Silva, Horacio. ‘Lynda Benglis’, Cloakroom, issue 2, Summer 2020.
Lynda Benglis
Lynda Benglis knows how to make an entrance. After all, the American artist famously kicked down the door to the male-dominated art world in 1974, appearing in a double-page spread in Artforum, naked save for a pair of sunglasses and a giant dildo.
On a recent Sunday afternoon in Athens, a fully- clothed Benglis still manages to own the room when she walks into Ratka, the legendary restaurant in the upscale neighborhood of Kolonaki, on the slope of Mount Lycabettus. The Athenian answer to (the now-closed) Elaine’s in New York, where, until 2011, the elite once met to eat in an unpretentious bohemian setting, Ratka has seen its fair share of VIPs. But the craned necks in the dining room suggest that even this jaded crowd is unprepared for such an imperious arrival. Benglis, carrying an oversized bag and attitude to match, has the demeanor of a gunslinger eyeing up a saloon before taking everyone out—an effect that is amplified by her entering to Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison Blues playing in the background.
‘You know, Johnny Cash is my all-time favourite,’ she says, approaching the table while The Man in Black sings about having shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. Like her hero, Benglis is wearing mostly black—a dark jacket and trouser combo with a single strand of ‘very old semi-baroque pearls’ and a gold necklace with a teardrop motif given to her by Klaus Kertess (the late co-founder of Bykert Gallery in Manhattan—where Brice Marden, Chuck Close and other artists started their careers in the 1960s and 1970s). A pair of dark Sketchers—the orthopedic shoes proving popular among art kids with a penchant for irony in New York—completes the look. Though unmenacing, they give her an extra bounce in her step as she marches up to the maitrê d’ to let him know that the music is too loud for her taste. She also informs him that she is battling a cold and he would do well to keep her hydrated—with wine rather than water, preferably from Santorini. ‘When the carafe gets half full, top it up and don’t stop until I say so,’ she demands, firm but polite.
Benglis takes her seat and unzips her bag to reveal Cleo, her one-and-a-half-year-old miniature dachshund, which has been a model of discretion and is now surveying the room with the long-necked hauteur of the Egyptian ruler after whom she is named. Few of our fellow diners, if any, likely know that Benglis, the silver-haired 78-year-old woman dominating the room, has been the centre of attention in the art world for five decades, responsible for one of the most iconic images of feminist art. If they were familiar with her mythology, they would know that Benglis, at the time touted as the female successor to Jackson Pollock, had originally wanted to pose nude in Artforum to accompany a story about her. When the editors demurred, she paid for an advertisement instead—and with that, what began as a rebuke to the machismo of the magazine and the art world at large, became an important artwork in its own right (Cindy Sherman described her encounter with the ad as ‘one of the most pivotal moments of my career’, and The New York Times recently included it in a roundup of ‘25 Works of Art That Define The Contemporary Age’.) Not everyone was enamoured by the audacious stunt. Feminist art historian and writer Cindy Nemster accused Benglis of ‘making a frantic bid for male
attention’, and it led to the resignation of two of Artforum’s top editors. In the annals of art history, it will arguably go down as the ultimate dick pic.
By all accounts, Benglis is not an easy witness to lead. She warns me at the beginning of the interview that she is a double Scorpio (intense, quick, often having to bite one’s tongue) with a Capricorn rising (an ambitious taskmaster), so will most likely be asking, rather than answering, questions. So it’s with trepidation that I enquire about the ad that made her name, which I have been told she is sick of discussing. Did the reaction rankle her, or lead to self- doubt? ‘I think whatever you think,’ she teases, as the waiter pours us the first of many glasses of white wine, handing over a menu from which Benglis picks practically one of everything. ‘Or would you like my dog to say something about it? Cleo is very clever, you know.’ I try a different tactic, appealing to her ego, and tell her that, to my mind, her mien in the infamous image, all tan, broad shoulders and taut torso, became the template for Brigitte Nielsen’s much-copied butch look, and the glamourous boulder-shouldered fashion of Thierry Mugler and Claude Montana in the 1980s. ‘You know, I thought that when I first saw Brigitte and those designers emerged,’ she concedes. ‘I said to myself, “What took them so long?” To be honest, I thought the same of David Bowie at certain moments in his career.’ The change of subject is swift. ‘More wine? Do we need more protein?’ she asks, ready to pour, with a grin.
