Models as Media of Worlding in Sadie Benning and Fernand DelignyAstrid Deuber-Mankowsky

Inventing New Aesthetic Practices

Sadie Benning grew up with a single mother in Milwaukee. They were fifteen years old and had dropped out of high school because of homophobia when their father, Los Angeles-based avant-garde artist James Benning, gave them a Fisher-Price PKL-2000 camera, also called ‘Pixelvision’, for Christmas in 1988. It was a toy, a camera for children that ran on batteries and produced pixelated black-and-white images on standard cassette tapes that did not allow reels longer than four minutes. Although Benning says they were disappointed that it was only a child’s camera and not a camcorder, they very soon began experimenting with it, and invented a new video aesthetic. In a 1992 interview, they recalled how they began shooting their first video, A New Year (1989): ‘I just set the camera down and it didn’t judge me. It just listened. I used it to get things out that I couldn’t tell anybody yet.’11Kim Masters, ‘Auteur of Adolescence’, The Washington Post, 17 October 1992 <https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1992/10/17/auteur-of-adolescence/bad908d9-02b0-4a56-a336-8d0cd1b78b31/> [accessed 20 August 2024].Beginning of page[p. 22]

They recorded TV images and their body in their bedroom, combining performance, close-ups of their face, handwriting and text, snippets of newspapers, music from the underground feminist punk movement that was just emerging, as well as hip hop and jazz, and experimental narrative to critically explore gender, sexuality, racism, homophobia, and the ‘normal’ violence of their social environment (Figure 1).

Benning showed their first four short films to their father, who immediately recognized the artistic value and expressiveness of these videos. He screened them in his class at the California Institute of the Arts, and, from there, their reputation quickly spread to the art world and to a queer public. Benning’s Pixelvision videos were shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1991, at the 1993 Beginning of page[p. 23] Whitney Biennial, and at all relevant independent film festivals. They established a new aesthetic and helped found New Queer Cinema.22On the emergence and history of New Queer Cinema, see Ruby Rich, New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013) <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.1215/​9780822399698>.

Fernand Deligny was not an artist; his work was not exhibited. But he was similarly interested in questions of perception and technology’s potential to change the way we see the world. Deligny’s focus was on sharing the world with children and young people who did not conform to the model of normality. In 1949, he created the network La Grande Cordeé, dedicated to the attempt to free psychotic and delinquent youths from institutions and to take care of them ‘in an independent therapy’.33Sandra Alvarez de Toledo, ‘Fernand Deligny: Repères cinèbiographiques’, in Le Cinéma de Fernand Deligny (Paris: Editions Montparnasse et les auteurs, 2007), pp. 3–8 (p. 4; my translation). Nine years later, together with the psychoanalyst and free thinker Josée Manenti, a few companions, and the children entrusted to his care, he moved to the Cévennes countryside. They used the camera to collaborate on a project that focused not on language but on the universe of gestures in which the children lived.44See Jean-Pierre Daniel, ‘Josée Manenti, la force de l’amitié. Le Moindre Geste, ou filmer l’enfant psychotique’, Le Coq-Héron, 209 (2012), pp. 65–70 <https://doi.org/10.3917/cohe.209.0065>. The presence of the camera opened a space for play that allowed new encounters and the forging of new relationships among the participants, including the landscape and the recording equipment.55See, in this regard, Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky, ‘The Space of Appearance in Deep Underground: A Film Is Being Made and the Documentary Gesture’, MLN, 137.3 (2022), pp. 443–65 <https://doi.org/10.1353/mln.2022.0034>. Between 1962 and 1964, Deligny, Manenti — who operated the 16 mm camera — and their companions spent days with the children in the landscape, shooting footage for a film to come. The film material was only edited by Jean-Pierre Daniel five years later, becoming the famous experimental film Le Moindre Geste (Figure 2), shown in a first version at the Cannes Film Festival in 1971. The final 35 mm version was completed with the help of Chris Marker, but was not released until 2004.66On the circuitous and by no means conflict-free production history of Le Moindre Geste, see Daniel, ‘Josée Manenti, la force de l’amitié’.Beginning of page[p. 25]

