles and in New York by the Manhattan bridge on a particularly azureus day. Amping up the drama, she shares footage of her 2023 photo and video shoot with Pamela Anderson, where she put the much-photographed Gen X idol in front of a rumpled backdrop. The soundtrack borrows freely from different periods. Swelling with march-like rhythms and synth-pop, it slides easily from Romantic composer Franz Liszt to contemporary recording artist Charli XCX. The video concludes with a series of short declarative statements as voiceover where Cwynar and Cooper summon back the content of the rest of the video, as if to make sure it is firmly planted and has taken root like a good advertisement. They describe themselves as “the world’s most expensive car,” “a bellhop in stiletto heels,” and Pamela Anderson, as if they have become their obsessions. Baby Blue Benzo doesn’t so much say that consumerism, celebrity worship, or kitsch is bad. On the contrary, it seems to revel in the trappings.

Talking to Sophia Coppola in 2023, Cwynar explained that she wants her work to take on “latent power dynamics in images and the media, and to rework them into photographs and films that are beautiful and accessible. Sometimes, Baby Blue Benzo feels so accessible that it could be a fashion week collaboration with Mercedes-Benz. Still, the video recalls the late philosopher Lauren Berlant’s concept of “cruel optimism.” In 2011, Berlant described “cruel optimism” as the tendency in a time of crisis to cultivate, as an escape, an attachment to an object, particularly one that fails to provide any real support and might hurt the person attached to it, furthering the crises that motivated the attachment. In other words, imagine you’re feeling depressed moving between two underpaid jobs and listening to a podcast about climate change, so you buy yourself a stylish sweater in an attempt to feel better, but buying that “fast fashion” item pays into the very system that undervalues your labor and the labor of people like you, puts hazardous chemicals into the water stream, and calculates how to keep you purchasing, thereby sending you back to work. Someone’s tendency to think that a new object can elevate them out of their current condition often keeps them there. In its wake, an expensive dream car produces sometimes devastating and overlooked environmental and labor costs. Despite its impressive design, ironically, it does little to help us move forward. In fact, it might hold us back. No automobile is more than an automobile. An insomnia-fueled car obsession, like a celebrity obsession, is only movement the way walking on a treadmill is movement. It’s a renunciation. It’s cruel. It doesn’t really get you anywhere.