Lynda Benglis
Breaking The Glass Ceiling In Sunglasses and a Dildo
Something I think we could all learn from the artist Lynda Benglis is the value of placing a nude self-portrait in a major art industry magazine as an ad for your art, especially when you’re wearing a dildo. Allow me to explain.
…she explored different roles women could inhabit, different cliches of femininity, sexuality and gender. In one such image, she photographed herself nude, wearing nothing but sunglasses and a dildo.
Benglis was born in 1941 in Louisiana, into a happy Greek household filled with children, a craft-loving mother, and her father, who ran a building supply company. After Benglis was born came a younger sister, the final of five children, triggering a terrible depression in Benglis’s mother, who eventually received shock therapy. Benglis got her art degree from Tulane, and as was common with many young women who wanted to pursue a career in the arts, she found herself teaching when she graduated, one of the only avenues open to her.
In 1964, Benglis moved to New York to attend the Brooklyn Museum Art School. It was also in 1964 that the great New York sculptor Donald Judd published his treatise on Minimalist art called Specific Objects, in which he described his desire to make a new form of art that was “neither painting nor sculpture.” Benglis met the abstract painter Barnett Newman and his wife, Annalee, who threw parties for young artists at their house, and through them she met other icons of the era, like Frank Stella and Robert Murray. Undoubtedly, she read Judd’s text and spent drunken nights debating it with members of the art community at the Newman’s house. Perhaps she took those ideas home with her to her East Village apartment, an unheated basement in a nine story walk-up, whose owner let her use the top floor as a free studio.
Benglis’ early works were wax on Masonite board, inspired both by Coptic encaustic casket painting, and the heating conditions of her New York home. She used a secondhand plug-in heater to warm her space, and realized that she could heat up wax with it, so that it would mimic the fluidity of paint, and then layer it to create textured surfaces that could exist on their own, without a frame or canvas or any traditional painting structure. She called these works “a mummified version of painting,” eventually noticing that leftover wax spilled and built up on the floor as a side effect of her process, and that detritus was as exciting to her as the paintings themselves. So she did what any young art girlie would do, and called a rubber maker she found in the phone book, asking him make some custom latex for her that she could pour onto the ground to make intentional works, sort of hybrids of sculpture and paintings. This technique put her at the vanguard of an increasing number of artists who would use industrial materials in their art making, such as groundbreaking German-American sculptor Eva Hesse.
The rubber material Benglis began to use spilled and spread into unctuous, curvy, smooth shapes that seemed almost like a feminine repudiation of Jackson Pollock’s drip-paintings; though, in their saturated pigmentation, we could consider them more akin to the color-field paintings of Helen Frankenthaler, an early abstract expressionist painter of the 1950s. Frankenthaler had pioneered a technique of mixing oil paint and turpentine and soaking sections of her canvases in troughs of the concoction. Famously, her boyfriend, the art critic of the era, Clement Greenberg, brought several of her male counterparts into her studio while she was out, and they would go on to copy her technique and claim it as their own, while Greenberg would go on to write extensively about how women could not be artists. “They paint candy,” he said.
Greenberg would go on to write extensively about how women could not be artists. “They paint candy,” he said.
Benglis, on the contrary, was adored by critics, one of the few female artists to be so lauded, and by the age of 28 had been profiled in both Life and New York Magazine. Her works grew to massive, gallery-sized pours of other industrial materials like polyurethane foam, some of them requiring armatures and ladders for her to stand on to dump material over and achieve their final shapes. She considered these large and very 3-dimensional art pieces to be more like drawings. The art critic Robert Pincus-Witten called them “Frozen Gestures,” which Benglis borrowed. Detractors argued that her art wasn’t explicitly feminist enough, a dogmatic rigidity that bothered her.
And then things got a little crazy.
In the 1970s, Benglis started making a sequence of photographs that she called sexual mockeries. In these she explored different roles women could inhabit, different cliches of femininity, sexuality and gender. In one such image, she photographed herself nude, wearing nothing but sunglasses and a dildo. And then she took out a one page advertisement in Artforum, an important industry monthly, and used her nude self portrait to announce an upcoming exhibition. This image is now considered a groundbreaking artwork, commenting on how artists could use their own persona to sell work. At the same time, it affirmed the masculine hegemony of the art world, as well as the widely accepted reality that women were sexualized objects in works of art, but were forbidden as artists from existing as their own sexual beings.
She now lives in New York, Santa Fe, Greece and India, and at the age of eighty-two, still keeps a studio and makes her art.