After working for two years at the Clinique de la Borde with Jean Oury and Félix Guattari, Deligny returned to the Cévennes in 1967 to undertake a new tentative. A tentative, for Deligny, was more of an experience or experimentation than an experiment. In his words, it was ‘a small ensemble, a small, very flexible network that weaves itself into reality as it is, in circumstances as they are, even encountering rather rare events that cannot be created arbitrarily’.77Fernand Deligny, Oeuvres, ed. by Sandra Alvarez de Toledo (Paris: L’Arachnéen, 2007), p. 705; my translation. ‘La tentative des Cévennes’, also called ‘the network of Cévennes’, existed from 1969 until 1986. It denotes a certain form of cohabitation of Deligny and his companions — he called them ‘presences proches’ — with up to twelve ‘autistic’ children in the countryside. Autism, at that time, meant to Deligny in the first place that the children were mute, without any relation to symbolic language. At the centre of the group was Janmari, who had been placed in Deligny’s care by his mother in 1966 as a twelve-year-old boy, diagnosed by the Salpêtrière Hospital with incurable, profound brain damage. This boy, who lived in the group all the time, changed his behaviour in astonishing ways, participating in common activities such as baking bread, fetching water, chopping wood, and so forth, but did not speak a word in all these years. During all this time, the camera was almost always present. For Deligny, as he explained in the 1975 documentary Ce gamin, là, these children lived at ‘the other pole of our existence’,88Fernand Deligny, in Ce gamin, là (Radeaux dans la montagne), dir. by Renaud Victor (France, 1975) (03:47–03:49). and for him it could not be a question of the children adapting to our point of view, but that we must learn to live with them, their gestures, and their ‘point de voir’ (‘point of view’). In the course of this reversal of perspective, which was at the same time a radical change of perspective towards what Deligny called the ‘common body of the human species’, Deligny and his adult companions drew more than two hundred maps, on which they marked their own journeys and then, on tracing paper, the children’s ‘lignes d’erre’, their ‘wander lines’.99See Fernand Deligny, Sandra Alvarez de Toledo, and Cyril Le Roy, Cartes et lignes d’erre / Maps and Wander Lines: Traces du réseau de Fernand Deligny, 1969–1979 (Paris: L’Arachnéen, 2013).Beginning of page[p. 27]

This practice became famous under the name ‘mapping the wander lines’ (see Figure 3). The goal of these maps was to locate places where encounters took place while the adults were mainly engaged in everyday tasks, such as making a fire, washing dishes, or feeding animals, and while the children were also outside, near them, following their own ways and rhythms. Deleuze and Guattari derived their method of cartography and the notion of the rhizome in A Thousand Plateaus in part from Deligny’s practices.

What Model?

Yet, what do Sadie Benning’s Pixelvision videos and Deligny’s tentative have in common, and what connects them to the question of models? Both criticize existing models and decidedly do not wish to create new models. The French scholar Igor Krtolica, for example, emphasizes that Deligny’s tentative does not follow any model and does not represent a model that could be followed: the network of Deligny, he writes, has ‘no monopolistic pretensions: it is not a model to follow’.1010Igor Krtolica, ‘La “Tentative” des Cévennes. Deligny et la question de l’institution’, Chimères, 72 (2010), pp. 73–97 (p. 85). Even clearer: ‘The word “tentative” should therefore be taken literally: as an experimentation that has no model and does not pretend to become one.’1111Ibid. From Sadie Benning comes the related statement: ‘I want to be free to try things that don’t make sense yet.’1212Sadie Benning, in ‘Sadie Benning, American, born 1973’, Museum of Modern Art, n.d. <https://www.moma.org/artists/34902> [accessed 20 August 2024]. And: ‘As a transgender queer youth without access at that time to images or language that affirmed my reality, I saw it as urgent to make my own images.’1313Sadie Benning, in Diana Solway, ‘Transgender Artist Sadie Benning Is Not Afraid’, W, 13 May 2016 <https://www.wmagazine.com/story/sadie-benning-artist-mary-boone-callicoon-fine-arts> [accessed 20 August 2024].

