Lynda Benglis by Cheim Read

Lynda Benglis nasher sculpture center

Lynda Benglis

nasher sculpture center

New and Recent Work by Lynda Benglis dr. leigh arnold

associate curator, nasher sculpture center

Active for five decades, American artist Lynda Benglis (born 1941) continues to invigorate the art discourse, making tactile works in a range of media that challenge prevailing hierarchies and attitudes judging taste and value. Benglis started her career in relation to painting, making work by pouring layers of latex paint directly onto the floor. Critics recognized her gestural pours as bold reinterpretations of Abstract Expressionist painting and referenced Jackson Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler as important precedents. Benglis nicknamed these early pours “fallen paintings”—a literal description of her floor-based practice and a winking reference to the fall of painting’s importance in the 1960s as artists turned away from expressive and painterly Abstract Expressionism—the dominant movement in American art in the 1950s—in favor of cool, rational Minimalist sculpture. Benglis’s choice of a color palette in bold Day-Glo (fig. 1) hues set her apart from her peers and situated her work closer to the aesthetics and consumer culture references of Pop art. Certain critics described Benglis’s color choices as garish and extravagant, while museum curators felt the work didn’t “play well” with those of others.1 1

In 1969, curators at the Whitney Museum of American Art invited Benglis to participate in the exhibition Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials—the first exhibition in a major US museum to showcase process-oriented art. Benglis created the 1969 latex pour titled Contraband (now in the Whitney Museum’s collection—a 2008 purchase) with the museum’s exhibition gallery in mind. Benglis ultimately withdrew the monumental latex pour (which measures over 30 ft. in length) from the exhibition at the last minute, disappointed that the curators decided to relocate it outside of the main gallery, in the building’s atrium. Benglis recollected that the curators relocated Contraband because they were unhappy with her “strident color choices, and in particular, the inclusion of bubble-gum pink,” and they worried it would deflect attention away from other works in the exhibition. See Susan Richmond, Lynda Benglis: Beyond Process (London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd., 2013), 21. fig. 1 Odalisque: Hey Hey Frankenthaler, 1969. Poured pigmented latex. 165 x 34 in. / 419.1 x 86.4 cm. Dallas Museum of Art, TWO x TWO for AIDS and Art Fund, 2003.2. © 2022 Lynda Benglis / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Image courtesy of John Cheim.

Benglis came to sculpture through her discovery of polyurethane foam—a synthetic material that supported colorful pigments and expanded her painterly gestures into three-dimensional forms.2 She created her foam sculptures as she did her latex works, by pouring polyurethane directly onto the floor, where it would swell into bulbous, organic shapes. She first began working with semi-flexible polyurethane, making foam sculptures that hugged the floor, rising into three dimensions ever so slightly. Her increasing desire to deal with the sculptural concerns of volume and mass led the artist to work with more rigid polyurethane foam: “Then I decided if I was having foam anyway, why not get a foam you could sort of really foam up. So I sacrificed one element, which was flexibility, in order to get the foam you see here.”3 Since her initial experiments in latex and foam, Benglis has established a groundbreaking career making works in an array of materials and across the mediums of painting, sculpture, installation, and video. For her exhibition at the Nasher—originally scheduled for the summer of 2020 before a series of delays owing to the COVID-19 pandemic—Benglis selected three bodies of new and recent work that demonstrate the breadth of her still very active practice.

