Shaw, Anny. ‘Lynda Benglis: the globe-trotting artist who shocks and delights’. Financial Times Online. 17 January 2020.

17/01/2020 Lynda Benglis: the globe-trotting artist who shocks and delights | Financial Times

Visual Arts

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Portrait of the artist as a dog lover: Lynda Benglis in Naples with her dachshund © Amedeo Benestante

Anny Shaw 3 HOURS AGO

When an 11-year-old Lynda Benglis first arrived in a heavily bombed-out Naples in 1952, it was as if “the houses were wailing”, she says. “There were no lights, and there were smashed-out window panes everywhere.”

Accompanied by her grandmother, the Louisiana-born artist had set sail from New York two weeks earlier on a pilgrimage to Kastellorizo, the rocky Greek island where her paternal family lived. When we meet, Benglis is back in Naples installing her show at Thomas Dane gallery,

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17/01/2020 Lynda Benglis: the globe-trotting artist who shocks and delights | Financial Times which boasts views across the glistening water of the bay with Vesuvius rising beyond: the spectacular backdrop for our interview.

Spettri, as the exhibition is titled, is about the traces and memories of Greece and the many other places Benglis calls home, as well as the works of art she has returned to after decades. It is also about light and spectacle.

One room is dedicated to two phosphorescent polyurethane sculptures that glow green in the dark: “Potent Limit III” (2011), an egg that swells like a pregnant belly from the wall, and “Ghost of Smile” (1974/2016), a cast of a double-ended dildo that grins at you like the Cheshire Cat.

It is the same dildo with which Benglis posed naked, save for a pair of rhinestone-studded sunglasses, in her famous advertisement in Artforum in 1974. Meant as a “humanist gesture that negated the idea of either male or female, one or the other”, Benglis took out the ad after the editors of the magazine refused to illustrate her interview with a nude self-portrait. The ad caused an uproar; five critics, including the eminent Rosalind Krauss, resigned.

They missed the point entirely, Benglis believes. By recasting the dildo in a luminous material (she first cast it in bronze in 1974) and installing it as a smile over an open fireplace, she reasserts the “excess and humour” of the piece. “Oh this is funny, the dildo is going to come at you like a boomerang! And now the egg has been impregnated!” she exclaims as she sees the two works hung together for the first time.

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17/01/2020 Lynda Benglis: the globe-trotting artist who shocks and delights | Financial Times

‘Bikini Incandescent Column’ (2002), on display at the Naples show, evokes both a phallus and a mushroom cloud © Thomas Dane Gallery/Pace Gallery courtesy the artist Whether reflecting off surfaces or emanating from within, Benglis’s show is suffused with light. There are sculptures moulded from paper pulp over chicken wire, painted with Mardi Gras coloured glitter, and lamp pieces that hang like classical columns or caryatids from the ceiling. The latter were created using recycled handmade cotton paper from Gandhi’s ashram in Ahmedabad, near where Benglis had a home with her life-long partner Anand Sarabhai, who died in 2013.

Another earlier lamp work, “Bikini Incandescent Column” (2002), conjures both phallus and mushroom cloud, at once solid and spectral.

There’s a buoyancy to the hanging sculptures, which Benglis, a certified scuba diver, likens to the feeling of weightlessness found in water. “We all have that sensation because we are all born from fluid,” she says.

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17/01/2020 Lynda Benglis: the globe-trotting artist who shocks and delights | Financial Times If the curvaceous lamps suggest volume, the glitter sculptures are about surface, or skin. Inspired by the majorettes of her high school years who would twirl gem-encrusted batons, Benglis first started using glitter in the early 1970s. “I grew up with glitter. To me it seems very natural, it’s another skin,” she says. “Hoofers” I and II (both 1971-72) are among her earliest works in this vein. The tubular sculptures are made from flesh-coloured gauze embellished with glitter and hang like two slender limbs down the wall.

Benglis pouring latex paint for a 1969 work. 'The basis of the material being alive and viscous interested me,' she says © Getty The artist’s preoccupation with skin began with her latex sculptures, chiefly created between 1968 and 1970, in which she would pour brightly coloured polyurethane foam on the floor, turning painting into sculpture. “As I was pouring it, it felt as if there was a rubber band going https://www.ft.com/content/600e7886-330a-11ea-a329-0bcf87a328f2 4/6

17/01/2020 Lynda Benglis: the globe-trotting artist who shocks and delights | Financial Times out and pulling me back in,” she says. “The basis of the material being alive and viscous interested me, and I wanted to find ways of making other forms of skin. So I got into paper which was almost like pie crust.”

Several of Benglis’s latex sculptures, known as “fallen paintings”, are currently on show at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens, the complementary chapter to her Naples exhibition. She describes the works as “a comment on [Jackson] Pollock”, who had pioneered the drip painting approach in the 1940s. Her colourful, amorphous, resistant puddles are therefore a powerful rebuff to the macho minimalist and polished pop art that dominated New York at the time. Later, she would hang knotted cotton and plaster pieces on the wall, turning sculpture back into painting. “She’s as much a shape-maker as a colourist, a painter as well as a sculptor,” observes François Chantala, a director at the gallery.

Knots and tubes — both fallopian and phallic — recur frequently in Benglis’s work, evoking Benglis caused uproar with Christian and pagan symbols of birth and rebirth. a magazine ad after editors The artist recalls Easters spent in Greece where refused to use her nude plaited breads sprinkled with sugar were a welcome self-portrait for an treat. “You would find a silver dollar buried in one interview of them somewhere if you were lucky.”

Knots preoccupied Benglis on and off during the 1970s and into the early 1980s when she produced a series of knots in marble. She kept several in the garden of her Long Island home, three of which are on public display for the first time in 30 years. It is a homecoming of sorts for the sculptures, which were carved in India from marble sourced in Italy.

As the sun begins to set over the bay of Naples, I ask Benglis whether she has any plans to establish a foundation to preserve her legacy. Pace gallery, whose roster the artist joined in January, is preparing her catalogue raisonné, no small task for an artist whose career took off in the 1960s, a time when she was making ephemeral and fragile works.

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17/01/2020 Lynda Benglis: the globe-trotting artist who shocks and delights | Financial Times

'Ghost of Smile' (1974/2016) revisits a work that prompted resignations from Artforum magazine © Thomas Dane Gallery/Pace Gallery courtesy the artist Though historically significant, such pieces rarely command high sums. Thomas Dane declined to give prices for the exhibition, but Benglis’s auction record, for a five-part metal wall sculpture, stands at $245,000. Women artists, as we know, are still undervalued.

Two years ago, Benglis bought the mansion once owned by the chewing gum magnate William Wrigley Jr in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which she calls her “foundation house”. The tireless artist has been building a 120-acre compound in the nearby desert. But that is all she will say about her legacy. It is hard to imagine Benglis settling in one place. As she puts it: “Los Angeles, New York, Greece, India, New Mexico and Louisiana are all home.” Can she add Naples to that list? “Yes”, she says with a warm smile, “here is also home.”

To March 14, thomasdane.com

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