Artifacts: Lynda Benglis

Tiffany Yuen

October 9, 2016

Benglis is widely known for her sculptures, although she has done printmaking, cast paper, painting, and magazine advertisements, to name a few. Her work has been labeled as expressionist, feminist, exhibitionist, pop, funk, minimalist, and post-minimalist. She is always experimenting with new materials. Many people describe her work as, “curious hybrids between Greenbergian abstraction and a sort of manic post-minimalism unafraid of chaos or quick movement.”

As a child, Benglis did not have a lot of experience with art, but she got started because of her mother. Benglis considered herself to be an inventor when she was a child. She saw her mother’s work and she was very curious; she developed a growing passion for art. She started to make things for sticks, sand, and mounds of clay. She learned how to make sculptures just by doing it herself. He father owned a business in building materials, which became the basis of her work. She never really liked working with flat surfaces and canvases; she poured paint directly on the floor so the corners of the room would shape her work.

When she started working as a teenager, she felt very underrepresented in the workplace. At the time, men were mostly making art, going to school, and running businesses. This led her to create some controversial feminist magazine advertisements. She posed nude for one her her pieces to stand up against male domination. Her work represented the sexual and cultural power of feminism. Now, Benglis believes that men do not dominate the art world. She says, “There are so many women artists since I began and I really think of both energy and talent as coming from both men and women equally. Women feel their bodies differently from men because they have different resources.”

Pop art and minimalism were two art forms that were starting to dominate in the 1960s and 1970s, just when she was starting to get noticed for her work. Many of her art pieces are labeled as minimalism and post-minimalist.

Benglis works with a range of material -- fabric, wire mesh, bronze, steel, cast aluminum, polyurethane, beeswax, glitter, and even handmade paper. The materials and the processes that she uses to make the art shows in her final piece. If she was using wax, you would see the “pouring” and the “spilling” of the wax. As she progressed in her artwork, the spills turned to mounds of lava-like sculptures. Benglis says that she does not like working on a blank, flat canvas. She prefers to pour wax or other materials directly on the floor; the art shapes itself, so you can sense the true form and texture of the material. Benglis treats art as an experiment, and you can see the risks that she is taking in her work. She works in a carefree way. Her work inspired many modern artists like Cindy Sherman and Rachel Harrison.

Benglis’ work is a representation of her inner feelings. The magazine ads she did represent the way she feels about women in the workplace, and about how men were very dominant in the art world. The carefreeness of her personality is reflected in her work.

I chose this artist because I was drawn to the range of colors and overlapping quality of her work. The pieces themselves have a personality, especially her sculptures; they look like they are still moving and forming. I liked how carefree she was with her work and I liked the style that she used to accomplish the outcome of the artwork.

I would like to work in the way she does, and I want to experiment more. Benglis saw art in everyday materials, like glitter, mesh, clay, and wax. I want to get more hands on in my art and be more engaged in the artistic process. In most of her pieces, a little bit of her personality is shown in the piece. I would also like to make art that I feel a personal connection to.

Artwork by Lynda Benglis: