Essays, Issue 6

Lynda Benglis

As The Stories Flow

Words BARBARA POLLACK

Photography WILLIAM JESS LAIRD

Pours, spills, and flows—these are fundamental to the vocabulary of American sculptor Lynda Benglis, a towering figure in contemporary art. Often, her works look like accidents—spilled milk— too spontaneous to be intentional. But speaking to the artist by phone from her house in New Mexico, Benglis makes clear that achieving this “spontaneous” appearance took in-depth scientific research, studying the chemistry of her materials and experimenting with foundries. The 81-year-old artist arrived in New York in 1964, confident enough to become friends with Barnett Newman, Carl Andre, and Robert Morris. She never tried to be “one of the boys” yet did not adopt an oppositional stance as a woman. Still working today, this pioneer is never satisfied until she has pushed the limits of contemporary sculpture to new lengths, creating never-before-seen spectacles.

Rivers and oceans, mud piles and mountains, Benglis has absorbed a lifetime of waterways and embraces their impact on her artmaking. Growing up surrounded by water in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and going on her first ocean voyage before she turned 11 with her grandmother to the family home in Greece. The artist recalls these experiences as if they happened yesterday. She talks about making messy mud pies of pine needles and clay by the side of the bayou or finding a startling white magnolia tree planted in the middle of a dark green pine forest. There are memories of water-skiing, watching blue waves spew from the motorboat, or a fascination with algae and its magical phosphorescent glow. She learned to scuba dive in her 30s in California, remarking that this floating sensation returned her to a womb-like state.

“I felt very close to the earth,” says Benglis. “The bayou was called ‘Contraband’ because that is where allegedly the pirate Jean LaFitte buried his treasure, and people were always looking for the contraband.” Contraband is also the name of her early sculpture, now on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, a respiration of sorts. It was originally scheduled to be in a show at this museum in 1969 but was withdrawn by the artist because she disagreed with the installation. Contraband is a spill of red, orange, blue, lime green, and yellow, over 33 feet long; a lengthy scroll of rubber latex mixed with bright DayGlo pigments, more alive than Jackson Pollock’s studio floor. (The reference to the abstract master is not accidental. In 1970, Benglis was featured in Life Magazine with pictures capturing her “pour” just as Life in 1949 made Pollock famous with demonstrations of his “drip” technique.)

When Contraband was created, it introduced a new shape for contemporary art: both painting and sculpture, natural and industrial, spongy and stationary, body-dysmorphic and sensual. Minimalism, the art movement of the time, encouraged the use of industrial materials, mostly as ready-mades. Benglis, along with Eva Hesse, experimented with rubber to achieve results exactly the opposite of the plywood caskets of Donald Judd or the arc-shaped canvases of Frank Stella. “The men also explored curves, but an industrial curve, a ready-made curve. I am looking at curves as they appear in nature, though most were achieved through chemical reactions,” says Benglis. Angles never appear in these sculptures, even as they grow into mammoth magical fountains and friezes. Curiosity may have been a starting point, but as Benglis quickly injects, “Curiosity and Inductive reasoning: logic.” After all, it is not easy to fix a fluid gesture into an enduring stillness.

Though her works look as if they sprung from her body intuitively, Benglis had a proper education to prepare for this eureka moment. Her mother, a genteel belle, aspired to be a painter and enrolled in long-distance courses from the Art Institute of Chicago. Her father owned a building supply company and had samples and catalogs for her to peruse in the back seat of his car. She had already traveled throughout Europe as a child, consequentially exposed to artworks in major museums. She studied painting at H. Sophie Newcomb College in New Orleans, a sister-school to Tulane University with an impressive ceramics department. She arrived in New York at the age of 22 to attend the then-school at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. With a few courses in art history and friendships with the artists of her time, she looked for modes that would liberate painting from the constrictions of an easel, inspired by Pollock but also, Helen Frankenthaler. From Abstract Expressionism to color field painting to Post-Minimalism, Benglis’ influences go way beyond mere autobiography.

The “frozen gesture”—both physical and psychological—is how Robert Pincus-Witten transcribed the quintessential Benglis form, in a profile of the artist in Artforum. His insight underscores the way these cascades, waterfalls, and streams function as aesthetic Rorschach tests, reflecting back on the psyche of viewers as a key element of interpretation. I remember my first encounter with this effect, many years later when Benglis had a retrospective at the New Museum in 2011. Her works made me feel self-conscious about the water within, viscerally reliving squeamish moments caused by intensely personal bodily fluids. To Benglis, the flow is not just a reference to a bigger world but also an interrogation of our inner selves. Eviscerating the barrier between within and without, horizontal and vertical, east and west, could be dangerously broad for some artists. For this one, ever exploring the expanse of her own body gestures, this challenge results in events that are powerfully visual.