Who is Benita Whyte? Who am I?
Benita Whyte’s Video Fish at Casino Artspace, Hamilton, ON.
Image courtesy of the Artist.
A prime qualifier for a guilty pleasure in the times we live in might be something like a page you wouldn’t open on your browser in a “cool” cafe, if the likelihood of over-the-shoulder visibility were assessed as probable. Set within the current mood of hyperactive identity politics, every visible transaction (social or commercial) is a chance to affirm who we are and/or aren’t. Some of our dearest browser friends are also our most embarrassing; personal brand liabilities to be denied publicly whenever within eye-shot of those in the socio-cultural bracket to which we belong or aspire. Who are these ‘like-minded’ individuals and community members we self-police for, erecting and posturing our public selves in the likeness of? We invite the judgement of those we designate favorably alike, to reaffirm publicly the personas we cultivate. From even the unknown co-occupant in a see-and-be-seen situation, we seek (at best) tacit approval of our co-occupancy, and (at least) to seem like an appropriate constituent of their identity-enacting public patronage practices. If this transaction goes well (meaning we have both appropriately judged our belonging-ness in whatever space we both currently exist) neither party has to confront an identi-quake* or inquisition into their carefully-curated, capital B “brand” of cultural capital. We are our own PR managers and agents of representation, and the stratagem employed depends on the ability to anticipate the rules of the game around our own perception. Stakes run high. Within the brief moments during which judgement passes, who we are and what we stand for is assessed and understood with or without permission granted. The surest route to the reading we hope to author is a well-oiled, vertical sequence of signifiers. We dress, act, and create like we belong so that when others rapidly consume our image, we do. Full circle.
*when one’s identity is deeply shaken causing them to ask themselves a series of questions about who they really are or how people really perceive them causing one to lose confidence and assurance in how they present.
Perhaps this is less a shared truism about modern living and community-building than an unflattering, unsolicited personal outing. Reconciling the critical consumer I self-identify as with the ideological shortcomings of my consumptive habits, is more a step-trip shuffle than anything more imaginably elegant. With my identity politic anxieties often engaged, the opening of Benita Whyte’s show Video Fish, was a moment of consecration. Being on the receiving end of the vulnerability she infuses her work with felt consoling and pleasurable, like a friend rubbing aloe on sensitive sunburns that are my own misgivings about who I might be. Yet it also made me uncomfortable. She may be the one exposing herself, offering companionship, but she is also implicating her viewer’s guilty pleasures.
Video Fish is sort of like reading a tabloid or a tell-all. You imagine yourself better, more refined even, than salacious ‘trash’ culture, but you find yourself flipping through it the minute no one is watching, not fully ready to admit your own embarrassment about how eager you were to do so. Not to say that Whyte’s work is of the same genre, but rather that her subjects share the tacky, hypnotic allure of pop/mainstream culture. In the gallery, the lights are turned off. The artist has designated items for our sight through the positioning of LED lights, projections, televisions, and digital picture frames. The celestial video on the entry wall, is one of many renditions to come of artist as angel. The version of the artist shown here is in full saturation; a larger-than-life pink glamazon strategically tapping nerve meridians in order that she might more successfully attract love. Personal betterment, identity performance through costume and affectation, heavenly symbolism, and literal overexposure of the artist herself, have iterations in multiple media throughout the show. These themes set the units of Video Fish (a title referring to convincing performances of hyperfemininity in drag culture) in sync. Her performances are less literal than allegorical. Each piece offers a new persona and possibility for who we are, or can be, as contemporary “women.” It’s hard not to talk about Whyte as a Cindy Sherman of an internet age. Sherman’s practice dealt with a cast of characters to regurgitate stories about who women are, what spaces their bodies may inhabit, and the possible storylines of who they can become and what they can dream. Whyte’s own cast of characters and possibilities reflect a moment where authorship of personal identities and stories is done through media platforms that anyone with WiFi can access. The limit of one’s impact is the quantifiable size of one’s audience. Internalized oppression now derives less from top-down storytelling, than from a flatter, more aggressively ubiquitous model in which everyone is trying to prove their validity, striving towards mass appeal for the stories they tell.
Appropriating “femininity” as a woman is complicated, the irony being that parody often comes closer to the mark than most female-identifying individuals ever do in their day-to-day. Whyte’s body of work often renders high-resolution advertisements-- the most powerful and expensive images created and circulated in our culture-- in crude, pixelated low fidelity. High-resolution images often convincingly create a world in which we suspend our disbelief, but her lo-fi renderings short circuit our unquestioning consumption. The aberrant similarities in Whyte’s imagery don’t allow us the same assumptions their hi-fi counterparts do. We are forced to rethink how to engage with them because we can’t dismiss them. This is a result of an inability to trust in their message because they are not of the slick style that panels cityscapes, their familiarity allowing for quick consumption. The ways in which these pop culture images are distorted highlight humanity through the errors in their construction. In a climate of extreme bio-politics via popular representation, it is plain that some bodies are designated more valuable than others; Whyte’s work describes a world where a body can depict almost any body.
Benita Whyte’s own body refracts a contradictory reading. Her default colour scheme is hot pink on hot pink. Her hair is platinum but her roots are dark and grown out. I have known her to be taken for many ethnicities: generally “Asian,” Philippino, Spanish, Guyanese, and eastern European. One might assume she identifies as a woman of colour or just as possibly, white. Her studio has images of women like Anna Nicole Smith taped up on the walls along with gendered packaging for pantyhose. The ironies of the feminine ideal are always on view, and in the midst of an extra-heated political moment for historically marginalized bodies, her persona and her work are a meeting place for these hot discussions to take place with incredible complexity. She incites a multiplicity of readings in which almost every feminine archetype has a stake.
We are all affirming, reaffirming, and re-reaffirming our identities publicly almost constantly. We judge others, judge ourselves against others, and ask others to judge us in the hopes of garnering their approval (again, maybe I am unflatteringly alone on this premise). At some event like an art opening, where we are on the scene with those who recognize us as part of it and allow us to belong, displaying our identity at full mast to be seen or photographed, we affirm who we are. In such a circumstance, what does it mean to consume vulnerability, voluntarily on display, collectively? What then, when the art on view refuses to allow us to be a confident passive viewer? We walked in emboldened by our hard-won membership in this social space and now we are put in a submissive role, because we identify with the vulnerabilities on display. We felt so sure we were there to judge the work of the artist, and the artist themselves on the basis of their work. Suddenly we are implicated. Benita Whyte offers us the confusing paradox of performances of the private self in public. We can’t be sure we are witnessing autobiographical truisms, but we also can’t help but breathe a uncomfortable (but secret!) sigh of relief, as we see a reflection of the un-slick, horizontal, and conflicting version of who we know we are behind our policed, and polished public image.
Aimee Burnett is the founder of, and Bespoke shoemaker at Pedlar Stock, a small makers brand. Pedlar Stock is based out of Casino Artspace in Hamilton Ontario. Casino, of which Burnett is a founder and member, is a curated events venue, project space, and workshop that hosts 16 individual creatives.
