Mardi Gras and Flying Kites: Some Thoughts about Lynda Benglis (NSFW)

Virginia Billeaud Anderson

Among the numerous articles written about Lynda Benglis around the time of her 2011 New Museum retrospective was "Lynda Benglis: Still in Art’s Avant-Garde" published in the New York Times. In it Hilarie Sheets stated that Benglis continues to bring “a visceral quality to her experimentations with glass, video, metals, ceramics, gold leaf, paper and plastics.”

Now Sheets is a very important writer whose critical commentary I’ve admired for years, but if Benglis’ glass sculpture Tickfaw (2010) is one the experimentations upon which Sheets based her statement, I’m certain the critic did not understand the meaning of that work’s title. A New York writer can’t possibly know Tickfaw, Louisiana. Benglis’ titling of her glass piece after a secluded south Loos-iana swampy bayou constitutes mockery of art world grandiosity and a bit of fun in the face of collectors and critics.

Being ignorant of the fact that she could drive her boat to the Prop Stop’s wet T-shirt contest, and ride in Blood River Marina’s Mardi Gras boat parade would not have prevented Sheets from understanding that Tickfaw was saturated with allusions. The concentrated symbolism which defines Benglis’ art stretches back to Contraband (1969) in which acid trip colors irreverently affronted Serra and Ryman’s macho monochrome minimalist sculptures while alluding to oil-polluted bayous.


Lynda Benglis, Tickfaw, 2010, glass, pigment, mixed media, size unknown

Some of Benglis’ associations have been elusive. The bronze and polyurethane sculptures exhibited a couple of years back at Cheim & Read in New York were titled after Swinburne. The English writer Swinburne, critic Alfred MacAdam pointed out, had sadomasochistic tendencies, and these combined with his “astonishing delicacy,” MacAdam wrote, could be seen “as the intellectual and esthetic background of Benglis’s wall pieces, some of which vaguely suggest a female figure that had been burned and then preserved as a precious relic.” MacAdam found bronze surfaces reminiscent of rope, evoking bondage, another Swinburne connection, and breast-shaped polyurethane to constitute homage to fertility.

MacAdam would have been guided by Benglis’s explanation of the organic fluidity of her floor sculptures, which evoked "the depravity of the 'fallen' woman" or, from a feminist perspective, a "prone victim of phallic male desire".

Erotic preoccupations were more strait-forward in 2007 when the same gallery demonstrated affinities between Benglis’s globby wrinkled forms and the older Louise Bourgeois’ sexual sculptural forms. Both artists made penises in bronze.

As one would expect that 2007 exhibition displayed the famous 1974 Artforum ad image, which Benglis devised to address male domination of the early 70s art world. Benglis has said in interviews that much research and planning went into the ad’s construction. She probably could not have imagined the image would still be generating dialogue almost forty years later. "Sizing Up the Dildo: Lynda Benglis' Artforum Advertisement as a Feminist Icon" is one example of the sort of lofty exhortation it inspires.

Benglis also could not have anticipated New Museum retrospective curators writing that her “singular practice both intersected with and transcended the categories of post-Minimalism and feminist art.” Or that she would influence numerous younger artists such as Cindy Sherman and Matthew Barney.


Lynda Benglis, Artforum ad, 1974

Although I’ve seen the Artforum ad image many times, it still causes my mouth to fly open. The wrinkles and veins in that astounding prick are a primary stylistic element in Benglis’ art.


Lynda Benglis, The Graces, 2003-2005, Cast polyeurethane, lead, stainless steel, 103 x 26 x26

On September 7, Inman Gallery opened the exhibition Paper Space: Drawings by Sculptors (through October 29) which includes Benglis’ 1979 Untitled (#26). It’s easy to see how the drawing’s purple columnar form anticipates later sculptures such as the totemic biomorphic Graces, and looks ahead to the glass works. Wanting to know more about Benglis’ drawing I contacted Inman.