Both Benning and Deligny want to change existing worldviews, which are emotionally and affectively firmly anchored in certain normalizing models. Moreover, both build on the singularity and contingency of the present to initiate a practice of world exploration that is less exclusive and less violent. This approach is not geared towards new models that serve to normalize and subjectivize.Beginning of page[p. 28]

And yet, models play a crucial role for both in their explorations of different forms of worlding. The two hundred maps of wander lines that Deligny and his team produced can undoubtedly be described as models of a kind. Benning also plays with models in her videos when she disguises herself and uses gestures, moves, movements, songs, and utterances from the subculture to queer and rearrange the world. The question is, of course, what one means by ‘model’. I shall now explore this question in more detail.

A well-known, indeed almost canonical, definition of ‘model’ in the fields of anthropology and cultural studies goes back to Clifford Geertz and his 1966 essay ‘Religion as Cultural System’.1414Clifford Geertz, ‘Religion as a Cultural System’, in Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (London: Fontana Press, 1993), pp. 86–125. Here, Geertz introduces his concept of the model to explain how the processes he calls ‘culturally programmed’ should be understood. His text concerns the analysis of religion, which he defines as follows:

(1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.1515Ibid., p. 90.

As Geertz argues, by analogy with genetics, the way religion reproduces itself as a cultural pattern can be understood as a cultural programme. He introduces the concept of the model to explain how the teachings of religions, which are linked to moods and motivations, rituals and melodies, are passed on. As with the term ‘programming’, Geertz borrows the term ‘model’ from the sciences and defines cultural patterns as models in the sense that they are ‘sets of symbols whose relations to one another “model” relations among entities, processes or what-have-you in physical, organic, social, or psychological systems by “paralleling”, “imitating”, or “simulating” them’.1616Ibid. He makes no distinction as to whether these systems, of which the entities are components, are physical, organic, mental, or social. However, he emphasizes that the two aspects inherent in the model, as being both of (reality) and Beginning of page[p. 29] for (reality), respectively, make the model the medium and executive organ of doctrines and rites in the field of religion, whereas in the sciences models remain bound to theory. That is, for anthropology, the model is an analytical tool to explain how it is that religion and similar authoritative value systems function like cultural programmes to create realities. In contrast, the model in the sciences is not so much tied to doctrines, rites, moods, and motivations but to theories and concepts. This means that only models as cultural patterns are normative in the sense that they ‘give meaning, that is, objective conceptual form, to social and psychological reality both by shaping themselves to it and by shaping it to themselves’.1717Ibid., p. 93.

The connection Geertz draws between models and religion — as a ‘system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic’ — explains the violent effect that models, as cultural patterns, can have on people, and especially on those who do not fit into a given cultural system. Models in this sense are intrinsically normative. This also explains why Benning and Deligny neither follow models nor wish to create models to follow. Instead, they are interested in analysing and criticizing the power of these models and exploring the frameworks in which they are so powerful. At the same time, through alternative forms of expression, they seek practices of worlding or world-making that are non-exclusionary and non-violent. However, they work with models for this as well.

My thesis is that the models Benning and Deligny relate to, as the media of worlding, differ significantly from those Geertz describes so accurately: Benning’s and Deligny’s models are neither normative nor oriented towards a totalizing view of the world. They are local, playful, and experimental. I base my argument on the decisive questions posed in the ICI Focus ‘Models’ statement. Christoph Holzhey and his co-authors here assume, first, that all models share the fundamental characteristic that their effect depends on a specific relational quality.Beginning of page[p. 30] Second, they underscore that this relation is ‘reductive insofar as it is selective and considers only certain aspects of both object and model’.1818‘Models: ICI Focus 2022–24 of the Core Project “Reduction”’, ICI Berlin, 13 November 2021 <https://www.ici-berlin.org/projects/models/> [accessed 20 August 2024], quoting from the introduction of this volume, p. 1.