Benglis, as her friends will tell you, is as solicitous as she is cheeky. ‘There is no limit to what she will do to help,’ says William Fagaly, emeritus curator of the New Orleans Museum of Art and a close friend who has known her for 45 years. ‘She goes beyond the call of duty.’ So I ask, again, whether the negative staff reactions to the Artforum ad disappointed or spurred her. ‘I found it strange,’she finally admits. ‘They were definitely trying to control information and had no sense of humour. But I had the last laugh, didn’t I?’ Did she ever. As the imperious Realm of the Senses— Benglis’ first solo museum show in the country that has played a key role in her life and vision (Benglis was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, but is of Greek heritage)— attests, the variety of her achievements, in terms of materials, imagery and ideas, is staggering. Held at the Stathatos Mansion of the Museum of Cycladic Art and curated by Dr David Anfam, a leading authority on American modern art, the show consists of 36 sculptures in a diverse range of media—wax, bronze, aluminium, marble, latex, ceramics and glass—spanning from 1969 to now, underscoring Benglis’ boldness and boundless imagination.
‘One of Lynda’s foremost artistic virtues is that she has always been a maverick,’ Anfam says. ‘Whereas Minimalism was macho and dour, she explored female gender issues, eroticism and gaiety and the natural world. I find her mix of expressive qualities irresistible, by turns humourous, sublime and exquisite. She’s been incredibly inventive, and still is.’
Andrew Bonacina, the chief curator of The Hepworth Wakefield museum in West Yorkshire who curated Benglis’ first retrospective in the UK in 2015, adds: ‘Lynda’s genius has always been in her ability to absorb and synthesise contemporary ideas and create something entirely new from them, taking them in directions that might seem to contradict the very thing she set out to explore. In her use of unconventional materials, or even unfashionable decorative materials such as glitter, she’s always pushing against ideas of what is right, or tasteful.’
‘What can I say? I like to wrestle with forms,’ says Benglis, a self-styled gypsy with homes in New York, The Hamptons, Kastellorizo, Sante Fe and India, and who is in Europe for the first time in three years ostensibly for the opening of this show. (This precedes a stop in Naples for the opening of another solo exhibition at Thomas Dane Gallery before heading back to New York, where she is represented by Pace Gallery.) ‘I create planes. I’m more of a proprioceptive—more like a dancer,’ she says, her arms now a swirl of gestures creating above-the-table Euro-drama. I ask the sculptor’s sculptor if she is cursed with feet of clay or whether she had twinkle toes back in the day. ‘I have always loved to dance, to get down and perform,’ she offers emphatically. ‘I still do. I grew up surrounded with music. My grandparents had a Victrola and we played all these musicals and World War II songs that were popular at the time. I did a little jig when I could barely stand and used to perform for the poor babysitter.’
Maybe it’s the liquid courage, or the mountains of bottarga, lamb, tempura shrimp, stir-fried chicken, and octopus (which she playfully refers to as her favourite dish) that begin to arrive that put Benglis in a generous mood. Far from taciturn, nothing, it now seems, is off the table.
Just as she has played limbo with traditional markers of art and craft—masculine and feminine, frozen and fluid— Benglis’ mind flits from subject to subject, past to present. It’s not always easy to keep up. A conversation about how developments in creative fields are often in lockstep with science dovetails into a recollection of her mother receiving electric shock therapy for postpartum depression after the birth of her sister. ‘That’s what the politics were like for women in the early 1940s,’ laments Benglis, who, despite her legacy, has an ambivalent relationship with feminism as a movement, and will routinely tell you that she identifies most as a humanist. ‘She was Protestant with a Presbyterian father, but the only hospital was Catholic, so these nuns put a drawing board in front of her and said, “Here, draw.” Can you imagine?’
A rumination on the current political climate in America (‘It’s totally shocking, but the trick, as I say, is humanism. If more people speak out we can really survive this shit storm’) quickly shifts to touch on the culture of oversharing online (‘I am on social media but not religiously’), then back to Alexander Girard having been influenced by Gandhi. As she herself says at one point, ‘It’s important to think and talk elliptically, not do things by rote.’
