African Art and Art History

Abstract

abyme multiplies, image and audio get more distorted and cacophonous—three layers of Lynda perform, matched in motion. By framing the viewer’s encounter through these recursive screens, Benglis not only challenges any sense of video’s immediacy but also insists on the physicality of the medium and its playback devices. This is further emphasized in the moments when Benglis stands before the television set and annotates the recorded image, drawing with a thick black marker directly onto the glass of the monitor. The continuities between Benglis’s video art and her works that hang outside the darkened screening room are perhaps most evident in Collage (1973), as the video’s title might suggest. Much as Drawing #27 (1979)— installed just a few feet away—layers bits of fabric, string, tissue paper, plastic film, and metallic paper over wash, crayon, and pen, Collage creates a patchwork of color footage. The intelligibility of the shots (a hockey game, hands and arms darting in and out of the frame, encounters with three enormous oranges) comes in and out of focus, at times blurring into a technicolor excess. As in her other videos, Benglis creates spatial depth by having images appear simultaneously on and in front of the monitor. Robert Pincus-Witten once claimed that video offered Benglis “a perfect medium of gesture freed from materiality,” but Benglis piles each successive generation of image on top of the previous one much in the same way she layered brushstrokes of wax in her encaustic lozenges.7 The exhibition invites the viewer to track how Benglis’s processes and material investigations move from one technique to another. Much like the phase changes on display in the first room—liquid latex that clots into a rubbery pool and wax that melts and hardens—we can also observe modes of working changing states, jumping from medium to medium. The final gallery primarily features Benglis’s wall reliefs: bows and knots gilded in gold leaf or coated with sprays of zinc, copper, nickel, and aluminum. The wall text notes that for many of these pieces, Benglis worked with fabricators to achieve their “metallized final state,” and again the specter of Minimalism lurks in the background. What was the nature of this collaboration? For an artist so invested in the responsiveness of different materials, one imagines this did not look like Tony Smith ordering a sixfoot cube of hot-rolled steel over the phone, as he did for his sculpture Die (on view just outside the entrance to Benglis’s exhibition). It feels like a missed opportunity to not expound on Benglis’s work with fabricators after the exhibition so successfully construes her challenges to conventional notions of authorship. Across the gallery, the viewer is treated to a more textured account of the complex process required to twist and tie Moonglow Four (1985), a sand-cast glass knot glittering with metal inclusions. Far from demystifying the work, this careful description enlivens it, allowing the viewer to imagine the choreography between Benglis, her assistants, and the flows of molten glass. Additional glimpses into the behind-thescenes of production could provide the same sense of agency to Benglis’s human collaborators as she emphasizes in her materials. Notably, the exhibition largely steers clear of references to Benglis as a “woman artist,” nor does it position her work in terms of the feminist art movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Perhaps this follows from the artist’s own discomfort with the label “feminist artist”; even as Benglis nonetheless recognized that she “is part of [feminism] whether I want it or not.”8 The show declines to essentialize the artist’s output as first and foremost gendered, and in doing so avoids reducing craft-based techniques, organic forms, and nontraditional materials to the avant-garde’s feminine “other.” Instead, taking Benglis’s cue, the exhibition allows her materials to speak with their own voice.