Expressing Herself

You don’t know what to expect in chatting with New York artist Lynda Benglis. For two decades she’s received hard-boiled acclaim for such zany activities as sculpting silver genitals, dipping cloth in plaster, globbing rubber onto gallery floors and taking out ads in snooty art magazines that depict Benglis baring her bottom in a feminist spoof of old Betty Grable pin-ups.

Wacky as it all sounds, Benglis is a serious conceptualist. “My work’s been called process art, feminist art, decorative art. Regardless of labels and the specifics of materials and content, the work is open-ended and metaphorical; I want viewers to be able to read their own meanings.”

It’s tough to see how a hunk of latex is a metaphor for anything, but Benglis explains that her career-long theme has really been natural phenomena: “The human body--its proportions motion, anatomy--is a natural phenomenon. The flow of the ocean, gravity, flight, physical and chemical reactions and all the spontaneity these imply are represented in my work.”

For nearly a decade, Benglis’ now-familiar knots--on view at the Margo Leavin Gallery (to Aug. 12)--have been the vehicle of choice. The wall-bound 6-foot ribbons look like airborne drapery fossilized in a coat of precious metal. Undeniably beautiful, they have a glitzy elegance and none of the raw, counter-culture appeal that won Benglis her name in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

“Back then, artists were trying to establish art as a living, changing process, so we made art with fluorescent light, by accidental techniques like pouring or dripping. The bending and pleating of my knots, the chemistry of the metal coating are another way of expressing non-static, organic evolution. Recently I’ve stressed larger-scale and shiny, striking surfaces because I want the sculptures to have a mythical and heroic power as well,” she said.

And what of purist’s view that Benglis is another art superstar who’s gone glossy and high ticket? “There will always be a Puritan strain in society that gets nervous if things are too pleasurable, too beautiful or too open. That’s the most significant legacy of feminist art; it taught us not to be afraid to express these things.”