Unlike Geertz, the ‘Models’ statement emphasizes less the performative aspect of the model than the difference between the model and its referent. In this regard, it cites Lewis Carroll and Jorge Luis Borges, both of whom humorously point out ‘the absurdity of thinking that models keep improving by becoming less reductive until they eventually coincide with their target’.1919Ibid. The ICI’s statement points out that models have often been criticized precisely because of this restrictive function:

Such critiques can draw on the notion of scientific paradigms, referring to accepted models that cohere in totalizing, self-reinforcing worldviews, presenting models of reality, and at the same time serving as models for the development of further models.2020Ibid., pp. 1–2.

Now, it is striking that Holzhey and his co-authors link the self-referentiality of models to their restrictive function and cite this as the reason for totalizing, self-reinforcing worldviews, while Geertz identifies in this very fact the central potentiality of the model qua cultural pattern for religions as systems of symbols. These different perspectives on models are related to the fact that the ICI’s statement starts from the differences between models in various disciplines. While Geertz points out that models in the sciences refer to theories and not to doctrines and melodies, but draws no conclusion from this, Holzhey and his co-authors emphasize this very fact. They state: ‘In the sciences, they are usually considered more modest, tentative, and local than theories, which are more expansive and aspire to universality’.2121Ibid., p. 2. They highlight, furthermore, that models are ‘less prescriptive or definitive and more ambiguous than codified rules’, and conclude that models Beginning of page[p. 31] can be considered ‘as creative, partially autonomous tools for understanding and as media of theorizing and worlding’.2222Ibid.

So, we have two models of models that belong to different forms of worlding: one belongs to symbol systems that are totalizing and self-reinforcing. In this, the aspects of the model’s being for and of coincide. The other model is tentative, deliberately reductive, local, experimental, playful, and modest. It is a medium for a non-exclusive, local, and tentative worlding.

In what follows, I will move from the tension between these two different concepts of models to concrete examples, to examine the ways in which Sadie Benning, in her early Pixelvision videos, and Fernand Deligny, in his ‘tentative des Cévennes’, draw on models as media of a more inclusive and less violent exploration of the world. In this way, I hope both to sharpen the understanding of the concept of the model and to contribute to the understanding of the artistic practices of Benning and Deligny.

Sadie Benning: Free to Try Things that Don’t Make Sense Yet

The first tapes Benning shot with her Fisher-Price toy camera in 1989 are raw. The black-and-white images are heavily pixelated and surrounded by a thick black border. The sound is overlaid with a strong hiss. The videos address the violence of the Reagan era in the US and the violence Benning experienced as a teenager who described themselves as being ‘as queer as can be’.2323Masters, ‘Auteur of Adolescence’.

Benning filmed the first tapes enclosed in the safety of their bedroom and from this position observed the influences of US culture on their queerness and lesbian identity through the camera lens and video screen. The compressed spatial format of the Fisher-Price PKL-2000 camera images reflects the limited space of Benning’s bedroom: the image quality of these videos is low, the images’ relationship to the subject is weak, their combination with music and sound is tentative, and the use of Benning’s own body is experimental. They oppose the normative model that is part of a totalizing and self-reinforcing symbol Beginning of page[p. 32] system. That is, Benning analyses in and with their videos the patterns of a culture based on exclusion and violence, and thus the very models that Geertz identifies as the executive organ of doctrines and rites.

A New Year (1989) starts with a Pixelvision-recorded sample of the television game show The Price is Right, in which contestants compete by guessing the prices of merchandise to win cash and prizes (Figure 4). The camera then moves to pan across a hand-scrawled sentence: ‘I realized how crazy everyone is and I realized what a small part I played in it’ (00:39–01:09; Figure 5). Following this, the camera pans over newspaper headlines while ‘I Shot the Sheriff’ can be heard on the soundtrack. No music is heard while the camera scans Benning’s handwritten lines — only the noise of the camera. Following this, Benning laconically, yet precisely, describes the everyday violence of her immediate surroundings (‘A girl I know got hit by a drunk driver. Her leg was broken & twisted like puddy’, 01:39–02:09). In contrast, there are pictures of a snow globe in which Mary and Joseph can be seen fleeing with the baby Jesus (Figure 6).

