Free Association

For more than a half-century, Lynda Benglis has located physical forms that straddle the dynamism of abstract expressionism and the spirit of one-and-done minimalist gestures. Her voluminous “pour” sculptures—made from the simple process of dripping molten materials into amorphous piles that became the finished pieces—put her on the map during the heyday of New York’s freewheeling art scene in the late 1960s and ’70s. Though she’s since diverged from this signature technique, the painstakingly manufactured yet aesthetically organic shapes she’s executed through other methods embody similarly enigmatic, nebulous traits for which her work is internationally celebrated.

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Late last year, the 82-year-old native of Lake Charles, Louisiana, debuted a new body of work at 125 Newbury, Arne Glimcher’s New York concept gallery, in an exhibition entitled “Skeletonizer.” The featured pieces were fashioned mainly from abaca paper, realized in collaboration with the Brooklyn nonprofit Dieu Donné, which champions the craft of handmade paper in the realm of contemporary art—a series that extends to these pages with two unseen works.

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Private dealer and curator Adam Sheffer is a longtime art-world friend of Benglis’, having first met the artist back in 2005 shortly after joining Cheim & Read gallery. “Since that time, we’ve remained close and traveled extensively throughout the world,” he says, adding that they share a love of “India, dachshunds, and all things Hellenic.” Dialing in from her house in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Benglis reaches Sheffer in Greenwich Village, New York, to discuss the emotional weight of materials, formative memories, and how her process of sculpting is, much like cooking, context-dependent.

— Rachel Summer Small

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LYNDA BENGLIS: What animals are we gonna talk about today?

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ADAM SHEFFER: We’re gonna talk about the works in “Skeletonizer” and large bronze sculptures. How does that sound?

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LB: There are no sexual issues, then?

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AS: Only if you want there to be.

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LB: We’re dealing with something more profound, aren’t we? We’re all trying to categorize everything, one way or another. I think we continue to do that all our lives. I’ve always been interested in abstraction in a universal sense, so my physical being feels and sees at the same time. That’s my basis of trying to communicate with the world.

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“I want to manhandle, woman-handle; I want to feel. I want to wrestle. All these kinds of physical feelings: I’m trying to decipher it, and can my brain do it? I look around for materials.”
— Lynda Benglis

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AS: You’re an artist whose work is known for its dichotomies: for gravity and levity, soft and hard, dark and light, male and female, intimate and universal. You’ve done these new bodies of work—such as those in “Skeletonizer,” which are made from paper and bamboo, reeds and wire—as well as a 2021 edition of the monumental bronze Bounty, Amber Waves, Fruited Plane that’s going to be at the Orange County Museum of Art later this year. These works seem radically different, but what do you think they share?

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LB: Most of them are organic and flexible when I’m making them. It’s very much contextual, as cooking is contextual. I’m categorizing the way we feel, look, and see with materials.

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AS: One of your most famous quotes is, “The material is the question, the work is the answer.” How does your choice of materials determine the final object?

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LB: It comes to me as a feeling. I can say now, “I’m feeling squashed.” What does that mean? I want to manhandle, woman-handle; I want to feel. I want to wrestle. All these kinds of physical feelings: I’m trying to decipher it, and can my brain do it? I look around for materials.

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AS: Dieu Donné provided you with wet sheets of freshly made paper in Sante Fe. You talked earlier about liking this clumpy, handmade paper and the feeling of working with it with your fingers.

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LB: All of us are somehow blind, and we do like to work with our fingers and our minds at the same time, but what’s been coming to my mind recently is that I want to crush things. I relate to what John Chamberlain did: the physicality and the immediacy of it, much like children are attracted to color. I remember having my first set of colored papers at my grandfather and grandmother’s place during World War II. I threw the paper out on the floor to look at all the different colors. Anything that was pure, and that I could handle, was terribly exciting.

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AS: It’s interesting that you talked about this sensory kind of experience and this physicality, because it makes me think about the term “proprioception,” which I think about all the time when I look at your work. What I love about Bounty, Amber Waves, Fruited Plane is that you choose to [have the water] plummet, and the resulting sound adds to this incredibly heightened experience that you have around something that’s also 25 feet tall. That brings me back to this conversation about water and buoyancy in your work but on a very different scale.

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LB: I was 6 or 7 when I learned to not be afraid of floating. I remember the buoyancy, all this water, and that I loved being in a boat. My father took me at age 2 or 3, as soon as I was able to go out on the water with him... My mother once told me a story about how he threw me in the air, and I hit the ceiling of our house. The homes back then had big wide woodwork. Frank Lloyd Wright lowered the ceilings. Everybody liked that because it had much more to do with the landscape.

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AS: This whole idea of building and constructing things as a child, the impact of your father, and thinking forward to how you construct sculpture: I was really charmed by the fact that you were working in a very preliminary way on Bounty, Amber Waves, Fruited Plane with styrofoam cups in your studio as a way to conceive how the sculpture was going to be constructed. Is that how it started, before you got to a foundry?

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LB: I think it probably started with ice-cream cones, you know, shoveling into something and piling one thing on top of the other.

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AS: [Laughs.] Wow.

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LB: Everything is a discovery, based on feeling: if you feel it, if it happens right, and if you can explain it. But it has to do with experience. That’s the whole reason, in the last century, why psychology was so important.

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AS: When you talk about the experience, I remember seeing an earlier version of Bounty, Amber Waves, Fruited Plane in 2015 at Storm King, where the fountains almost challenged or overtook the landscape because of their height and power. It’s really interesting when you talk about Lloyd Wright, because I think about how much the work in different landscapes affects your experience with it.

LB: Architecture has always been very dependent and relative to the landscape. You know, either it gets along with the landscape, or it overpowers it. New York City, for instance, made its own building scape. When you look at it—when you’re coming home from the airport—you see it as one context, and you identify with it, and you feel it physically—the excitement of feeling the landscape, or feeling the sky with the landscape, or the water with the landscape. All of our experiences are basically artistic. When we’re little, we interpret things as being negative or positive. Mostly, it’s the sensuality that we experienced when we were young. That’s what I’ve always been drawn to. I really believe that those first experiences make you the person you are.

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AS: These childhood associations keep coming back in your work. I think a lot about your Greek heritage. And when I look at these sculptures, for some reason, they are reminiscent in some way of the columns from the Parthenon, these absolutely heroic Greek constructions with caryatids, etc. And I wonder if part of your Greek heritage is somehow subconsciously always peeking its head out in forms, like what you’ve done with Bounty, Amber Waves, Fruited Plane.

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LB: I remember being in Athens and being at the Parthenon at age 10-and-a-half. One of the things my father had given me was a rock collection; they named the rocks, and it was in a little box. There, at the Parthenon, there was a rock. It just seemed like a plain rock. A little fence was around it; I didn’t know why. So I decided I’d go over there and start taking another rock and trying to chip this rock that lived in the little fence. I have no idea why I did it. But then, of course, I was stopped. My grandmother was very upset, and they called some guards. I just remember being very materialistic in that sense, and wanting to try to understand why this rock had a little fence around it. I just couldn’t understand it.

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Back home in Louisiana, it was interesting to grow up near a rice paddy, which had crawfish. The crawfish made these mounds that were Romanesque. They had a hole that was fluted on the sides. I watched these crawfish, their eyes down the hole, and they would begin digging up this deep hole with their claws. They would spit out the mud in a circle around them to protect their hole and have a deeper hole and then have their eggs in there. It was so interesting just to have them around me. I didn’t think too much about it. I was just interested in what they looked like and what they were doing.