Lynda Benglis, Untitled (#26), 1979, collage on handmade paper, 26 x 33 inches

It turns out Inman Gallery took Benglis’ drawing on consignment from Texas Gallery for the drawing exhibition, so Texas Gallery kindly passed on a bit of insight. The pink “mask” form and the green and gold foil elements relate to the Mardi Gras Benglis saw in her Louisiana upbringing. Mardi Gras would have been inescapable when the artist studied at Newcomb. Benglis has spoken clearly about the impact of Mardi Gras on her aesthetic.

According to Texas Gallery the drawing also relates to Benglis’ Atlanta Airport commission titled Patang. And also to collages and works on paper in the 1979-1980 Patang series, which included thread, fabric and foil decorative objects.

Further, passages in the drawing relate to kites in India, which have faces and eyes as decorative elements. “Patang" is also the title of a recent movie about the largest kite festival in India, which takes place in Ahmedabad where Benglis lives part of the year with her husband Anand Serabai. Texas Gallery directed me to kite festival images.


Kite Festival - Ahmedabad India

!Women Art Revolution

by Robert Boyd



Lynn Hershman Leeson speaking after the showing of !Women Art Revolution

Last night I saw !Women Art Revolution, a documentary by Lynn Hershman Leeson, which compiles video of feminist artists taken by Hershman since 1967. She's been videotaping interviews with these artists continually and has literally thousands of hours of interviews. In a sense, this film is an adjunct to the video, which is an amazing database of information about feminist art. And you can see it online--Hershman donated the video to Stanford University, who have made some of the video accessible online. (I wonder if making the video accessible online is an ongoing project--if so, they have made a good start but have a long way to go.)

The movie has a somewhat confused structure. In part, it is chronological--the origins of feminist art is located in the 1960s. The film is clear on placing this art within the social movements of the 60s and in opposition to the apolitical, contentless art of minimalism. This is something that is key and will come up later in terms of art history.

Hershman places her own story within the context of the larger topic, including discussing how she wrote fake reviews of her work under three pseudonyms, got them published, and used them to get her first gallery shows. Her point was that because she was a woman, it was hard for galleries to take her work seriously, so she had to engage in this ruse. Without knowing the specific circumstances and galleries, it's hard to judge how true that is--I mean, any young artist without a gallery, male or female, finds it hard to get a gallery. (Old artists, too!) Nonetheless, her clever tactic worked, but more important, it actually prefigured some of her subsequent work in which she took on a fictional identity (so well, in fact, that her alter ego had better credit than she did). All this is interesting, but it stops the movie dead whenever she talks about her own art. It's tricky to make a movie that is simultaneously about an art movement and about oneself.

The movie moves into the early seventies, when feminist art really took off as a thing. Judy Chicago becomes a major figure, not only for her own art, but also for her founding and cofounding several programs in feminist art. The funny thing about this section is you see that Chicago wasn't good at keeping these programs going--the details are never spelled out, but you get the idea that there were fallings out with her collaborators. That said, lots of interesting artists and thinkers came through Chicago's programs. The movie also discussed A.I.R.--Artists in Residence, a non-profit women's art gallery founded in 1972. Probably the two most famous artists in A.I.R. were Nancy Spero and Ana Mendieta.

The way I'm describing the movie makes it seem much more narrative than it is. While there is a general sense of time passing (60s-70s-80s), !Women Art Revolution veers off into discussions of different media that were pioneered by these artists (particularly performance and video) and different subject matters. It touches on controversies (particularly Congress discussing The Dinner Party and later the revocation of certain N.E.A. grants in the 80s), but mostly keeps it focused on the artists and what they were doing.

