“I totally believe that art is an open dialogue and that it is not logical. It does not always make sense.”
Lynda Benglis Redefined Sculpture in the ’60s. Now, She’s at Her Most Prolific.
The pioneering artist, who came to attention with her poured-latex floor works, is still pushing the limits of her medium.
By Osman Can Yerebakan for The New York Times Style Magazine. 8/16/19.
Memory is as important to the work of Lynda Benglis as any of her artistic materials, including the globular polyurethane foam and wax for which she is perhaps best known. A pioneer of free-form sculpture who radically pushed the medium in the late ’60s, she fills her biomorphic abstract works with the textures, sounds and images of the past.
The artist’s coming exhibition at Pace Gallery in Palo Alto, Calif., which will open on August 21, includes work from four decades of her career, ranging from the curving tubular “sparkle paper” sculptures she has produced since 2013— brightly colored totems created from handmade paper draped around amorphous chicken-wire forms — to “Eat Meat,” a fleshy human-size blob of poured-polyurethane foam that Benglis first fashioned in 1969 and recast in aluminum in 2012.
Each piece in the show is laced with memory. Recently, she recalled how her childhood trips from her hometown, Lake Charles, La., to the rocky Greek island of Kastellorizo, where her paternal grandparents once lived, informed her fascination with rugged textures, while she attributed her keen understanding of color, seen in works such as the hot-pink crystalline cast-polyurethane wall sculpture “Swinburne Figure I” (2009)and the shimmering multicolor paper-and-wire sculpture “Flag Twister”(2017), to watching birds as a girl with her grandfather in Mississippi.
Since the 1990s, Benglis has traveled between her main home in East Hampton, N.Y., and Santa Fe, N.M., where she fell in love with the natural landscape. Her studio, a cluster of small earth-toned adobe structures connected by a network of flagstone paths, which she has occupied since 1997, offers sweeping views of the high desert and the space to create dramatic large-scale works, such as her recent sculpture “Elephant: First Foot Forward” (2018), a ragged five-foot-wide knot of white bronze that resembles a torn tire.
Seated in her studio amid a sea of wooden sawhorses, Benglis meandered between decades and movements during our interview. “My whole history is reflected in my work,” she explained, as we discussed her career, starting with her signature poured-latex floor pieces in the 1960s and ’70s, with which she redefined the then predominantly male world of sculpture, and touching on one of her most subversive works: her groundbreaking Artforum ad.
During the heyday of Minimalism in 1974, Benglis placed a highly controversial ad in the magazine, after the editors there had refused to illustrate an interview with her using a nude self-portrait. The two-page advertisement, which shows Benglis naked but for a pair of cat-eye sunglasses and clutching a latex dildo toward her crotch, is now considered an important artwork in its own right and a comment on the sexist gender stereotyping of art and images shown in the media.
Now, at 77, Benglis is more prolific than ever: After her show at Pace, she will open the exhibition “In the Realm of Senses” at the Museum of Cycladic Art in November, with 30 works selected by the art historian David Anfam, and next May, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas will hold a major solo exhibition dedicated to her groundbreaking work in sculpture. On a late July morning, as she prepared to travel to Palo Alto, Benglis sat down to answer T’s Artist’s Questionnaire.
What is your day like? What’s your work schedule?
My day starts with looking at the New Mexico sky and the trees I plant in my studio’s garden. I go out on the porch to feed the birds and watch them play or fight over the seeds. After spending time with my miniature dachshund, Cleo, I make coffee.
How many hours of creative work do you think you do in a day?
My mind is always working with ideas but sometimes they pop and quickly disappear. I have to wait until the idea crystallizes again before I go back to working. Otherwise, I have no reason to work again. Last month, for example, I had a spark of an idea for which I am still in the waiting process. I am not interested in going backward, so I wait for new ideas to appear.
What’s the first piece of art you ever made?
When I was a child, I found some strings and sticks to make a mobile, which I had never seen in real life. Even back then, I was interested in making objects that move in space. My dad used to make kites out of newspaper and I thought about doing the same for a mobile. An urge to make things has always been evident. Art is about tricks of illusion and space.
What’s the worst studio you ever had?
I don’t consider any of them bad, because a studio is what you build with what is available. My beginning studio was heaven, an East Village basement with no heat. A former landlord had convinced me to move from an 11th Street unit to another one in a nine floor walk-up, with an offer of a basement space with an additional top floor, which nobody wanted. Having no proper heat led to my wax works, because I would need a heat source to melt the material. I found a secondhand plug-in heater and bought some Elmer’s glue and clamps. The Copts used encaustic painting recipes to paint caskets, which inspired me to make my own hot wax paint to achieve plasticity and transparency.
