Lynda Benglis, Phantom, 1971
This week I discuss what I like at The New Museum at The L Magazine: The Lynda Benglis show. An excerpt below:
“Feminism has had a much greater influence on art than we think,” a friend told me recently at The New Museum’s Lynda Benglis show (through June 19). Her comment was prompted by how fresh some of the 40-plus-years-old work looked, though I wondered if there was a sufficiently consistent aesthetic to feminist art-making to draw such a conclusion. After all, what does feminist art look like?
Even the conventional examples—bloody tampon art, labial flowers and bound or mutilated bodies—reveal commonalities. Like many contemporary artists’ work—Urs Fischer, Rachel Whiteread and Tino Sehgal to name the best known—feminist art is intimately concerned with its relationship to the body. This persistent interest figures throughout the Benglis exhibition.
Interestingly, when discussing the idea that the body might have increased relevance to contemporary artists than it has a friend countered to say that I perhaps I was simply more interested in 90’s artists. “Everyone was talking actually about it then”, he told me. He has a point, but I don’t think the interest has disappeared which is one reason the Benglis show looks so fresh. To read the full review click here.
{ 3 comments }
lol
read our thoughts too: http://continuummag.com/
Lynda Benglis was probibly a nice person, but her artwork was horrible. Anyone can mix up a bucket of Laytex, put some color in it and pour it on the floor. Artwork like that is a tragity to real artwork.
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