The film portrays the 80s as a period of cultural retrenchment--Reagan, the NEA, and the Guerrilla Girls. But it also makes the point that this was the moment when women art stars came to the fore--Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer. The Guerrilla Girls are interviewed at length, and their clever, fact-filled graphics about the percentage of women in galleries and museums is recognized. The film suggests that they had to be anonymous because of the danger to their professions if they became known, and wraps that up into the general sense of 80s reaction. But to me, what we have with the Guerrilla Girls is moving beyond feminists addressing other feminists (for example, consciousness raising) which was very common in the 70s to feminists addressing everybody in the art world, whether they were self-identified as feminist or not. When they pointed out how few female artists there were in the Museum of Modern Art, their intended audience were the curators, directors and trustees of MOMA. And perhaps even more important, future curators, directors and trustees. Because as the movie pointed out, trustees--particularly women trustees--have gradually pushed for more women in permanent collections.

The battle between feminist art and minimalism reaches a gruesome apotheosis in 1985. Ana Mendieta, whose work dealt with identity, gender, and the body--obviously important fields for feminist art--was married to one of the key minimalist artists, Carl Andre. Mendieta fell from a 34th floor window on September 8, after an argument with Andre. Andre said he was not in the room when she fell. Andre was tried for murder, and many artists contributed to his legal defense (the film specifies male artists, but I don't know if his supporters were exclusively male). This outraged women artists, and they picketed the trial. Andre was acquitted, which increased their outrage.

The film concludes with the success (one might say triumph) of feminist art, including its institutionalization. Hershman discusses how her own work is now in the collection of MOMA and the Tate, and that she was able to finance this film. She interviews younger feminist artists who have received MacArthur grants. She discusses WACK!, the huge survey of feminist art at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. And perhaps the most amusing parts of the film were excerpts of an interview with Marcia Tucker, the first female curator at the Whitney Museum who later founded the New Museum. Tucker proved that a feminist could create a lasting art institution.

But the most powerful statement--and the most revisionist--was by Martha Rosler. She stated that feminism was the most important art movement in recent history, and pointed out that art historians and critics still tried to split all these artists up into an art history based on style (minimalism, post-minimalism, conceptualism, neo-expressionism, whatever) or medium (performance, video, etc.), when the most logical grouping was by ideology (feminism). This rings really true--they way you read about these artists is as members of different movements as opposed to all being part of the same movement, the feminist art movement.

I've read most of the WACK! catalog, and now I've seen this film. What I would really like to read would be a good narrative history of feminist art. Who did what when, written in a down-to-earth warts-and-all style. (I hate to admit it, but I'd like to know how Judy Chicago managed to piss off so many of her colleagues in the early 70s, for example.) But that's just me--the art world tends to prefer more high-level art histories, as well as more theoretical texts. Story-telling and reportage are frowned upon for some reason.

Although it's not without faults, I recommend !Women Art Revolution highly. It will be showing again in Houston in February, 2112, at the MFAH.

The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago

by Robert Boyd

One of the things I saw while I was in New York earlier this month was The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago. After reading her autobiography, I was really intrigued to see it. It's an enormous work. When it was created in 1979, it ended up touring for nine years. But after that, it stayed mostly in storage until 2007, when the Brooklyn Museum created a permanent display for it.


Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party detail ("Primordial Goddess"), 1979

The piece is installed in a dark room with dramatic lighting. The table is shaped like an equilateral triangle. It's huge--48 feet on each side--and features 39 place settings for famous women primarily from history (with a few from myth, like the one above). The table rests on a tile floor on which are written the names of 999 additional notable women.


Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party detail ("Sappho"), 1979

It was first displayed at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, whose director, Henry Hopkins, likely knew Chicago from their days in the L.A. art scene. But the next stop on its nine year tour is still kind of surprising to me: Houston. Even more surprising, the University of Houston: Clear Lake.