enlargements Metal casting occupies a central place in Benglis’s practice and has been a part of her process since the mid-1970s; a potentially costly endeavor that was initially made possible, in part, with funding from a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation grant (1975). At the time, Benglis wanted to find a way of continuing her foam forms in a new material. A technique that lends permanence and communicates mastery, metal casting has allowed Benglis to engage with and sometimes subvert the history of modern sculpture. Her turn to metal casting seems an obvious conclusion for the artist’s polyurethane pours. Quartered Meteor (fig. 2) is a prime example of the artist returning to a distinct form at different points in her career: the work’s first iteration in 1969 was a polyurethane pour in black, white, and gray foam, titled King of Flot 4. She 2 In a 1982 interview about her works in polyurethane, Benglis conceded, “I suppose I found myself a sculptor.” Benglis in “Lynda Benglis: Interview by Ned Rifkin,” in Early Work: Lynda Benglis, Joan Brown, Luis Jimenez, Gary Stephan, Lawrence Weiner, ed. Lynn Gumpert, Ned Rifkin, and Marcia Tucker (New York: New Museum, 1982), 11. 3 Here Benglis is referring to the foam sculpture For Carl Andre that she made in 1970 on-site at the old location of the Fort Worth Art Center Museum, today known as the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. See Jan Butterfield, “‘Poured Art’ Sculptor Reveals Technique, Approach to Style,” Fort Worth Star Telegram, June 14, 1970, 6-I. 4 Benglis had to make two molds of King of Flot to get the form right, but once she had a good mold, she cast the foam sculpture in lead, thereby destroying King of Flot in the making of Quartered Meteor, 1975. Other polyurethane sculptures Benglis cast in metals around fig. 2 Quartered Meteor, 1969/1975/2018. Bronze. 57 1/2 x 65 1/2 x 64 1/4 in. / 146.1 x 166.4 x 163.2 cm. © 2022 Lynda Benglis / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Artwork courtesy of Cheim & Read, New York. Photography: Tom Powel / Cheim & Read, New York.

fig. 3 Elephant Necklace, 2016. Glazed ceramic; 37 elements. 173 in. diameter / 439.4 cm. diameter © 2022 Lynda Benglis / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Image courtesy of Cheim & Read, New York. Photography: Brian Buckley / Cheim & Read, New York.

cast the foam sculpture in lead in 1975, resulting in a work that she titled Quartered Meteor. The lead cast unified the disparate layers of polyurethane into a single, monochrome material, thereby removing our ability to discern the various strata of foam. The transposition of the foam sculptures into heavier metals made literal the illusion of weight in the foam pours, while also exaggerating the impression of movement and flow inherent in the original polyurethane forms. In 2018, Benglis returned to Quartered Meteor, casting a version in the highly traditional sculptural material of bronze. The process of one-to-one object casting is relatively straightforward, while enlarging smaller forms to monumental proportions is more complex, with additional steps involved to transpose what might be a table-top sized ceramic into a towering bronze. Within these additional steps there is room for further adjustments and changes to the work, ensuring that no enlargement is an exact replica of the original at larger dimensions; rather, the enlargements are again a method for Benglis to extend the process of making. Each of the three bronze enlargements included in the Nasher’s presentation originate from Benglis’s 2016 series Elephant Necklace 5 (fig. 3). Benglis enlarged Elephant Necklace 58 to make Elephant: First Foot Forward, the artist’s first of this series of enlargements, first cast in 2018, while Elephant Necklace 49 (fig. 4) is the basis for Yellow Tail, first cast in 2020. The artist chooses which ceramic forms she wishes to enlarge based on their perceived speed—that is, the quickness of the gesture in making them. Likewise, her choice of polished bronze is intended to add to the quickness of the works so that they have a kind of “fast form,” as the artist has described.6 Once Benglis has chosen the form to enlarge, she works with a fabricator to have a maquettesized mold of the ceramic made, which is then used to create a wax to be 3-D scanned. The scanned form is enlarged via computer techology and 3-D printed at the new dimensions in a puttylike material that reveals all of the details of its surfaces, edges, and planes. Benglis then approves the prototype; a mold is made of it, which is used to cast the enlarged form in metal. 1975 include: Come, 1969/1974, bronze; Eat Meat, 1969/1974, bronze; Eat Meat, 1969/1975, aluminum; Modern Art Pair, 1969/1974 (bronze and aluminum) 1969/1975 (lead and tin); and Wing, 1970/1975, aluminum. Artist in email correspondence with the author, November 13, 2018. 5 Benglis made 61 Elephant Necklace ceramics with Saxe Patterson in Taos, New Mexico. When planning to show them, a selection of the 61 ceramics were initially planned to be displayed on individual pedestals, but ultimately, they were arranged on the floor in a circle. There are additional works in the series that didn’t make it into the final sculpture. Author in a phone conversation with the artist’s studio, April 11, 2022. 6

