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Lynda Benglis
American, born 1941
She lost her Southern accent as fast as she could and enrolled at the Brooklyn Museum Art School; within a few months, it seems, she knew almost everyone in the art world. Her blunt manner must have been balanced by considerable charm if, as the story goes, she really got away with telling David Hockney, at one of his openings, that his drawings were good but that he ought to forget about his paintings. She also recommended to Dan Flavin, still making painted boxes with light-bulbs sticking out, that maybe he could lose the boxes, which he eventually did.
The New York art world was smaller then with "nobody was going to these openings," Benglis recalls, so it was relatively easy for a smart, ambitious young woman to meet the people who mattered. After a semester, the Museum School had outlived its usefulness for her, and she began making her way as an artist. By the latter part of the 60s, she was investigating process-oriented paintings in wax on board and working part-time for Klaus Kertess at the Bykert Gallery ("I had to bring my own typewriter').
Later, she worked as a waitress, and it was this job that brought in enough money for her to buy the quantities of latex paint she needed to make her first poured works, described as breakthrough pieces (actually just a furthering of dated 19th century "art for art's sake" and early 20th century Dadaist anti-art theories). One of these works, recently re-exhibited at the Locks Gallery in Philadelphia, is titled Odalisque: Hey Hey Frankenthaler, made in 1969.
The same year, Benglis was invited to participate in "Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials," conceived by the Whitney Museum of American Art and curators Marcia Tucker and James Monte. She proposed a big "spill" piece (Contraband, 1969). But there was a hitch: When she explained that her bright colors would pop out in a brilliant way against the Museum's black stone floor, the curators realized that, while Benglis might have been as interested in procedures and materials as Robert Morris, Richard Serra and the rest, she was also just as interested in illusion, a no-no for the anti-realist prejudices of the contemporary Whitney.
At least that's how Benglis remembers it. Tucker, for her part, recalls that the work, unlike the artist's original proposal, was just too big. As a compromise, Benglis later told critic Carter Ratcliff: "They offered to build a ramp for it, near the entrance to the Museum, to sort of get it off to one side." But, rather than allow her work to be marginalized, she withdrew it from the show.
By that time, though, the catalogue had already gone to press, so there her work remained, which has occasionally led to its being discussed as if it had been in the exhibition. Just after "Anti-Illusion" opened, Benglis showed a similar latex work at Bykert, Bounce, 1969, a "strange and startling colored spread" that was seen, in an Artforum magazine review, as "a kind of painting entirely freed from an auxiliary ground or armature."
Several iconic images come to mind when some think of Lynda Benglis: her decorative, gilded knots of the late 70s, for instance. And, of course, the notorious ad that graced (or disgraced, depending on the beholder) ArtForum in November 1974, the one with the artist sporting a dildo, an image so outrageous to some that it caused an irreparable rift among the magazine's editors.
But for many viewers, the first image the name Benglis conjures will be one of her aforementioned "spills"expanses of multicolored latex paint poured on the floor in the late 1960s. In the continuing, unlikely art-theoretical gyrations of contemporary critics, such works have been seen as a development stemming from the Abstract Expressionism of Jackson Pollock and the poured paintings of the Color Field movement, as if Benglis's endeavors merited a place in some logical art historical stream of stylistic consciousness, rather than being just another Dadaist-inspired, assault on art.
Two decades after the Whitney's "Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials" show, the Museum would make up for Benglis's absence then by including her in its 1990 survey, "The New Sculpture 1965-75: Between Geometry and Gesture." Benglis's first big one-person show would take place at the Paula Cooper Gallery the next year. She would also be included, along with Eva Hesse, Richard Serra and Richard Van Buren, in a Life magazine article called "Fling, Dribble and Drip," continuing that publication's publicizing of a hyped avant-garde deemed newsworthy since their earlier article on "Jack the Dripper," (Jackson Pollock).
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