What’s the first work you ever sold? For how much?
It was a black-and-white painting sold to a collector from Washington state for around $400. Also, Sol LeWitt had introduced me to Dorothy and Herb Vogel, who collected my work early on. I had acollection of Sol’s drawings, until somebody I had let stay at my apartment for $75 stole them!
How do you know when you’re done?
How do you know when you land on a plane? It’s just obvious.
Have you assisted other artists before? If so, who?
No, but Ron Gorchov and I assisted each other and had important artistic exchange.
What music do you play when you’re making art?
I used to listen to John Mayall while making the poured sculptures. I grew up listening to Greek music with my grandmother, as well as Johnny Cash, which I still think about.
When did you first feel comfortable saying you’re a professional artist?
I wasn’t comfortable in the beginning. Carl Andre asked to visit my studio after a night at Max’s Kansas City. He came to my basement space and saw I had ideas; he told me I am a real artist. One of the classes I enjoyed the most at school was logic. People thought I could be a logician, as it seemed I could argue anything, anytime if I throw out ideas into the space through art.
Is there a meal you eat on repeat when you’re working?
Actually, I was thinking today how important milk is for me — I drink it every day although I know most people don’t.
What’s the weirdest object in your studio?
Not at my studio, but I have a wonderful African carved wood ram. Another important object was a mask my dad had brought from Chicago. Later, I sold it for $50 because I needed money to leave New Orleans. I remember the expression on his face when I told him I sold it, which was the same expression he made when I showed him images of my Artforum ad piece with a dildo in 1974.
How often do you talk to other artists?
I have many artist friends here in New Mexico.
What’s the last thing that made you cry?
Peeling onions.
If you have windows, what do they look out on?
My garden. I should add that I consider anywhere I create my studio.
What’s your worst habit?
If there is something I don’t like about myself, I’d try to change that — but one thing I could be accused of is that I don’t listen enough [laughs].
What are you reading?
A book of recipes called “Barefoot in Paris.” I like looking at cooking photos for entertainment. You don’t have to eat; you can just look at them!
What’s your favorite artwork (by someone else)?
“The Winged Victory of Samothrace” at the Louvre impresses me every time I see it.
Art or Ad or What? It Caused a Lot of Fuss
By Roberta Smith for The New York Times. July 24, 2009
It all began with a woman with a phallus. She was Lynda Benglis, a 32-year-old rising star in the New York art firmament of the early 1970s, Post-Minimal division. The instrument in question was a large, cast-latex double-headed dildo that Ms. Benglis held defiantly between her thighs in a now infamous color photograph. Visible from the knees up, she is nude except for a pair of cat’s-eye rhinestone sunglasses and a diamond stud earring, her body oiled, her cropped hair stiffly moussed.
And “it”? It was the historic dust-up that ensued when this photograph appeared, in 1974, in Artforum, the leading art magazine of the time. Ms. Benglis called the image a “centerfold” and considered it a work of art; others called it an ad, since Paula Cooper, Ms. Benglis’s dealer at the time, made arrangements for its placement; still others said it was pornography and unsuitable for an art magazine.
But there it was in the advertising section in the front of the magazine, many pages ahead of an article on Ms. Benglis’s work by Robert Pincus-Witten, the art critic who coined the term Post-
Minimalism. She had originally wanted the photograph to run as part of the article, but the editor, John Coplans, refused.
The “Benglis ad,” as it is usually called, is central to “Lynda Benglis/Robert Morris, 1973-74,” an informative, fascinating and often hilarious exhibition at the Susan Inglett Gallery in Chelsea. With a sheaf of unpublished letters to the editor, it fills in history that you probably missed even if you were around the first time. (I worked for Paula Cooper until a few months before the ad ran and was writing short reviews for Artforum.)
The exhibition has been organized by David Platzker, Ms. Inglett’s husband, a dealer in rare catalogs and art-world ephemera who owns a bookstore-cum-gallery called Specific Object on West 26th Street. Combining art with papers drawn mostly from Ms. Benglis’s files, Mr. Platzker elaborates several rings of context around the ad, starting with Ms. Benglis’s friendship and loose collaboration, in video, with the older sculptor Robert Morris. Two videos, one by each artist, indicate the fruitful way they passed video material back and forth, incorporating one another’s additions into new pieces. The layered images and convoluted narratives now seem very much of the present.