The video analyses the sinister dynamic in which poverty, sexism, homophobia, and racism intertwine (‘A friend of mine got raped by a Black man. Now she’s a racist Nazi skinhead’, 03:09–03.55; Figure 1),Beginning of page[p. 33] and explores the relation between addictions (‘My neighboor [sic] is selling crack’, 04:52–05:06) and capitalism (‘But our nation is addicted to a more harmful drug, money’, 05:30–05:50). Between these statements, there are close-ups of her own body, an eye, a shoe (Figure 7) — real, yet at the same time monstrous and powerful.

In her seminal 1998 essay about Benning’s early videos, Mia Carter succinctly summarizes:

Benning associates the persecution of sexually different bodies with the histories of racism and imperialism, thereby transcending the boundaries of both the personal and the historical.2424Mia Carter, ‘The Politics of Pleasure: Cross-Cultural Autobiographic Performance in the Video Works of Sadie Benning’, Signs, 23.3 (1998), pp. 745–76 (p. 751) <https://doi.org/10.1086/495287>.

These histories of racism, imperialism, and homophobia are based precisely on those cultural models that are at the centre of a ‘system of symbols’ which, according to Geertz, ‘acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions Beginning of page[p. 34] with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic’.2525Geertz, ‘Religion as a Cultural System’, p. 90.

The closeness of Benning’s works to the form of the diary meant that they were quickly perceived as ‘video diaries’. Benning, however, was critical of this reception. In an interview ten years later, responding to the question ‘would you call your first works video diaries?’, they stated:

They were, in a way, forerunners to YouTube videos. I was young and aware of the diary as a format, but I was more conscious that the videos were experimental and performance based — my concern with the word diary is that it highlights the confessional and is less about the imaginative and abstract qualities that I associate with those videos.2626Sadie Benning, in Solway, ‘Transgender Artist Sadie Benning Is Not Afraid.’

I propose to connect the imaginative and abstract qualities of the videos with the very qualities that Holzhey and his co-authors attribute to these models, which can be considered ‘as creative, partially autonomous tools for understanding and as media of theorizing and worlding’.2727‘Models: ICI Focus 2022–24’, quoted in this volume on p. 2. The restriction to their bedroom; the limitations of the Pixelvision camera; the concentration on their own person, their body, and the known environment; the use of the objects; and the performances in front of and with the camera can be interpreted as rules that create a place, limited in time and space — a ‘room-for-play’, in which new worlds and new models can be designed. It is a way of modelling that, as Annabel Jane Wharton points out, can be thought of as play: ‘“Play”, at least if it is understood in terms of its definition by the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, is a productive way to understand models and their manipulation.’2828Annabel Jane Wharton, ‘Defining Models’, in Modelwork: The Material Culture of Making and Knowing, ed. by Martin Brückner, Sandy Isenstadt, and Sarah Wasserman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021), pp. 3–20 (p. 10) <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.5749/​j.ctv1z9n20d.4>.

From this perspective, the sound and the music, Benning’s body, the clothes, the caps, and all the other parts, like the sentences scribbled on paper, the voice-overs, the drawings, puppets, newspapers,Beginning of page[p. 35] television pictures, and found footage, appear as elements of a game in which the camera plays a privileged role. The camera simultaneously sets the rules, plays along, and records the game. The camera thus becomes an active agent in Benning’s practice of modelling. It does not function as a tool to achieve a specific purpose or a specific result; rather, its presence and materiality open up the possibility of a different form of worlding. The videos irritate the viewer, inviting them to think and to play along with them.

The way Benning carefully and deliberately assembles the various elements into a local and provisional model is evident in the way she relates to music:

I think music is a place where you can challenge social conventions because rhythm is so personal. It makes you feel things. I think that musical influences and the experience of creating music is in everything I do. It’s like a heartbeat.2929Benning, in Solway, ‘Transgender Artist Sadie Benning Is Not Afraid’.

This brings me to the fourteen-minute video Girl Power (Part I), of 1992, featuring the underground feminist Riot Grrrl punk band Bikini Kill, and the underground rock band Sonic Youth, as elements of Beginning of page[p. 36] the counterculture in which Benning grounds their new model for worlding. The video begins with a scene in which sound and image are woven into a single rhythm. We hear a sample of the song ‘Shoot’ by Sonic Youth and move with the Pixelvision camera from a drawn portrait of a woman (Figure 8) to a series of drawings of naked girls’ bodies (Figure 9) over which the camera moves in time with the music, and after a cut we finally see a profile view of an older woman pointing a gun at a model of a male torso and shooting (Figures 10 and 11).

