Lynda Benglis (born October 25, 1941) is an American sculptor and visual artist known especially for her wax paintings and poured latex sculptures. She maintains residences in New York City, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Kastellorizo, Greece, and Ahmedabad, India."Lynda Benglis" PBS, Retrieved 15 April 2014.
Early life Benglis was born on October 25, 1941, in Lake Charles, Louisiana.Kreimer, Julian "Shape Shifter: Lynda Benglis" Art in America Magazine, Retrieved 15 April 2014. She is Greek-American. As a young child and in her early 20s, Benglis often traveled with her grandmother to Greece. She later described these travels as having been important to her work. In her 2015 interview with Ocula Magazine, the artist said that her grandmother was a significant feminist icon for her:Her husband died very early—1955. I was the first female grandchild—which is very important in Greece, as the women inherit the property. She was my godmother, as well as my grandmother.
My grandmother travelled in her forties, and this was unusual and it impacted the way I was. It set a standard for me.Growing up, her father Michael ran a building-materials business.Sheets, Hilarie M. "A Life of Melting the Status Quo" The New York Times, Retrieved 15 April 2014. Her mother was from Mississippi and was a preacher's daughter.Landi, Ann. "Getting Paint Off the Wall" ARTnews, Retrieved 15 April 2014. She is the eldest of five children.Belcove, Julie L. "I Keep Arriving" The Financial Times, Retrieved 15 April 2014.
Benglis attended McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana.Benglis, Lynda. "Oral history interview with Lynda Benglis, 2009 November 20" Smithsonian Archives of American Art. Accessed March 8, 2015. She earned a BFA degree in 1964 from Newcomb College in New Orleans, which was then the women's college of Tulane University, where she studied ceramics and painting. Following graduation, she taught third grade at Jefferson Parish, in Louisiana. In 1964, Benglis moved to New York. Here she came in contact with many of the influential artists of the decade, such as Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Eva Hesse, and Barnett Newman.Belcove, Julie L. "'I keep arriving'." She went on to study painting at the Brooklyn Museum Art School."Lynda Benglis" National Museum of Women in the Arts, Retrieved 15 April 2014. There she met the Scottish painter Gordon Hart, who was briefly to be her first husband. Benglis later stated that she married Hart to help him avoid the draft. She also took a job as an assistant to Klaus Kertess at the Bykert Gallery before moving on to work at the Paula Cooper Gallery. In 1979 she met her life partner, Anand Sarabhai, the son of her hosts on a trip she made to Ahmedabad, India. Sarabhai died in February 2013.Zwick, Traey. "Dancing with Clay: An Interview with Lynda Benglis" Art in America Magazine, Retrieved 15 April 2014.
Career Benglis's work is noted for an unusual blend of organic imagery and confrontation with newer media incorporating influences such as Barnett Newman and Andy Warhol. Her early work used materials such as beeswax before moving on to large polyurethane pieces in the 1970s and later to gold-leaf, zinc, and aluminum. The validity of much of her work was questioned until the 1980s due to its use of sensuality and physicality.
Benglis's latex and polyurethane pours of the late 1960s and 1970s marked her entry into the New York art world. At the same time, she was also working on "small encaustic relief paintings".
Like other artists such as Yves Klein, Benglis's work resembled Jackson Pollock's flinging and dripping methods of painting. Works such as Fallen Painting (1968) inform the approach with what could be read as a feminist perspective. For this work, Benglis smeared Day-Glo paint across the gallery floor invoking "the depravity of the 'fallen' woman" or, from a feminist perspective, a "prone victim of phallic male desire." In her work Contraband (1969), she removed the use of a canvas altogether and created her work directly on the floor. These brightly colored organic floor pieces work to disrupt the male-dominated minimalism movement with their suggestiveness and openness.
The structure of the new medium itself played an important role in addressing questions about female identity in relation to art, pop culture, and dominant feminism movements at the time.
In the 1970s, she turned to video as an extension of her sculptural work, producing over a dozen works between 1972 and 1977. Benglis dove into metal casting in the mid 1980s, most notably a series of public fountain projects.
Benglis has been a professor or visiting artist at the University of Rochester (1970-1972), Princeton University (1975), University of Arizona (1982), School of Visual Arts (1985-1987).Heller, J., & Heller, N. (1995). North American women artists of the twentieth century: A biographical dictionary. New York: Garland.
Artforum advertisement
History
Benglis felt underrepresented in the male-run artistic community and so confronted the "male ethos" in a series of magazine advertisements satirizing pin-up girls, Hollywood actresses, and traditional depictions of nude female models in canonical works of art. Benglis chose the medium of magazine advertisements as it allowed her complete control of an image rather than allowing it to be run through critical commentary. This series culminated with a particularly controversial one in the November 1974 issue of Artforum featuring Benglis posing with a large plastic dildo and wearing only a pair of sunglasses promoting an upcoming exhibition of hers at the Paula Cooper Gallery. Benglis paid $3,000 for the Artforum ad.Poundstone, William. ArtInfo, Retrieved 15 April 2014. One of her original ideas for the advertisement had been for her and collaborative partner Robert Morris to work together as a double pin-up, but eventually found that using a double dildo was sufficient as she found it to be "both male and female." Morris, too, put out an advertisement for his work in that month's Artforum which featured himself in full "butch" S&M regalia.