All of a sudden, it’s anything but calm waters at the table as another dog, coincidentally owned by someone from the Museum of Cycladic Art, enters the restaurant. Cleo is not having it. Nor is Benglis, who barks at the owner to take it upstairs. ‘We’re interviewing here, if you don’t mind,’ she sniffs, barely containing a mischievous smile. The woman assures her that they are moving and order is restored. ‘Where were we?’
I tell her that I think she was recalling the ‘god awful’ smell of perming solutions that used to pervade old-school beauty salons, a subject we had arrived at circuitously via an account of growing up in ‘nowheresville’ Louisiana as the child of a Southern beauty and a brilliant, if not overly successful, business owner—a tangent to a story about a formative trip to the island of Kastellorizo with her grandmother when she was 11 years old.
‘No one could believe my mother let me travel to Greece at such a young age. But my grandmother was very determined,’ she says. ‘I saw the harbour in 1953, and it was bombed out—no glass, just black windows, and no doors, like crying houses with long eyes and noses that were dripping, and mouths that were open with no teeth. It scared me. It was terrific.’
A small, kitsch fountain behind Benglis prompts me to ask about her fascination with all things water, references to which she sprinkles liberally in conversation, and which is an important element in her work, including her already ambitious sculptures. ‘It goes back to the womb, I guess,’ she explains, aware of how pervasive that might be as an explanation. ‘I have a feeling that perhaps I use various materials to interpret feelings of security, and the idea of fluidity, and being relatively warm and open in terms of function.’ Water will be a key element in a major solo exhibition of her work at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas from 9 May, focusing on new and recent work, including two monumental bronze fountains. The show’s curator, Leigh Arnold, adds that ‘water is an important element that adds actual movement to her sculptures, rather than an image or illusion of it’. Having water flowing over the gestural surfaces that are Benglis’s calling card, Arnold maintains, ‘gives the appearance of an object continually in formation and deformation’.
Back at the restaurant, the talk of water leads to fond recollections of Benglis learning to swim with her father, early trips to the port of Marseille, rock-hopping on the islands with an old Australian boyfriend and growing up near the Intercoastal Waterway. I put it to her that she sounds awfully nostalgic for someone known for constantly moving forward (incidentally, she has a much-anticipated monograph, published by Phaidon, out later this
year, as well as a catalog raisoneé produced by Pace Gallery). ‘Maybe,’ she allows, ‘but these memories, of water for example, laid a very secure foundation for expressing my ongoing interest in movement. How can I not want to hold on to them?’
‘I think her sense of nostalgia is really indicative of how she is always thinking simultaneously about the past, present and future,’ says Bonacina, who has contributed an essay to the Phaidon book. ‘Her work exists on a continuum, always relentlessly new and contemporary while also heavily informed by the past.’
While she is in a reflective mood, I ask Benglis, who was twice married (‘I saved two young men from the draft,’ she proudly admits), if there are any regrets, be it about her work or the loves that got away while she was earning acclaim as an artist.
‘Well, they all got away. I got away,’ she chortles, recalling the hot German with the Nazi father in prison, the Scotsman who looked like a young Terence Stamp but had a short temper and once gave her a black eye (‘I carried a little paring knife after that,’ she says of her former beau who also caught Warhol’s eye). And, of course, there was her long-term partner Anand Sarabhai, a respected microbiologist who studied with the Nobel Prize- winning Francis Crick at Cambridge, and passed away six years ago. ‘Anand was very important to my life,’ she says, earnestly. ‘These days I think I am actually married to a lot of my friends. I feel very connected with the people I associate myself with.’
The wine is all but gone and the preternaturally voluble Benglis, who seems keen to continue talking, shoots the waiter a look. But before the affable chap can pour more, Cleo gives her owner a look that suggests she needs to avail herself of the orange trees outside, stat! On that note, the artist and her little pooch are off. As they exit the restaurant, Bobby Charles, in a twist that almost strains credulity, sings in the background, ‘See you later alligator. After ’while crocodile.’