Author in a phone conversation with the artist’s studio, April 11, 2022.

fig. 4 Elephant Necklace 49, 2016. Glazed ceramic. 9 x 16 1/2 x 13 in. /22.9 x 41.9 x 33 cm. © 2022 Lynda Benglis / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Image courtesy of Cheim & Read, New York. Photography: Brian Buckley / Cheim & Read, New York.

In the case of the works on view as part of Lynda Benglis, the artist casts the enlargements in alloys like the trademarked Everdur, a copper-silicon bronze or Tombasil, a copper and zinc bronze, each of which achieve Benglis’s desired high-polished shine.

fountains In the Nasher Garden, Benglis incorporates water into her sculpture by installing the most recent work in the exhibition: Bounty, Amber Waves, Fruited Plane (fig. 5), which the artist cast as a variant in 2021. Comprising three identical totems towering over 25 feet in height, the monumental sculpture also functions as a fountain, with the added element of water further underscoring the impression of gestural and spontaneous processes inherent in her latex and polyurethane pours of the 60s and 70s. Benglis has long been concerned with reconciling states of liquidity and solidity, and by the early 1980s with her first fountain developments, the artist incorporated actual movement and flow into her work (as opposed to the static image or illusion of it). When thinking about the properties of water and other sculptural materials, Benglis said, “I never directly poured metal, because metal itself doesn’t have any form. But the idea of metal being a resource to contain and suggest movement, and having the capacity to imply that it’s illusionistically appearing to be water, was natural, like volcano lava that suggests movement.’”7 The forms for Bounty, Amber Waves, Fruited Plane come from Benglis’s comparatively smaller cast polyurethane trio The Graces (2003–05) and is a further iteration of the first edition of the “Bounties”, as the artist affectionately refers to them, that she cast in golden bronze in 2014 and displayed at Storm King the next year. In describing her thoughts about the 2014 version, Benglis said: Bounty I always envisioned as a kind of totemic work, an endless column with water. It’s a really monumental work, and I look forward to seeing it in water. It’s really nicely polished, softly. […] It’s not a passive cornucopia, where it lies horizontal on the table. I thought about how water itself can be bountiful and flowing upward. I think of it as a living growth or an explosion of water that is frozen in bronze, but also emits this water.8 7 Nora Lawrence, “Lynda Benglis: In Conversation,” in Lynda Benglis: Water Sources (New Windsor, NY: Storm King Art Center, 2015), 31. 8

Ibid., 34-35.

fig. 5 Bounty, Amber Waves, Fruited Plane, 2021. Bronze with black patina. 25 ft. 5 1/2 in. x 2 ft. 4 in. x 2 ft. 4 in. each / 302 1/2 x 27 x 27 in. each / 768.7 x 68.6 x 68.6 cm. each. © 2022 Lynda Benglis / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Artwork courtesy of the artist. Photography: Kevin Todora / Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas.

