Art Expanded, 1958–1978

II

Walker Living Collections Catalogue

×
0

Adhesive Products

Lynda Benglis at the Walker
Eric Crosby
Abstract
For the inaugural exhibition in the Walker’s Edward Larrabee Barnes–designed building, which opened its doors in 1971, artists were invited to work on-site and create works responding to, for the first time, the Walker’s new home. Works for New Spaces included more than twenty artists including Robert Rauschenberg, Dorothea Rockburne, Dan Flavin, Robert Irwin, Sam Gilliam, and Lynda Benglis. This collection of materials from the Walker’s archive looks at the creation of Benglis’s site-specific installation work Adhesive Products, documenting the artist’s intriguing process and innovative approach to materials through photographic, video, and audio documents.
Citation
Crosby, Eric. “Adhesive Products: Lynda Benglis at the Walker.” In Art Expanded, 1958-1978, edited by Eric Crosby with Liz Glass. Vol. 2 of Living Collections Catalogue. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2015.
http://walkerart.org/publications/art-expanded/adhesive-products.

Walker Art Center ©2015

Lynda Benglis, Adhesive Products, 1971. Installation view, Works for New Spaces, Walker Art Center, 1971.

Poised to open the new Walker Art Center in 1971, with spacious white cube galleries designed by architect Edward Larrabee Barnes, director Martin Friedman invited a number of artists to participate in the museum’s inaugural exhibition Works for New Spaces. With a wide-ranging selection reflecting what Friedman called “the pluralistic nature of American art today,” the show notably made use of the Walker’s ample, pristine spaces by giving artists free reign to work in them as if an extension of their studios. “Many artists have opted for the experiential rather than the monumental,” Friedman wrote in the exhibition catalogue, “and, by creating works directly in the galleries which, for them, became huge workrooms, they recognized that their art could have only momentary existence, limited by the period of the exhibition.”

1

Skewing toward the established canon of Minimalism and the emergent concerns of Post-Minimalism, Friedman’s show was anchored by substantial, environmentally-scaled works by Dan Flavin, Robert Irwin, and Robert Morris as well as iconic pieces by Donald Judd and Richard Serra. In addition to these heavyweights, Friedman extended an invitation to Lynda Benglis, a young artist who was beginning to achieve some notoriety for her misshapen, incidental pours of viscous pigmented chemicals, which began appearing in group shows in New York galleries and beyond in 1969. Born in Lake Charles, Louisiana in 1941, and a graduate of Sophie Newcomb Memorial College at Tulane University in New Orleans, Benglis came to New York City in the mid-1960s eager to make her mark on the art world. At a time when Hard-edge painting and the machined forms of Minimalism were the common languages of abstraction, Benglis gravitated toward softer, more unconventional materials, such as beeswax, which she used to make intimately-scaled paintings on oblong panels, such as the Walker’s own Excess of 1971, which the museum acquired in 1972.

Galvanized by the energy of her urban environment, in contrast to the more rural backdrop of her upbringing, Benglis’s work quickly became more muscular in its approach and gestural in its effect, especially when she began to employ pourable rubber and latex, which she heaved on the floor in vivid, chromatic flows—a gesture captured memorably with a 1970 photo spread in the pages of Life Magazine with the headline “Fling, Dribble and Drip.” As she describes her motivation, “I think I was reinventing a process within painting; I was making my own paints with pigmented rubber and then later with pigmented polyurethane. I had this feeling that I wanted to stretch the image, to have the image confront the viewer rather than have it lie on a surface.”

2 As her works grew more ambitious, they began to take on a more direct relationship to the body, commandeering the space of the viewer aggressively with their lumpy, oozing, even abject forms.

Working within the emergent idiom of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Benglis conceived her piece for the Walker as site-specific, creating her forms in the museum’s Gallery 2 over a week and a half and in response to the unique features of the exhibition space. During that time, she produced 10 incidental pours of liquid polyurethane mixed with black iron oxide powder. Needless to say, Benglis’s materials did not come from a local art supply store. Similar to many artists of her generation who were reinventing the terms of contemporary sculpture, Benglis looked to alternative sources such as building supply stores and chemical manufacturers. (She recently quipped, “I’ve always found my supplies through the yellow pages.”

3) Indeed, the title of the piece, Adhesive Products, was derived from the name of the company that provided her materials.

Perched on a ladder, she poured bucket after bucket of the substance on temporary armatures of wood, chicken wire, and plastic, which were distributed across the gallery’s 76-foot wall at regular intervals and varying heights. Working in an improvisational way as the viscous material hardened, Benglis made adjustments to each of the ten forms as the installation developed and composed the group as a whole rather than individual works. “These had to be more than the effects of simple gestures,” she remembers. “They were about density, surface, and form.”

4 Depending on the viscosity of the polyurethane, which Benglis could control with varying amounts of powdered pigment, her pours could result in smooth quick flows or bubbling, craggy clots that traveled slowly toward the gallery floor.

