Tag Archives: Lynda Benglis

Sloth

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Sloth: Exhibition Opening and ReceptionMaybe the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum curators were being witty with their exhibit-portion of the 7 Deadly Sins.  Seven museums are participating, and I had already enjoyed the thoughtful exhibit on Gluttony at the Bruce.  I was surprisingly unamused by the Sloth exhibit at the Aldrich.

The whole show was comprised of a porch rocker and inside, three recliners in front of tv monitors playing a video of the other museums’ exhibits of the Deadly Sins.  This exhibit was deadly!  Come on, curators!  Just because the exhibit was on sloth didn’t mean they had to be lazy.  What a delicious art historical topic and certainly one for contemporary artists.  A real missed opportunity.

Fortunately, I had already had a wonderful visit to the Storm King Art Center, a place that requires the opposite of sloth.  More than 100 sculptures dot the landscape, over 500 acres of picturesque, upstate New York countryside.  Past visits had me tromping all over the place.

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Today, despite the picture-perfect weather, I slothed out.  I took the tram all over the site.  No, I didn’t see as much as slowly as I would have liked, but my real objective was to get to the Lynda Benglis Water Sources sculptures.  Benglis has always been interested in texture and expressionistic, organic shapes, so she makes a wonderful fit as the featured artist in an environment where the sculptures play off of, complement, intrude, and create landscapes, as you can see in this slide show.

[Show picture list]

Most of the Benglis outdoor pieces are bronze and were not created site specifically for Storm King.  Some elements were added to North South East West for the site.  Regardless, all I could see was Bernini, especially in relationship to those columns.

Lynda Benglis North South East West 1988/2009/2014-5

Lynda Benglis
North South East West
1988/2009/2014-5

Bernini, Fountain of the Four Rivers, 17th Century, Rome

See what I mean?  That same earthy, crusty, twisting, Baroque sensibility.  I’d love to ask Benglis if she thinks of Bernini, tooi.

You can see how her works fit in the landscape.  All those verticals reaching to the sky.

Lynda Benglis, Crescendo, 1983-4/2014-5

Lynda Benglis, Bounty, 1983-4/2014-5

Sound is an important element for the works, so enjoy a listen in these videos.

Crescendo

Crescendo

 

 

Crescendo actually reminds me of the natural history museum.  A primordial ooze emerging out of the water becoming a dinosaur.  Do you see it, too?

Like most sculpture, you get different impressions by walking around any of these works.

 

This last video of Pink Ladies shows that Benglis is experimenting with materials.  In addition to bronze, she uses polyurethane that she also casts and then pigments.  The poly allows the pink to shimmer in the sun.  It becomes translucent, too.  Mesmerizing and meditative.

With these works, and the lovely day, I enjoyed a bit of slothfulness.

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As a culture, are we slothful?  Inside Storm King’s museum was a small exhibition of the emerging artist the museum has supported–Luke Stettner.   His still untitled work demonstrates how archaeologists may look back at us: ‘Hmmm.  This garbage suggests that back in the day, people valued these gizmos for a moment, before discarding them for the next thing.’

A definite case for recycling!

 

 

Some things that never change and those that do

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On the Edward Hopper tour in Greenwich Village, I got to see some of the places where he and Jo created their lives.  He lived in the same apartment on The Row across from Washington Square for over forty years, and Jo moved in with him after they married.

Built in the 1830s, the creme de la creme of New York society lived there.  It was the site of the Henry James novel.  A hundred years later, Hopper moves in to the fourth floor walk up with a shared toilet.  In the 1950s, the landlord tried to kick him out.  They went to court, and Hopper won.  New York real estate is tough.  No indication that they ever got a private loo.

2013-09-15 11.25.30My architectural favorite on today’s tour wasn’t connected to the Hopper’s at all.  Robert Deforest, President of the Met Museum, moved from The Row to 10th Street.  You can see how he was inspired be East Indian motifs in this elaborately carved wooden window corbels.  Built in the 1880s and named one of the ten most beautiful homes in America,  NYU has now gutted the interior, so little remains of the Indian craftsmanship.  Sigh.2013-09-15 11.25.38
Worse was the famous Tenth Street Studio building, torn down and replaced by a ’50’s modernist apartment building.  It was this tear down, as well as Penn Station, that led to forming the Landmark’s Commission.

Across the street is what is left of Gertrude Whitney’s Studio Club, in which even the reclusive Hopper partic2013-09-15 12.00.34ipated.  She assembled eight townhouses and the rear stables into exhibition space celebrating living American artists and their current work.  All that’s left is the patriotic, streamlined eagle above the doorway, the staircase, and the fireplace, which is a piece of art in itself.

 

The stables next door?  The sign was painted for a movie.

So in this city that’s always changing, today we celebrated an artist who doggedly stayed the same–despite the discomforts of his home and marriage and in the face of art trends that turned in a very different direction.
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I saw another example of this juxtaposition at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts.  Lynda Benglis has four works there.  Look at the contrast between her famous latex pours from the late 1960s and the 1904 classically-inspired mansion that houses the art history doctoral program.  What a place to take a class, as you can see in this slide show.

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My day wrapped with a new opera of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, my favorite of her novels. Some things never change, like the poignant charm of this Austen story, which worked fairly nicely as an opera.