This subtle deconstruction of the prevailing normative models through which a totalizing heteronormative order is reproduced and reinforced runs through the entire fourteen-minute video.

Using video technology and playing with the mediality of moving images, Benning creates a kind of equality between the close-ups of their own body and the various models through which the heteronormative order inscribes itself as a ‘cultural programme’ in the hearts and minds of its subjects, similar to that which Geertz describes for religion. The close-ups make their body appear both more unfitting and more powerful. Benning is repeatedly seen dancing wildly, and, in some scenes, we see home videos of them as a small child, dreaming of riding a motorcycle like actor Erik Estrada, even in those early days.Beginning of page[p. 37] The video plays with scientific and medical models that confirm gender and generational order. Benning contrasts these with the desire for a different, more open, less violent world, in which models are not performative but invite us to play. Particularly beautiful and famous is the scene in which Benning remembers how they imagined themself as Matt Dillon in front of the mirror as a child, imagining themself to be just as sexy as the star (Figures 12, 13, and 14).Beginning of page[p. 38]

‘So I built my own world […] made my own rules.’ These voice-over statements, spoken by Benning themself, show that the refusal to conform to the harmful normative ideals of society is accompanied by a different worlding. Just as the models Benning designs as media for theorizing and worlding are playful, local, humble, and experimental, so the imaginary world they design is open to change.

Fernand Deligny: A Raft in the Mountains

The camera plays an important and active role not only in Sadie Benning’s modelling practices, but also in Fernand Deligny’s tentatives. The 16 mm camera was there from the beginning of Deligny’s work with delinquent and behaviourally conspicuous children. Initially thought of as a pedagogical tool, the camera became for Deligny a medium for thinking differently about language, image, communication, gestures, landscape, technology, and human community — even the human species.3030See Deuber-Mankowsky, ‘The Space of Appearance in Deep Underground’, p. 473. Deligny, a philosophical poet and cinephile, was well versed in the history of experimental film and not only experimented with the camera himself, but also developed an original theory about it.3131See Marlon Miguel, Camering: Fernand Deligny on Cinema and the Image (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2022) <https://doi.org/10.1017/9789400604308>. He coined the term camérer to denote a method of being-with the camera, distinguishing this from the more familiar result-oriented, purposeful uses of the camera, which he called scénarier. Unfortunately, due to space constraints, I cannot go into more detail about Deligny’s concept of camérer, but I would like to point out that the presence of the camera is embedded in the philosophy of media and aesthetics that the concept entails. The 16 mm camera was present during all the years of the ‘tentative des Cévennes’ and was part of the method and practices of modelling that became known as ‘mapping the wander lines’. Deligny documented this method and the ‘tentative des Cévennes’ in the 1975 film Ce gamin, là (Radeaux dans la montagne).

Deligny wrote the script for the documentary together with director and cinematographer Renaud Victor. Victor lived for several years in Monoblet, participating in daily life with Deligny, the other ‘presences proches’, and the ‘autistic’ children, before the film was Beginning of page[p. 39] realized. One can interpret this as an aspect of Deligny’s practice of modelling, by which he sets himself apart from those models that he associates with the ‘conventional arsenal’ — the equipment, personnel, and instruments that go into the making of a conventional film. Deligny reminds us that ‘arsenal’ means ‘a facility where everything necessary for the construction, repair and equipping of warships is brought together’, while ‘conventional’ means ‘conforming to social conventions; unnatural, insincere’.3232Fernand Deligny, ‘Les Fossiles ont la vie dure’, in Fernand Deligny: Camérer. A propos d’images, ed. by Sandra Alvarez de Toledo and others (Paris: L’Arachnéen, 2021), pp. 142–49 (p. 143). He then counters this model of the conventional arsenal with his own way of modelling, which he calls ‘construire un radeau’: building a raft. He summarizes pointedly: ‘To escape the conventional and the arsenal that goes with it, you have to build a raft.’3333Ibid.