With this most recent variant, Benglis chose a new patina. In choosing a black patina in favor of something more reflective, like the gold used previously or even the Everdur or Tombasil bronze used for her enlargements on view on the Nasher terrace and Entrance Gallery, Benglis relies on water to give the sculpture its own luster and further the illusion of an object continually in transformation.

chicken wire, paper, glitter, and “bedazzled minimalism.”9 Perhaps the most intimate works in the exhibition are the five wall-based sculpures each comprising chicken wire, paper, and glitter. They have a sheen of their own and are emphatically handmade, providing the viewer a glimpse into Benglis’s studio practice in New Mexico. To make them, Benglis folds and crimps chicken wire to a desired form, then applies wet handmade paper that she further manipulates by stretching it taught over the wire substrate (fig. 6). When dry, Benglis brushes the paper with isolated gestures of acrylic medium, paint, ground coal, glitter, and in some cases gold leaf, evincing the paper’s texture, as well as the wire armature underneath. The group of four multi-colored works with titles beginning with SB were all done after Benglis discovered a method of casting sparkles during the paper making process. At a certain point in 2016, she realized she could mix glitter into the paper slurry to make “sparkle paper” and has since described such works as comprising “cast sparkles” as the glitter is cast into the handmade paper lending it a colorful luster, rather than applied to its surface using an acrylic medium, as is the case with Woopee (2015), made before this discovery. The artist also leaves some wire exposed, as is most obvious on either end of the torso-like sculpture, SB #7 (2017), while more often it remains implied by the hexagonal pattern pressing through the paper’s surface. Benglis describes these works as bodies, and critics have likened the paper and its wire substrate to flesh and bones or sheaths of molted snakeskin. 10 Viewed through a corporeal lens, the paint and glitter Benglis applies to the skin-like paper are akin to makeup, situating these works more broadly with beautification rituals often associated in our culture with the feminine.

9 Margaret Carrigan, “Lynda Benglis on the Pleasures of Decoration, and Why She’s ‘Very Uncomfortable’ Being Called a Feminist Artist,” Artnet, June 5, 2018, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/lynda-benglis-on-the-pleasures-of-decoration-and-why-shes-very-uncomfortable-being-called-a-feminist-artist-1297064 (accessed April 14, 2022). 10 Jo Applin, “Lynda Benglis: The Erotics of Artmaking,” Art Review, September 30, 2021: https://artreview.com/lynda-benglis-the-erotics-of-artmaking/ (accessed April 15, 2022). fig. 6 (detail) SB #3, 2017. Cast sparkles on handmade paper over chicken wire. 34 x 23 x 14 1/2 in. / 86.4 x 58.4 x 36.8 cm. © 2022 Lynda Benglis / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Image courtesy of Cheim & Read, New York. Photography: Alex Yudzon / Cheim & Read, New York.

This body of work finds precedent in Benglis’s knots series of the 1970s—her early use of glitter on painted forms, which provoked intense critical response, as vividly captured by critic Thomas Albright in his 1973 review: “Sometimes the painting elements run wholly amuck, producing tightly-knotted encrustations of globs and goops that look like a Jackson Pollock canvas that got thrown in a washing machine with a sequin-covered gown.” 11 At a time when the cool, monochrome, and reductive forms of Minimalism remained dominant, Benglis chose to create works that questioned artistic taste, value, and the decorative. Her use of vibrant colors and ostentatious materials initially categorized her knots as part of a “feminine aesthetic”—a derogatory phrase at a time when Feminist artists sought to push back against gendered notions of art. The works on view in this presentation, while made at a different time, under different circumstances, remain as provocative as ever and juxtaposed with the artist’s enlarged shiny bronzes—a material associated with “high” art and sculptural tradition—still raise questions of taste and the associations we make with materials. Asked to reflect on her choice of materials that shine, sparkle, and even glow in the dark, Benglis replied: We’re inherently attracted to shiny, sparkly things. Our eyes are honed by millennia of evolution to see them. But as we become increasingly socialized, we’re taught to limit our appreciation for glitter. I grew up with sparkly things, like my dance baton and my bright pink girl’s dance costume, and I loved those things. I still do. Why should what we’re naturally drawn to be conditioned out of us?12

Lynda Benglis is made possible by generous support from Cheim & Read and the Dallas Tourism Public Improvement District (dtpid).

