Eugenia Lapteva, Colour, Sex and Scube Diving with America s Most Sensual Sculptor Lynda Benglis, Husk Magazine, August 10, 2014

Transcription

1 Eugenia Lapteva, Colour, Sex and Scube Diving with America s Most Sensual Sculptor Lynda Benglis, Husk Magazine, August 10, 2014 In the desert, where I am right now, we have wonderful skies, really, it s just incredible you feel the sphere of the earth imitated in the skyline, reflected in all these sky maps and patterns all over the atmosphere. My telephone conversation with Lynda Benglis opens with an evocative image of the sky in Santa Fe. We speak briefly about the weather in London and New Mexico, as you do, and for once the weather feels integral to the discussion which follows. The sky patterns dance along the transmission media connecting our calls, and pave the way toward a dialogue which traverses the artistic aspects of Lynda s world. Santa Fe, New Mexico, is one of the four places between which Lynda currently lives and works, including New York, Kastelorizo, Greece, and Ahmedabad, India. Starting off in the early 1960s, at the height of Pop Art and Minimalism, Lynda moved from New Orleans in Louisiana to pursue her profession as a practicing artist in New York. There, against the prevailing theories of art and sculpture, she developed what became her unique aesthetic with a visceral idiom that continues to celebrate the excessive and emotive qualities of art. Her controversial advert in Artforum magazine a photograph of the artist, posing stark naked, but for a pair of white sunglasses and an enormous latex dildo marked her passionate involvement with the feminist discourse in the mid 1970s. Although the advert would secure her international media attention, Lynda s radicalism stretched far beyond the confines of polemics. Her work spans an extensive range of materials and forms, including richly layered beeswax pieces, large pigmented latex floor pours, phosphorous polyurethane lava paintings extending off the wall, hand folded sparkling knots made with cotton bunting, fossil-like figures in stainless steel and colonies of delicate metal figurines that bring to mind the corals of the ocean. Throughout Lynda s heterogeneous body of work her sensual use of form, colour and texture runs a deep sensibility to the multiplicity of human experience. Lynda s biomorphic sculptures summon us to another side of being, a primeval place beyond reason where chaos and peace, menace and shelter, density and void, seem to coincide. Perhaps here, in the midst of a large white museum or gallery room, if we listen and watch carefully, we might be able to hear the abyssal murmur of the Outside.

2 Lynda Benglis: I have been working in Tao and then straight to the desert I m pretty much cut off here in the desert, I have limited access to Internet. Since coming here to New Mexico I m not attached to the computer so much. Eugenia Lapteva: What are you working on? I ve been working on a project, in ceramics. I ve had this collaboration for over 20 years in Tao with Sax Patterson. I m working toward possibly presenting them in New York, we ve been talking about that lately. They ve been presented before in different places including the Detroit Institute of Design they have also travelled in Europe, various cities in Germany, amongst others. They ve been all over the US at different museums and galleries. Your new fountain Pink Lady was part of a recent exhibition in Philadelphia Yeah, it was exhibited at the Locks Gallery. The fountain was presented on the roof and actually it s a three part fountain from The Graces series. It was always meant to be a fountain, but I ve also done it in black and pink, which looks like stone, if there were pink stone! The colour is really stunning. What is the relation between colour and form in your work? Well, colour and form I think are very animated. Colour to me is very emotive and in this particular piece I think it is about the body inside, but likewise it s also about the body made up. In other words, it s about artifice and beauty, but I think that its strength also lies in the fact that it pulsates in a way, which is alive, and it could be vascular. Yes there is enormous energy in your pieces. I m curious to hear more about your material experimentation what is it about polyurethane, for instance, that first drew you to this particular material in the 60s? And what continues to attract you to use it today? This material is relatively new. But the form in the making is not new. I did pour urethane very early on in the 70s, but actually urethane as such, I knew thanks to one of the first developers of the material with whom I worked early on in my career. He was a worker at Robert Consultants in WW2