Right at the start, Ce gamin, là (Radeaux dans la montagne) impressively shows what it means to follow the model of the conventional arsenal and the difference that it makes to ‘construct a raft in the mountain’. First, we see a written document that certifies that Janmari, the boy living in Deligny’s care, has severe brain damage. Words fall: ‘uncurable’, ‘unbearable’, ‘unlivable’. The document is contrasted with a photograph of Janmari in a free environment, playing with a clay ball hanging from a string (Figure 15), while Deligny’s voice-over explains what the psychiatrists say about the boy. This leads to the next image, a bird’s-eye view of a closed psychiatric hospital from the turn of the twentieth century (Figure 16). It is almost a model for a model that is part of a symbol system that is totalizing and self-reinforcing.

The architecture itself ensures that the anticipated future of the child — incurable, unlivable, unbearable — will arrive, with its walls, closed doors, and windows that are not windows providing nothing but monotony, sameness, and immobility. Deligny’s voice-over then leads back to the photograph of the boy playing with the clay ball, telling us that the photograph was taken ‘here’, in Monoblet, ‘away from those predicted places, built on purpose, on the other pole’ (03:46). While the camera zooms slowly into the image, Deligny interprets the clay ball and the child’s play as an indication that the world may need Beginning of page[p. 40] to turn differently: that ‘autistic’ children should not be forced to adapt to our world and judged from our perspective, but that we must go in search of their world, which is not the world of language.

The change of perspective is accompanied by a change of model and modelling. Instead of following the model of the ‘conventional arsenal’, rafts have to be built in the mountains. Indeed, right after the scene described above, the film shows in a very condensed way how this is to be done. At the same time, it becomes clear that ‘building Beginning of page[p. 41] a raft’ refers to the construction of those models that are tentative, deliberately reductive, local, experimental, playful, and modest. We see an open house in the mountains — a ruin, without windows or a roof, ready to be converted and rebuilt in a new form (Figure 17). The camera zooms out and opens up a bird’s eye view of the landscape (Figure 18).

The rafts are the overlapping crosses on the map (Figure 19). They indicate the places where the adults, Deligny, his companions, and the Beginning of page[p. 42] children meet in their everyday tasks — washing dishes, baking bread, boiling water, fetching water, taking the goats out to pasture — where the rhythm of the water, the glitter and flicker of the fire count more than the purpose. All without language, but full of gestures, images, movement, and life.

As we have seen, Benning and Deligny differ in many respects. They deal with different topics at different times and in different places. However, there are moments that connect their works methodologically.Beginning of page[p. 43] The early video works of Benning and the tentatives of Deligny each carry their own spatiotemporal limitations as an inner condition and neither is explicitly intended to serve as a model. ‘Model’ refers here to the normative, cultural model that Geertz so aptly describes as a ‘system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men’. While Benning and Deligny criticize the dominance of these normative models, their respective methodological procedures can be compared and contrasted Beginning of page[p. 44] with the integration of the modelling in a methodological procedure that Holzhey and co-authors characterize as deliberately reductive, local, and playful.

I would like to conclude with the question of what it might mean today to deal with the early video works of Benning and the tentatives of Deligny. Both figures insist on the transience of their practices of worlding. I agree with Igor Krtolica: a tentative, an experimentation, invents new living possibilities. Thus, it is the art of innovation that is Beginning of page[p. 45] transferred — the transference of an experience: ‘So there’s no contradiction in Deligny’s simultaneous assertion that the attempt has no monopolistic pretensions, but proposes to swarm, that it hasn’t validated a paradigm, but invites other networks to be woven.’3434Krtolica, ‘La “Tentative” des Cévennes’, p. 93.

Deligny and Benning both build on the singularity and contingency of the present to initiate a practice of world exploration that is less exclusive and less violent. To this end, they break with those models that, in the sense of Clifford Geertz, are part of a self-reinforcing and tendentially totalizing view of the world. They invent aesthetic practices that incorporate a playful, experimental approach to local and constantly changing models. In this way, cultural models are transformed, in the sense of Holzhey and his co-authors, into creative ‘media of theorizing and worlding’.