With the armatures removed, Benglis likened her now solid cantilevered forms to “three-dimensional brushstrokes,” but her intervention was aimed as much at the conventions of sculpture as it was the discipline of painting. The molten shapes of Adhesive Products demonstrate a willful disregard for both the structural simplicity of Minimalism and the esteemed flatness of painting, both of which were on view in full force throughout Works for New Spaces. In stark contrast to the polished surfaces and lines of Judd’s, Irwin’s, and Flavin’s installations, Adhesive Products aggressively issued an “interruptive,” rather than “assimilative,” form of site-specificity into Friedman’s otherwise polished presentation of Minimalist and Post-Minimalist art.

6

While singular within the Walker’s history, Adhesive Products was one in a series of similar installations that Benglis executed at that time in university galleries and museums around the country. At the Walker, it is not surprising that Benglis would go with black, given the purity of Edward Larrabee Barnes’s white cube gallery design; at different venues though, the artist expanded her chromatic range. At the Hayden Gallery at MIT in Boston, for a piece called Totem (1971), she worked in red, black, and white, while at the Union Art Gallery at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas, she produced Phantom (1971), a magisterial five-part work that made use of phosphorescent pigments. While Phantom remains intact today (it was notably reconstituted for the artist’s traveling retrospective in 2009

7), Adhesive Products and Totem as well as a number of other important works from the period were all but destroyed at the time of their deinstallation—a consequence of their fragile materials and the artist’s own insistence on the importance and specificity of site.
8

At the close of Works for New Spaces and upon the work’s decommission, Friedman retained one surviving element as a souvenir. In March 1990, at the end of his nearly thirty-year tenure as director, he transferred the object to the Walker, where it was cleaned, photographed, and placed in storage. According to correspondence in the artwork’s object file, Walker staff gave some consideration to the prospect of casting the form, as Benglis had done with other poured forms from the period (see, for example, Wing [1970], which was cast in aluminum in an edition of three), but the matter was never taken up with the artist in earnest. In 1997, under the direction of Kathy Halbreich, the object was accessioned as a relic of the larger installation, and in February 2010, with Benglis’s consent, the element was installed for the first time since 1971 in the Walker-organized group exhibition Abstract Resistance, curated by Yasmil Raymond.

Of all the commissioned installations mounted for Works for New Spaces, Benglis’s Adhesive Products was the most thoroughly documented, and the result is a sizeable cache of still and moving images in the Walker Archives. While select photographs of her installation have been published before, never has the Walker’s complete sequence of process shots been presented together. Here, they offer an in-depth look into her working method. Supplemented by a newly transferred reel of 16mm color film that captures the viscous flows of Benglis’s works in progress, these documents give us a glimpse into the artist’s determined attitude at a formative moment in her career when she was developing a critical gesture in her repertoire. A subsequent lecture by Benglis at the Walker in 1983 recorded on audiotape and a private videotaped interview with Walker curator Marge Goldwater, both included here, offer further insight into the artist’s creative process in her own voice. Finally, in a 2009 essay published in Art in America and reprinted here, Martin Friedman offers his own recollections of working with Benglis set against the backdrop of the artistic innovations and countercultural upheavals of the moment they shared in 1971.

Eric Crosby is associate curator of visual arts at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. He is the curator of the exhibition Art Expanded, 1958–1978, a historical survey of interdisciplinary artistic practice that provides the foundation for this volume. His other recent curatorial projects and collaborations include the solo exhibition Liz Deschenes: Gallery 7 (2014); the residency Fritz Haeg: At Home in the City (2013); Painter Painter (2013), a group exhibition of new abstract painting; The Parade: Nathalie Djurberg with Music by Hans Berg (2011; catalogue), which traveled to the New Museum in New York and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; and Artists’ Cinema (2011 and 2013), a series of screenings, dialogues, and artist talks at the intersection of contemporary art and the moving image. He has contributed to Parkett, Art Pulse, the Journal of Moving Image Studies, and other publications. Before joining the Walker staff in 2009, Crosby studied film history and theory as an undergrad at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and as a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

  1. Martin Friedman, Works for New Spaces (Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, 1971), n.p.

    ↩

  2. Lynda Benglis in Marina Cashdan, “Time and Tide,” Frieze, no. 134 (October 2010).

    ↩

  3. Lynda Benglis, as told to Lauren O’Neill-Bulter, “500 Words,” Artforum, http://artforum.com/words/id=24179.

    ↩

  4. Quoted in Martin Friedman, “Up Against the Wall with Lynda Benglis,” Art in America (December 2009): 108.

    ↩

  5. Ibid., 107.

    ↩

  6. Miwon Kwon, “One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity,” October 80 (Spring 1997): 85.

    ↩

  7. The exhibition traveled to the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Netherlands; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Le Consortium, Dijon, France; the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; and the New Museum, New York.

    ↩

  8. Benglis still maintains the importance of site for these early 1970s works. On the occasion of her retrospective, when Phantom was reinstalled, Benglis described the piece as “a relic now because it’s not within the context of the space that I created it in.” Benglis in Cashdan, “Time and Tide,” 2010.

    ↩