Lynda Benglis

Fire on the Water

Lynda Benglis’s early work, from about 1966 to 1974, is divided into four rough groupings. She made lozenge-shaped, vertical wax landscapes by applying one layer of wax over another and changing colors at every level. Each layer of wax exacerbated the irregularities in the previous layer. The accrued levels gradually rose into to a geological landscape. Benglis’s process, as Kenneth Price remarked, was like making surfboards exactly wrong, and it was. Benglis also made flat geographic pours that covered floor space with geological maps in nongeological colors. The inference was that these pours were color-field paintings “made right” by remaining horizontal in the position such paintings were painted, thus her Odalisque (Hey Hey Frankenthaler) in 1969. Lynda thought of the pours as mementos of her home in Louisiana and the multihued oil slicks on the bayous. Benglis also created urethane lava flows gushing from walls like ballast gushing from an oil platform. They were poured then allowed to rise and harden like biscuits, sometimes guided by armatures, sometimes not. Finally, Benglis made racy photographs, “advertisements for herself” that insisted on the erotic subtext of all her work. Today, looking back, Lynda seems to be standing naked with a dildo in the gathering dusk of the last moment that “the artist as kinky pinup” might seem like a fun, sexy thing to do.

I was part of the downtown scene when Benglis created this work and often at the loft she shared with Klaus Kertess and a wonderful Agnes Martin, so what follows is less art history or criticism than a critical memoir designed to argue that the vein of practice Benglis opened up was richer and more logical than the route followed by artists of that time who were responding to seismic shifts occasioned by ideology, journalism, education, patronage, and real estate. At this time, the “civilizing” influence of university lifestyles and government largess was making inroads into the badass erotic cauldron of a downtown culture that was old school but still too young. Artists who had been to “graduate art school” were arriving in SoHo in droves, bringing with them the shopping habits of the upper middle class. A superstructure of nonprofit foundations, elite universities, and governmental patronage was fitting itself around that world like an exoskeleton. The prices of property and issues of propriety were suddenly at stake. Continental theory and Marxist politics were reordering and refocusing the improvisational hedonism of underground America.

Lynda Benglis, Phantom, 1971. © Lynda Benglis / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York.

Painting was still the bête noire and minimalism was stumbling around like a mammoth with Alzheimer’s, with no memory and no future. Lynda Benglis, however, understood that an artist in the Western tradition might slay one’s parents with impunity. (Warhol and Judd, in this case.) This was one’s obligation as a young artist. To slay one’s grandparents, however, to slay de Kooning and Frankenthaler too, would obliterate a genealogy and it did during the ruthless aesthetic cleansing of that period. Be that as it may, the aesthetic obsessions of this period were “process” and “materials,” but nobody talked about them. They were presumed to be proprietary, so everyone talked tactics. To convey a sense of that time, here’s an evening in the early seventies—something like an elementary-school performance of the first Thanksgiving.

The critic Peter Plagens, myself, and a group of sculptors were wandering around the SoHo opening of a Barry Le Va scatter-piece. As we surveyed Le Va’s receding plane of dispersed objects, Plagens said, “The floor is the new wall.”

“How could the floor not be the new wall?” I said, “After thirty years of the biggest market for the biggest paintings in the history of the world. There are no walls anymore.”

“There are corners, though,” Plagens said. “And Judd does walls. Otherwise, you want a narrow Noland to fit over the couch, or a tall, skinny Olitski like Dave’s that will fit between brownstone windows.” I mentioned that Bob Smithson thought the idea of the floor as the new wall was hard-copy landscape painting, that it was sissy and too minimalist. “We should be saying that the earth is the new sky,” Bob said one night at Max’s.

“This is beginning to sound like the Hudson River school from a weather balloon,” Plagens said.

“This is the natural consequence of treating the floor non-architecturally,” someone else said.

We ran into Barry Le Va. He didn’t say anything. As we moved on, a young woman whispered to me, “Can you really sell this stuff?” I reassured her that, in the New York art world, you could sell anything. The Australian dealer Max Hutchinson once insisted to me that anyone who couldn’t sell a handful of air with an idea in it didn’t deserve to call himself an art dealer.

