Lynda Benglis, Omega, 1973 (Portland Art Museum) and Judy Chicago, Pasadena Lifesaver, Blue Series, Number 4, 1969-70 (Portland Art Museum). This video was produced in cooperation with Portland Art Museum.
Smarthistory images for teaching and learning:
[flickr_tags user_id=”82032880@N00″ tags=”BenglisChicago,”]
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:00] We’re in the Portland Art Museum, and we’re looking at Judy Chicago’s “Pasadena Lifesaver, Blue Series, Number 4, 1969-1970.” Being from Brooklyn, I know Judy Chicago’s “Dinner Party.”
Bruce Guenther: [0:14] Absolutely.
Dr. Harris: [0:15] Because I’m lucky enough to live right near its permanent installation.
Bruce: [0:19] The celebration of women artists across history.
[0:22] This work is Judy Chicago, just after she changes her name from Judy Gerowitz, and she takes on another persona in her evolution as an artist and a person, from Minimalist art school to trying to make the vocabulary of the day in which she was active — raw Minimalism, The Factory, the men — trying to make it female, trying to make it mean something to her.
[0:50] When you look at this work, it’s four lifesaver-like shapes.
Dr. Harris: [0:55] How do you see that as connected to this finding of a feminist identity?
Bruce: [0:59] Oh, look at it.
Dr. Harris: [1:01] It’s pink and purple and blue.
Bruce: [1:04] But look at the pattern. It’s a translucent square, six foot by six foot. She’s divided into quadrants. The quadrants are divided into equilateral triangles, like a quilt body in the background.
Dr. Harris: [1:20] I see it.
Bruce: [1:21] On top, she’s created four lifesaver-like shapes in which color moves like a spectrum from light pastel blue and purple to dark rich purple.
Dr. Harris: [1:34] They look kind of frosted.
Bruce: [1:36] Yes. Well, that’s that transparent color on a plexiglass body. This is not the opaqueness of paint, but the transparency of light and color, like a Flavin in a room that changes the color. She uses that to suggest the sensuality of a form that is both geometric and female.
Dr. Harris: [1:59] And soft and round at the same time.
Bruce: [2:02] And so she takes two ideas — the traditional folk form of the quilt, I think. And…
Dr. Harris: [2:07] Maybe almost playing on the idea of a grid, the modernist grid.
Bruce: [2:11] Yes, absolutely.
Dr. Harris: [2:12] Let’s look at this other woman artist right next to it.
Bruce: [2:15] The Lynda Benglis.
Dr. Harris: [2:17] You have this purity and geometry of the Judy Chicago, and then this knotted, tense, but gorgeous, and explosive, and fun form called “Omega” from 1973.
Bruce: [2:31] This is Lynda Benglis from New Orleans, from the Mardi Gras tradition, a woman who takes something from the world. Those plaster-soaked bandages that they stabilize broken legs with. She begins to knot them and she thinks of them as organic and process and physical.
[2:50] It’s a post-Minimalist practice. It takes material for what it is. Then, like her famous “Art Forum” advertisement where she appears naked with a dildo on a two-page ad, confronting the machoism of Minimalism.
Dr. Harris: [3:05] Is that her holding the dildo?
Bruce: [3:06] Yes, and the sunglasses.
Dr. Harris: [3:07] I’d forgotten about that image.
Bruce: [3:09] One of the great confrontations she stages.
Dr. Harris: [3:12] It’s still a very confrontational image.
Bruce: [3:14] It was done against her friend, Robert Morris, the Minimalist. These glitter knots, dismissed in their day because they weren’t serious enough. They were frivolous. They were playful. They were…
Dr. Harris: [3:27] Female. I wonder what would have happened if a man had made them. If they would have been seen as frivolous and playful. I don’t know.
[3:35] There’s something about this that also reminds me of late Stella.
Bruce: [3:39] Yes, of course, it ends up being antecedent and grounded in what Lynda Benglis was doing. Because Frank Stella, at this point, is doing hard-edge geometrics much closer to Judy Chicago.
Dr. Harris: [3:51] That’s right.
Bruce: [3:52] It’s a wonderful piece, animated by this black drizzling line and then the blue and the magenta and the pink and the purple glitter.
Dr. Harris: [4:01] It feels like it’s making fun of Pollock too.
Bruce: [4:04] Oh, absolutely.
Dr. Harris: [4:05] Adding some kindergarten glitter to some Pollock.
Bruce: [4:08] You see, it is. I’ve known Lynda Benglis for 30 years. I’ve had the privilege of working with her on exhibits. She talks about the glitter knot as a response to the hypersensitivity and masculinity of the art world’s dealing with Pollock as the great breakthrough. She said, “I wanted to make him and his imagery mine, but to make it from the process.”
Dr. Harris: [4:32] Very cool.