Months before The Dinner Party opened in San Francisco, CA, Judy Chicago addressed a sales conference of publishing representatives, describing the epic project that she documented in The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our Heritage (1979). In the audience was a young woman from Houston, Evelyn Hubbard, who had worked for U.S. Representative Barbara Jordan before becoming the first African American sales rep in the huge Doubleday firm. Impressed by Chicago's presentation, Hubbard told feminist bookseller MaryRoss Taylor, "We need to get this show to Houston as a follow-up to the International Women's Year Conference." Taylor called The Dinner Party studio in Santa Monica and formed a committee of local art professionals to help a handful of feminist activists in the quest for a venue. Calvin Cannon, then Dean of Humanities at University of Houston - Clear Lake, said "Yes," and the show opened there in 1980 to enthusiastic reviews from local art critics and the public. "Where did we go wrong?" wailed feminist activist Helen Cassidy, "We thought we were starting a revolution, but they love it!" (Through the Flower)

Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party detail ("Theodora"), 1979

Now for those not from Houston, let me tell you how odd this is. Clear Lake is a master-planned suburb on the south side of Houston on Galveston Bay.  For Houstonians, I think the thing they think of when they think of Clear Lake is NASA. Many of the people who live there work for NASA, NASA contractors, or other aerospace firms in the area. It is far from the museums and art galleries in town, both in terms of physical distance and in terms of cultural distance. But in 1980, with the help of a lot of volunteers, the piece was installed at the University of Houston's Clear Lake branch campus.


Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party detail ("Atemisia Gentileschi"), 1979

Critical reaction was not surprisingly mixed. And there was a bit of political controversy--ultraconservative California Congressman Bob Dornan denounced it (but it would have been disappointing if he hadn't denounced it, in a way).  But what is more interesting is how it stands now. It's been over 30 years since its debut. But in my mind, it has been somewhat ignored by art history. It doesn't easily fit into some of the conventional narratives. One of the arguments one hears against it is that it is essentializing--all these women are included because they are women, not because of their individual uniqueness. The fact that each place setting is an abstracted ceramic vagina further essentialized the subjects. This is an inherent problem when someone makes a work (whether a piece of art or work of history or whatever) that makes an effort to recognize a group of people who were marginalized in the past because of some common feature--their gender, their race, their nationality, etc. Such work is often denigratingly called "victim art."


Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party detail ("Mary Wolstonecraft"), 1979

This is one of the many problems of political art, and why it is so difficult to make good political art. Chicago, I think, tries to overwhelm this inherent problem by creating something so dazzling and huge and beautiful that such nagging complaints are just blown away. In this sense, think of it as the equivalent of great church spectacles--architecture, sculpture and painting coming together in brilliant form. When you see the Ecstasy of St. Theresa by Bernini, you don't think of the Inquisition. Whatever objections one might have to the idea behind the piece get swept away.


Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party detail ("Sojourner Truth"), 1979

I admit I was swept away. My reaction was highly emotional. I reveled in the work. But at the same time, I know that this was the result of its magnificence--a magnificence created by the overwhelming quantity of beautiful objects, the fantastic staging, and dramatic lighting. It's like when you are watching a big Hollywood movie and you get all choked up at the emotional climax. Those Hollywood directors are master manipulators. My old art history professor Thomas McEvilley used to call this "psyching out the working class"--that productions from Bernini's sculptural tableaux to Hollywood movies were instruments of control by the ruling class. But obviously that's not the case with The Dinner Party. Chicago seems to be using all those tricks and theatrics for the opposite purpose.


Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party detail ("Emily Dickinson"), 1979

 Anyway, I'll leave those arguments for others. I love The Dinner Party.


Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party detail ("Susan B. Anthony"), 1979

Thirty years ago, The Dinner Party was in Houston. Now they are having a thirtieth anniversary celebration. In February, UH Clear Lake is putting up a 30th anniversary exhibit of drawings, test plates, and maquettes for the piece, along with seminars and lectures.  Looks like a good excuse to visit Clear Lake.


Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party detail ("Virginia Woolf"), 1979


Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party detail ("Georgia O'Keefe"), 1979

!Women Art Revolution!

I can't wait for this movie to be released.