11 Thomas Albright, “Three Major US Artists,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 22, 1973, 48, as quoted in Susan Richmond, Lynda Benglis: Beyond Process (London and New York: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 2013), 108. 12

Benglis as quoted in Carrigan.

fig. 7 SB #3, 2017. Cast sparkles on handmade paper over chicken wire. 34 x 23 x 14 1/2 in. / 86.4 x 58.4 x 36.8 cm. © 2022 Lynda Benglis / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Image courtesy of Cheim & Read, New York. Photography: Alex Yudzon / Cheim & Read, New York.

Woopee, 2015. Handmade paper over chicken wire, coal tempera, acrylic medium, glitter. 33 x 20 x 14 in. / 83.8 x 50.8 x 35.6 cm.

SB #9, 2017. Cast sparkles on handmade paper over chicken wire. 21 1/2 x 19 x 10 1/2 in. / 54.6 x 48.3 x 26.7 cm.

SB #7, 2017. Cast sparkles on handmade paper over chicken wire. 44 x 25 x 15 in. / 111.8 x 63.5 x 38.1 cm.

right SB #7, 2017. Cast sparkles on handmade paper over chicken wire. 44 x 25 x 15 in. / 111.8 x 63.5 x 38.1 cm. left SB #5, 2017. Cast sparkles on handmade paper over chicken wire. 37 x 30 x 13 in. / 94 x 76.2 x 33 cm.

SB #3, 2017. Cast sparkles on handmade paper over chicken wire. 34 x 23 x 14 1/2 in. / 86.4 x 58.4 x 36.8 cm.

Quartered Meteor, 1969/1975/2018. Bronze. 57 1/2 x 65 1/2 x 64 1/4 in. / 146.1 x 166.4 x 163.2 cm.

Clear Day, 2016. Acrylic on paper. 12 1/8 x 9 1/4 in. / 30.8 x 23.5 cm.

Yellow Tail, 2020. Everdur bronze. 53 x 96 x 74 in. / 134.6 x 243.8 x 188 cm.

Bounty, Amber Waves, Fruited Plane, 2021. Bronze with black patina. 302 1/2 x 27 x 27 in. each / 768.7 x 68.6 x 68.6 cm. each

Power Tower, 2019. White Tombasil bronze. 90 x 70 5/8 x 67 3/4 in. / 228.6 x 179.4 x 172.1 cm.

Elephant: First Foot Forward, 2018. White Tombasil bronze. 48 x 61 x 61 in. / 121.9 x 154.9 x 154.9 cm.

detail Power Tower, 2019. White Tombasil Bronze. 90 x 70 5/8 x 67 13/16 in. / 228.6 x 179.4 x 172.2 cm.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

Lynda Benglis nasher sculpture center, dallas may 21 — september 18, 2022

essay Dr. Leigh Arnold, associate curator design John Cheim editor Charlotte Dozier

front cover (detail): Elephant: First Foot Forward, 2018. White Tombasil bronze. 48 x 61 x 61 in. / 121.9 x 154.9 x 154.9 cm. Artwork courtesy of Cheim & Read, New York. Image courtesy of John Cheim. title page: Lynda Benglis in the Garden at the Nasher, 2022. Image courtesy of John Cheim. back cover (detail): Power Tower, 2019. White Tombasil Bronze. 90 x 70 5/8 x 67 13/16 in. / 228.6 x 179.4 x 172.2 cm. Artwork courtesy of Cheim & Read, New York. Image courtesy of John Cheim. photography pages 23, 25, 27, 29, 31, 35, 37: Alex Yudzon / Cheim & Read, New York. photography pages 32, 33, 39, 40, 41, 43, 45, 47, 49, 51, 53, 54, 55, 57: Kevin Todora Photography / Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas. all artworks: © 2022 Lynda Benglis / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. ISBN 978-1-944316-22-8. Printed in Italy by Graphicom.

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