ART REVIEWS : Benglis’ Pointedly Deceptive Pleasures

Lynda Benglis’ billowing metalized reliefs celebrate pleasure at a time when pleasure is politically suspect. Silhouetted against the wall like sprays of flowers or clusters of silvery bows, the aluminum and stainless steel sculptures are beautiful, elegant and decorative.

But they steadfastly refuse the traditional equation of decoration with preciosity. What Benglis offers instead is the decorative writ (literally) huge--wall-sized confections with exquisitely pleated surfaces that play with and against the verities of volume, space and texture.

In the smaller pieces--some mounted on the wall, others displayed on pedestals--the emphasis is on knotting and wrapping. Here, any distinction between interior and exterior space dissolves as the sculptures themselves dissolve into overlapping layers of sand-cast aluminum or stainless steel, woven together as fluidly as pieces of fabric.

From the early ‘70s through the present, Benglis has worked with diverse and often unconventional materials--polyurethane, latex, beeswax, glass, glitter, metal, gold leaf, welded steel and neon.

And what has interested her most consistently about such materials is their metamorphic potential--to appear soft when hard, to simulate movement when fastened to the wall or to the ground, to ooze, float, hover and spin. “Eat Meat” (1975) is one of Benglis’ earliest successes in this regard: a corner piece made of cast aluminum that uncannily resembles a pile of raw, viscid slabs of meat. In the current work, the artist continues to work her alchemical magic, making metal sculptures look no more heavy than gleaming sacks of air.

Benglis’ resistance to the traditional polarities between solidity and ephemerality, hardness and softness, is often read as a refusal of male/female dichotomies. In this resistance, however, Benglis is less closely linked to feminism than to romanticism, in which states of being--be they human or material--are always volatile, shifting, and impermanent.

Since 1974, when she appeared in an advertisement in Artforum magazine wearing nothing but a pair of movie-star sunglasses and an artificial male sex organ, Benglis has, in any case, had a troubled relationship with feminism.

Many feminists looked upon her very public act of self-objectification as politically retrogressive, representing the female body as a site not of power but of exploitation. Others regarded it as a coy but serious intervention into the longstanding discourse linking creativity to male sexuality.

Benglis’ work indeed raises a panoply of questions surrounding the possibilities for feminist art. Is there a proper mode of production? Must it be theoretical? Must “good” feminism work to eradicate its “bad” counterpart?

Benglis seems to argue that despite its long association with the “feminine,” beauty need not be anathema to a progressive politics. Nor need the decorative be merely irrelevant. In insisting upon feminism’s avowed commitment to non-exclusion, Benglis carves out of herself--and for a new generation of feminist artists--a space and a practice wherein pleasure is unexpectedly political.

Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, (213) 273-0603, through Oct. 10. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Skewed Portraits: One can’t help but think of Marcel Duchamp’s most famous gesture--painting a thin mustache upon the Mona Lisa’s pristine lips--when strolling through Kim Dingle’s cockeyed hall of portraits. A framed reproduction of Gilbert Stuart’s George Washington comes first; in the Dingle Library incarnation, however, the father of our country sports not the familiar powdered wig, but a brown bouffant hairdo and a delicate white crown.

Like Duchamp, who thumbed his aquiline nose at Leonardo da Vinci in order to liberate himself from the tyrannies of an art historical patrilineage (only to become, ironically, the “father” of modern art), Dingle is interested here in debunking patriarchal systems--democracy, history, and even portraiture, all designed to consecrate ideas and people in perpetuity.

However, the title of the piece, “George Washington as Cram Dingle as Queen Elizabeth II,” which entangles family history (Cram Dingle is the artist’s mother) with national history, complicates matters. For the image thereby emerges less as a satire a la Duchamp than as a manifesto about the inextricability of the public and the private--and their equal complicity in spinning impossible myths of origin.

The portraits startle with their incongruities. “Baby Cram Dingle as George Foreman” is especially bizarre--a tiny thing in a lacy white jumper, with green blouse and little green shoes to match, bearing the boxer’s distinctively puckered, narrow-eyed mug. Floating against a solid green background, feet delicately crossed at the ankles, this baby-man resembles nothing so much as a well-behaved extraterrestrial.

That this is a painting created whole-cloth by Dingle, rather than a “ready-made” partially altered by her, renders the image particularly disturbing. As such, it reads not as a prank, but as an emblem of an alternate universe--a place where private origins and public endings are strangely conterminous.

Boxing is an important symbol for Dingle, conjuring the macho ethos underlying any patriarchal system. By infantilizing Foreman (and perhaps even playing off his own self-deprecatory sense of humor), she suggests that the flip side of machismo is impotent pugilism.

In “Baby Boxer,” she reinvents the strategy, painting a pair of red boxing gloves onto the antique postcard image of a cherubic baby sprawled nude on a blanket. The latter work, however, is simply too easy. Like the enormous pile of dust Dingle displays alongside it in a glass pedestal, it is amusing, but ultimately weightless.

Accompanying the library of portraits is a series of “books”--wooden planks sandwiched between glass covers and embellished with a variety of images, from a “noodle-like boxer” to two coats of the Declaration of Independence, inscribed one atop the other, turning the ponderous words into utter gibberish. While these objects are clever--books that can’t be read, but can only be picked up and admired, like three-dimensional paintings--they are disjunctive in this context, and detract from an otherwise fine, taut exhibition.

Richard/Bennett Gallery, 830 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 962-8006, through Sept. 27. Closed Sunday and Monday.