Lynda Benglis

Dual Nature (Brown), Gold Leaf and Lithograph by Lynda Benglis

1991

In the summer of 1964, Lynda Benglis, described "as a very canny young woman from Louisiana, Tulane BFA in hand", made her way to New York on a bus filled with anti-Jim Crow activists on their way home from Mississippi. The New York art world was smaller then 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') 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, from which she was excluded, 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). Source: Barry Schwabsky, Artforum, October 2002