Also here is Mr. Morris’s incendiary poster for his April 1974 exhibition at the Sonnabend and Castelli galleries, which many people have seen as a catalyst to the Benglis ad. The poster shows him naked to the waist, wearing only a German Army helmet (Nazi vintage), mirrored aviator glasses, steel manacles and a spiked collar. (The collar and cuffs are linked by heavy chains that he clutches in his hands, as if he were Atlas about to shrug.)
But as this exhibition demonstrates, Ms. Benglis’s ad was also preceded by three other images of herself that increasingly flouted gender and sexual stereotype. One, an announcement card for a show at the Clocktower in 1973, used a childhood portrait for which she wore the national dress of Greece (her family’s country of origin) the boy’s costume, since the girl’s was too small.
In an ad in the April 1974 Artforum she appears in a jacket and jeans, leaning against her silver Porsche, in a pose of slouchy West Coast male-artist cool. The third photograph, by Annie Leibovitz, for the card announcing Ms. Benglis’s May 1974 exhibition at Paula Cooper, shows her from the back. She’s in Betty Grable mode, except she wears jeans that are dropped around her ankles.
As the show progresses, the Benglis ad photograph by Arthur Gordon takes over, and we see that reaction was swift and divided. Several of the magazine’s associate editors, all well-known art critics, stormed and huffed at Mr. Coplans’s acceptance of the ad, and simmering feuds escalated into schisms. Two of the critics, Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson left to found the redoubtable, strait-laced and theory-driven magazine October. (Another wrinkle: it turned out that Ms. Krauss took the photograph of Mr. Morris in chains.)
Before leaving, Ms. Krauss and Ms. Michelson joined three of their colleagues in a strongly worded, strait-laced letter to the editor. It appeared edged in black on the letters pages from the December issue, included here. It is amazing to read critics of new art sounding like National Endowment for the Arts-baiting senators, 15 years before Mapplethorpe. (On the same page, Mr. Coplans, one assumes, insinuates the pedigree of Ms. Benglis’s action by including an uncaptioned photograph of the Comtesse de Castiglione, the 19th-century French beauty who may have been the first woman to self-consciously orchestrate images of herself for the camera, from pose to attire to maquillage.)
[I had to look it up myself – “cosmetic, or theatrical, makeup.”]
And a letter from the critic Peter Plagens, a regular contributor, adds levity, feigning shock and concluding with the funniest line of the whole tempest: “On the other hand, anyone who could win Eydie Gorme and Steve Lawrence look-alike contests simultaneously can’t be all bad.”
Readers were similarly divided, and the letters from outside that deluged the magazine, most of them never published, make for some of the Inglett show’s best moments. Questions are asked, fingers are shaken. Subscriptions are canceled, some by librarians at Midwest high schools. Female artists approve enthusiastically and sometimes eloquently. Reading all this, you see how the ad became a lightning rod for conflicting views of feminism, pornography, editorial (and critical) responsibility, art-world economics, reputation-building and artistic license.
What was all the fuss really about? Well, for one thing, Mr. Plagens was right. It really was an amazing photograph. I remember the shock of seeing it and am always surprised at how shocking it remains. It is laugh-out-loud thrilling, and the phallus is the least of it. If this item continues to startle rather than look ridiculous, it is because everything around it is so perfect: the shiny leanness of Ms. Benglis’s androgynous torso, the saucy tilt of her hips, the slight flaring of her fingers at her hip, the angle of her head, her full, undulant Man Ray lips reiterated by the curves of the cat’s-eye sunglasses. Everything communicates fully and pictorially.
The most startling phallus in the picture is perhaps the metaphorical one that results from this fine-tuned perfection: the sense of empowerment, entitlement, aggressiveness and forthrightness so often misunderstood to be the province of men. This more than any object, penile or otherwise, is what Lynda Benglis waved at the art world.
Mr. Platzker’s show concludes with the mission statement of the first issue of October. But this is not the whole messy story. For that, consult Amy Newman’s oral history of Artforum’s early years, “Challenging Art: Artforum, 1962-1974.” Ms. Newman’s book neatly splices together interviews with 30 people who worked at, wrote for or avidly read the magazine Ms. Benglis included and is wonderfully alive with the energy of art critical infighting. This exhibition could be published as an appendix to that book.