This scrap of watercooler chatter demonstrates the complexity of issues befuddling artists at this time. The burgeoning logic of postminimalism led toward industrial materials newly adapted to the ends of art. The new art embraced a cult of fractal, chaotic, noncyclical nature. It led away from the sixties habit of using new materials in the formats that referenced the uses for which they had been intended and subverted them, like Warhol and Chamberlain. It led away from the “natural look” of Sierra Club nature, and in the midst of all this mustn’t do this and must do that, one has to admire the subversive grace of Benglis’s solutions. Her artificial materials, artificial colors, and natural forms evoked the sixties melted into lava, like the scat from cartoon animals in Jellystone Park. Add to this the corners she seductively articulated, the faux-naïf candor of her color-field paintings left on the floor, and the New York School drips gushing out of the wall—as if Benglis had built a room inside her body and the walls were giving way to the physical pressure. All these organic intrusions were frozen in their gravitational fall, and in the 1980s Robert Gober would pick up on Lynda’s device of using the wall as a cultural guillotine to celebrate another nature over another culture.

All of these maneuvers constitute major innovations that were at once too simple and too complex for theory and pedagogy. One lesson to be learned from this work was that Lynda could do it and you couldn’t—Twombly did it and you couldn’t, or Rauschenberg did it and you couldn’t, or, more recently, Robert Gober does it and you don’t dare. In their own defense, Benglis, Rauschenberg, and Twombly sited the visual roots of their works in the riotous swamps and tangled profusion of the American South—in the puddles, vines, goo, cypress roots, and mushroom balconies. This should have helped professors understand, but it didn’t. All these artists broke rules that professors were loath to admit were rules. In an age when revolutionary professors were seeking art with the utility and longevity of a crowbar, it was hard to justify art that aspired to the longevity and mystery of the Everglades.

As a result, to this day, Benglis’s work from this period has not been allowed to mean what it meant. Benglis took the regimen of “procedures and materials” from the generation of artists who invented it, and, using their own rules, turned it against them with a flirtatious smirk. Benglis took their ideology, added steroids, and let it bubble up. Postminimalists imposed a reign of chastity; Benglis countered with profligacy and promiscuity; she opened up a hundred roads that were never taken and should have been. Even so, taking these transgressions into account, Benglis work was undeniably dominant American art in this period—the articulate consequence of a narrative that runs from Burchfield to Pollock to Frankenthaler to Warhol—a powerful demonstration of logos in the service of eros—of nature without romance and sex without sentiment. The rest of this essay could easily be a catalog of the mistakes she didn’t make, and lessons we didn’t learn.

As a friend of mine remarked at the time, foreshadowing the dildo photograph, “If she’d only been a guy, it would have been less intimidating.”

But she wasn’t a guy, and I should note here that, contrary to urban myth, male artists have always been welcoming to female artists—except for artists like Lynda Benglis, Hannah Wilke, Bridget Riley, and Joan Mitchell whose effortless talent and erotic charisma scared the hell out of everybody, women included. In these cases, the gender insults were never about gender. They were always about sex and talent, in combination, as an unfair advantage. I remember one of Benglis’s detractors sending her back to the kitchen like a maid: “She isn’t making art, she’s cooking art!” Such cries of indignation at the culinary (read painterly) privileges Benglis granted herself prefigure those of Puritan feminists a generation later. The controversy over Benglis’s dildo photograph prefigured the controversy over Mapplethorpe’s “X Portfolio” a generation later, by which time the damage had already been done.

Thus, not surprisingly, the first major moment in Benglis’s career was submarined. She was chosen to participate in a 1969 exhibition at the Whitney Museum from which she felt compelled to withdraw her work at the last moment. Marcia Tucker and James Monte curated the exhibition, Anti-Illusion: Procedures and Materials. It included Robert Ryman, Barry Le Va, Robert Morris, Richard Serra, and other artists of that ilk, along with Benglis, who was the youngest artist in the show. The idea of the exhibition, in Carter Ratcliff’s phrase, was to celebrate “the meltdown of the minimalist object.” On the street, it marked the advent of what we called “stuff art”—the era of the general noun, like “dirt” or “snow” or “lint.” Unfortunately, the curators of Anti-Illusion and many of the artists in the exhibition felt that the minimalist object should not melt down quite as gorgeously as Benglis proposed.

This problem arose when Benglis, in the process of completing her pour piece, responded to the Whitney’s black floor by adding hot green and Day-Glo pink to the palette of her piece. This added an element of color to an exhibition otherwise devoted to white, black, and shades of industrial gray. This was, of course, an outrage! Wrists were slapped to foreheads. Muttering and wall kicking ensued. So much so that finally, in a classic demonstration of the “mission creep,” the meaning of “Anti-Illusion” was expanded to mean “Anti-Color,” because except for its colors, Benglis’s piece conformed perfectly to Tucker and Monte’s agenda.