Theory In this unmaking of the tradition of the passive female nude, Benglis was working in dialogue with popular discourse about gender and gender performativity published at the time of its execution.Frueh, Joanna. (1993). "The Body Through Women's Eyes". In Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard. The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. p. 190. . In particular, Benglis appears to be undermining June Wayne's theory of the "demonic myth" in which males, in assuming their gender identity, are responsible to a similar posturing and performativity as women, but instead of upholding "feminine" values of passivity, modesty, and gentility, they embody a guise of compensatory hyper-masculinity and heroic bravado. By adopting a phallus, Benglis physically and symbolically muddies the distinction made between these two types of gender performativity and ultimately overturns them, resulting in a positive assertion of femininity's sexual and cultural power.
Reception and criticism Artist Barbara Wagner claims that Benglis shows that even with the appropriation of the phallus as a Freudian sign of power, it does not cover her female identity and still emphasizes a female inferiority. Rosalind Krauss and other Artforum personnel attacked Benglis's work in the following month's issue of Artforum describing the advertisement as "exploitative" and "brutalizing". Critic Cindy Nemser of The Feminist Art Journal dismissed the advertisement as well, claiming that the picture showed that Benglis had "so little confidence in her art that she had to resort to kinky cheesecake to push herself over the top." Morris's advertisement, however, generated little commentary, providing evidence for Benglis's view that male artists were encouraged to promote themselves, whereas women were chastised for doing so. Benglis eventually cast five lead sculptures of the dildo that she posed with on the Artforum cover, each entitled Smile, one for each of the Artforum editors who wrote in to complain about her ad.
In 2019, The New York Times cited the work as one of the 25 works of art that defined the contemporary age.
Retrospectives, exhibitions, and surveys
2009 Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) Retrospective Benglis's work was greatly neglected for a long time. However, in 2009, a 40-year retrospective organized by the Irish Museum of Modern Art served to recognize her career. The exhibit showed her in her true light as a main figure in contemporary art. Not only did it show her vast amount of her work, it showed her enthusiasm to take on charged subjects. The exhibition focused on the 1960s and 1970s, when her work was most involved with the link between painting and sculpture. It included the lozenge-shaped wall pieces of built up multicolored wax layers that Benglis started making in 1966 with which she honored Jackson Pollock's famous drip methods. It also included her knotted bowtie shaped wall reliefs of the 1970s and some of her videos. Her work from the 1980s and 1990s was also shown, represented by a few of her famous pleats, which involved her spraying liquid metal onto chicken wire skeletons, and two videos from each of the decades.
In the stateside versions of the show more works from the 1980s and 1990s were shown including her ceramics. These pieces were made of clay and hand molded so that the viewers could feel the making of them- the extorting, folding, and throwing of the moist resistant material. Glazes seemed to be flung on in a causal manner, which brings to mind the abstract expressionism movement of art in which Benglis is involved. The ceramic pieces have a handmade quality that effect the senses both desire driven and dismal, while the colors suggest the glitz of commercial culture.
Concentrating on Benglis's early work, the curators gave her a main position in the diverse art of the 1970s, a time period that is seen as laying the groundwork for the wide range of expression that continues to grow to this day. Benglis's willingness and ability to mix up gendered tropes with her heroic scales and sparkly colorful finishes while laughing irreverently at views of every moral stripe set her apart from the common customs of feminism and the sexism of the art world. Her work is also deemed important for its meticulous grounding in process and materials used. Each piece produces its own physical understanding. "They provoke visceral reactions while playfully welcoming open ended associations and ambiguities."
2011 Show at the New Museum In 2011, The New Museum organized a four-decade exhibition of Benglis's sculptural works with supplementary videos, Polaroids, and magazine clippings. The show received high praise in the New Yorker magazine, which warned viewers to "prepare to be floored."Scott, Andrea K. "Making a Splash"
2015 The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield, UK In 2015, The Hepworth Wakefield presented Benglis's first museum retrospective in the UK. It included over 50 works from across her career, and was structured around the influence of place on Benglis's work, in particular her homes and studios in New York, New Mexico, Greece and India. Curated by Andrew Bonacina, it was described by Guardian critic Adrian Searle as "a revelation."
2012 Thomas Dane Gallery in London This subsequent survey focused on the exploratory breadth of materials Benglis experimented with over the course of her career: polyurethane foam, glass, enamel, stainless steel, beeswax, and poured latex.Belcove, Julie L. "'I keep arriving'". Retrieved March 4, 2015. It was her first major survey in the UK.
2015 Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York