3 and the urethanes were developed in the 1940s. Maybe you know that there are soft urethanes, such as natural rubber, imitation rubber, rigid urethanes and so forth. I became very involved with the rigid urethanes in the mid to late 60s, and I think in 67 or 68 I was involved with latex rubber, semi flexible urethane and then rigid urethane. The flexible pours I did back then were like that, simply because I had a relatively small studio. The doors were small and I had to roll up the artworks in order to get them out of the room, so that s how I kind of began pouring on the floor and soon it became instituted and different museums around the country began to pick up on that the Walker Museum was one of the first in Milwaukee, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston was one of the last exhibitions. I had an opportunity to do one in Chicago but by then I was already moving on to something else. I decided that I had extended the urethane investigation in terms of form and installation as much as I could do emotionally, emotively and intellectually. I felt I d learnt and experimented, so I went on to different forms of image making and began with the idea of making objects that were basically painting surface as skin with form, again using the wire idea as a skeletal approach to make surface. Now I m continuing this approach in plastics, which are also urethane, but this time it s a brand new material, translucent material, very different from other kinds of material that have been done before. I always resisted certain plastics because of the chemical smell and just for the fact that they were very messy and ugly. Even when they were produced they gave off odours. They developed them but the new ones weren t as beautiful you always had to increase the structure with a kind of webbing. This type of urethane is very strong structurally. I found that no one had used it in the way I had. At MIT for instance, engineers didn t know that it could extend 17.5 feet off the wall of it s own accord. And I did the pours kind of like a cross hatching, cross pouring against the wall and out in space, with a kind of skeletal approach underneath. It was supported by my making of structure with polyethylene, which I then pulled away so you would get these floating waves of urethane. So essentially, with these pours now, I m making the form with the old urethane but it s compressed and then sprayed over a form, compressed and sprayed again, drawn so to speak, but again it s related to the original urethane that I poured. Then I take a mould it s a very complicated process I m pouring over a mould, kind of spraying or drawing, after which I take this mould and then cast another urethane product. It s a two component system and pigmented. It s a huge chemical product, oil and rosin based, that we use all over the world.

4 It sounds incredibly complex! What s interesting is that the sculptures nevertheless feel very organic. To me they are physical and fluid. And yet the material involves a highly artificial process this is an interesting disjunction. Yeah, somehow I choose to be emotive in the quality of my image making, and I like that even children can identify, because of colour or taste. Colour has taste, colour has form, these pieces also have a translucency which makes them extremely complicated without being specific in an image. Colour can also be floral, very orchid like, very tropical. I like all these connections and because there is colour it becomes very emotive. As a result, you have a strong emotive quality without description. That s right, there are numerous layers and possible reactions to your work, and never the sense of a message being imposed. I enjoy how you allow this interpretative freedom to the viewers. Well, thank you. I feel that as artists we must pose questions! To remain within the space of thinking or questioning is refreshing. I think your work has this effect, much like good poetry. Writing and art, should always pose a mystery. And although we don t always have the answers, we must keep asking the questions and I think that s really the best kind of writing, the best kind of art.

5 I d like to go back to the creative context in which you first started making art, namely Pop Art and Minimalism. How did you respond to these movements at the time? You said once that you wanted art to be excessive, not minimal. Could you expand a bit on this? Well, the Pop situation is what I experienced when I first came to New York as a graduate. Basically what was accepted in the West at the time was a feeling of freedom, material freedom, and the theatricality of in fact I think it was more about illustration, but the qualities which I deliberately recognised that I could use, employed some qualities which had developed in so called minimalism. They began to ask the question what is art and what is the context? These kind of things, which questioned the nature of art, I easily sought my own answers too, because I felt well prepared for it logistically. I felt that minimalism and pop art were kind of closed systems and that I preferred to ask these questions through my body orientation toward various new materials, and by developing those materials within different contexts. This question of the body, in particular the female body, continues to inform your art. I agree with American art critic David Hickey that an erotic subtext runs throughout your oeuvre. Yes. I think that simply by begging the question of sexuality, I was arriving at a way of positioning myself in a metaphorical situation. Could you expand on this idea of sexuality with regards to your work? I was actually just thinking about this strange thing the other day. I picked up a very early copy of a Rodin book and the photographs had such ridiculous angles, they weren t artful at all! They were completely flat because of the fact they were very early prints. It was a bit like bad photography, and as result Rodin looked like a bad artist. I ve always thought Rodin was a very sexual artist but people criticised him back then. Personally, I think that he has a man s point of view of the women and men he portrayed, and the other day I was thinking of how people always have had certain attitudes about what they see. People express themselves very much with prejudice, that s all. So I think art or creation has always been about sexuality. It s about birth, it s about death and as human beings or animals we are deeply involved with the phases of life.