Negotiations ensured. Finally the curators suggested that Benglis’s piece be moved downstairs and installed on a ramp. This destroyed the rhetoric and reading of Benglis’s Frankenthaler/oil slick. So Benglis withdrew her piece. She probably shouldn’t have, but she was young and a haughty southern bitch. Today, this all sounds crazy and mean, and it was, so you’ll have to trust me that it really took place. And why? Well, you see, colorlessness, at this moment, was hilariously presumed to be the color of thought and intellect—black and white being the palette of écriture. This delusional premise meant nothing, of course; it was only a beard for the real reason. The simple truth I heard from a booth at Max’s was that this girl, this young upstart, this cutie-pie, had outfoxed them all. She had executed a perfect Warholian maneuver. She did it exactly right and got it exactly wrong, and, the times being what they were, Benglis’s impudence was not allowed to stand.

Today, I like to imagine the consequence of Benglis’s piece actually appearing in this exhibition. She would have been its star by default, having stirred controversy before the fact. As a consequence, the ambience of gravitas and Puritan asceticism would have been lightened to the point of being giggle-worthy. The new school would have become old school. The underground mandate of absolute permission would have been confirmed and celebrated. The underground adage of “Hey, why not?” would have mitigated the power of ideological exclusion. But this didn’t happen, and to this day I suspect that if Benglis’s early works had been recognized as the simple and self-evident alternatives they were—had Eva Hesse and Bob Smithson not died—had Hannah Wilke possessed a somewhat firmer grasp on reality—the American underground might have survived, and we would be looking at a different and more variegated world. We could have rid ourselves of the nineties in the seventies.

All of Benglis’s work from this period points away from the chaste academic mainstream toward which Augustan minimalism and postminimalism aspired and might have mitigated the attention minimalism commanded for thirty years—about twenty-five years more attention than any art movement deserves. With a brighter, looser, sexier, and more profligate idiom at play in the discourse, the underground would have been better insulated against academia. This didn’t happen but it could have. Bob Smithson and Eva Hesse share as much with Benglis and Wilke as they do with Nauman and Serra. But Smithson and Hesse died, and the eight years about which I am writing became a long, slow escalator ride up into the realm of mainstream Ivy League values. The underground died as consciousnesses were raised. Those of us who chose to defend the underground could look over at a long line of aspiring young “art professionals” moving upward into jobs with medical and benefits.

This was a major sea change. Since the end of World War II, the American underground had been a dumpster load of indiscriminate trash and a powerful force in American culture. It provided a clear conduit from the crazy bottom to Holly Solomon, Sam Wagstaff, and Baby Jane Holzer at its libertine top. The entrance requirement for this underground was some stigmata, any stigmata: a motorcycle, schizophrenia, homosexuality, exhibitionism, manic-depression, drug addiction, anorexia, promiscuity, cross-dressing, poor impulse control, leather clothing, a European title, or, like punk rock, some fantasy of grandiosity borne across the bridges from the boroughs. Even so, by the end of the seventies, the underground was dead. Outsider solidarity had been balkanized. Bikers, schizophrenics, homosexuals, exhibitionists, manic-depressives, junkies, anorexics, cross-dressers, and sex maniacs had been sorted out into their own identity groups striving upward toward public recognition of their “normalcy”—as if normal had ever helped anything. By this time, a substantial segment of America’s best artists had joined a diaspora into the wilderness: Don Judd moved to Marfa; Bruce Nauman to moved Galisteo; Ed Ruscha stayed in LA; Rauschenberg, Chamberlain, and Rosenquist moved to Florida; Ellsworth Kelly to Spencertown; Agnes Martin, Ken Price, and Larry Bell to Taos; Benglis, Sherry Levine, and Judy Chicago ended up in Santa Fe. I went to Nashville and played guitar just like Mick Ronson.

By then, we had what we have now, an art world without heroes or mentors and a surfeit of hall monitors. The plague of AIDS, herpes, and heroin in the early eighties thinned the population of art citizens predisposed to take risks even further, although safe never bought anything but social security, and sadly, in retrospect, Lynda Benglis’s dildo photograph now stands as a good-bye to all that. At the time, on the street, the photograph was a great, serious joke, a confirmation of Benglis’s bodily agenda, a slap at the male egos with whom Benglis contended, and an acknowledgment of the androgyny toward which the art world had been tending since the Trial of Oscar Wilde. It was also a show-off, a “look at this and just die” glimpse of Benglis’s body. If her bravura seemed invulnerable to criticism, it wasn’t. It teased a new order of authoritarian Puritans out of the closet, writing for October magazine. It sent the remnants of the underground into the wilderness, but this doesn’t mean that Benglis wasn’t right. She was right from jump street.