6 The drive to know and explore these phases no doubt has a sexual dimension which fuels creativity. Absolutely, it s the energy. It seems to me that obsession is a feature of many artists works. Do you think that to be obsessed with something is intrinsic to creativity? Yes, certainly. Lately I m obsessed with mud! Clay what clay can do or cannot do. I like to play with that boundary, I feel that I m experiencing some kind of definite well, I seem to be getting closer and closer to the earth or to the clay. I was taking a walk outside yesterday, I have 60 acres in the desert here, and in the corner the arroyos come together and they create this sort of mass of clay bed, deep clay. I touched it, this sticky clay, and it was just wonderful thinking about all the energy that was there, all the experience and energy that was in the palm of my hand, right there. Your sculptures no doubt reflect this strong presence of nature. Is your love of nature one of the reasons why you enjoy moving between several different homes? New York, Santa Fe, India I like different places, I need to be outside. I m very involved with landscape as well as the body. Processing perhaps, identifying with the landscapes. How do you balance concept and feeling in your art practice? I think people tackle them in different ways. Some people have a more sexual approach, some people have a more physical, abstract approach. I think as we progress in life we progress from the sexual to the more abstract and I keep a balance, I think, through travel and through working with various materials by looking at the sky and experiencing the sky, also by being in water and experiencing this kind of weightlessness that water gives you. You kind of feel that you go back to the womb. You can feel. The suspension is very important, and so is re-birthing your imagination or your body. This kind of going into the water is very important. What is the difference between the sexual and abstract? Well, for you it would be textual, for me it would be well, speaking with you, we re definitely conversing in what becomes text for you. The abstraction, however, is ideas that I m trying to voice in conversation. So, I m thinking aloud here by the way, but I believe that our bodies are dynamic beings, sexual beings, and the sexual continues all through life. But I also think that the awareness of that continuation can be brought about by different chapters. If you want, I can contextualise it. I was

7 aware from an early age, for example when I went scuba diving, of how important water is, or being in the water and being suspended in the water, that is, getting your weight balanced under water. It s like flying, and the feeling of weightlessness when you re pretty much under water, creates a balance where you can go up or down easily. This is something that I like to experience, not that I always go scuba diving, but I like the buoyancy that water gives you, so I always look forward to going to my home in Greece. The taste of the salt, and that kind of buoyance makes you experience something. There is a phosphorescence cave near to the place I go, it faces directly east so that the sun lights up the cave and you experience it as an anechonic chamber. You re floating in the phosphorous area which is full of light and there is literally no up or down. So you re suspended in the space, a perfect space. It s something that I ve often thought about. I experienced that when I was a little girl and I need to go back there one day. I was very struck by what I saw, and it was especially important because growing up in Louisiana, Mississippi, up until I was eleven, meant that I didn t experience anything other than flat land. One of my attractions here, in contrast, is the rocky formation of the landscape which is very old in New Mexico. Only briefly did I experience these caves in the southern part of New Mexico when I was young. The houses here are made of marble rocks. You have the great juxtaposition of the cliffs, the volcano rocks, the white stones. All these places are shiners of energy. They re vaults, and I think people are drawn to these energy sources. It sounds like a kind of pre-oedipal, primitive nucleus of warmth and love. Yes. Everyone has a feeling of their own energy sources and they bring about them in different ways. I became aware of that when scuba diving. I think children are very imaginative and aware of their energy sources. We re talking here about psychology too, a very primal understanding of the world. I think children do have these primal urges, understandings and experiences. I can remember certain dreams that I d wish to have over and over again in my childhood, and you could interpret them in any way you like in terms of what s been written in psychology, because they re archetypes! What I find particularly powerful about your work is the sense of surrender which it demands from the viewer. Picking up on what you mentioned earlier about children s

8 receptivity to your work it seems to me that children lack those critical filters which precisely prevent us from this ability to yield to these irrational moments and experiences which you describe. On another note, however, I wonder if there are any particular current issues that inform your art practice? I think there has been a lot of mocking of the commercial questioning what form and life is, which also questions the value substance the very issue of art. I think these questions are necessary, they are philosophical issues. I think they are of the time. I myself am involved with that too. I m influenced by everything! But I m not at school anymore, let s put it that way. I was trained as a thinker. Of course there were contexts, there was the New York abstractionists, and the Greenberg situation. I question the economic value of the dollar and the gold, the idea of the gold standard in the context of where I am operating. I ve always questioned the value of everything at that particular time be it metals, the value of gold or art, but it was totally in the context of the structure of making the art, that is, the material, the form and everything we ve been talking about. The pop artists were doing the same thing. I think art has always done that, it s always been of the time. Art is everywhere and contextual and the universe is very small finally. Maybe the smallness is what makes it timeless? You stated in an another interview, True art and the response is timeless. Is art both particular and universal would you say? One would hope so, huh!? It marks the time, but it has a classicism that is timeless. Well, one would hope so, yeah. And I think that kind of idealism in abstraction, is something which I m always hoping is there in my work. And I hope it s not just a cliché.