[ LYNDA BENGLIS ] I was asked in the early ‘70s to do installations all over the country. And...
For the price of the materials and my ticket I went to these different places
and did an artwork.
[ rapid jazz music ]
They were like statements of the reality that you’d feel
in the conversations that artists have with each other
and with the world and with their times.
One thing that these works clearly do is state that the process,
the drawing, texture equal form.
And it’s about drawing and these ideas have
come from really painting ideas, yet they’re dimensional.
This is one thing I’ve always been interested in exploring.
"Eat Meat" is a sand-cast bronze.
It has a lovely patina from being out in the elements
over 30-40 years.
I think of myself as a painter, probably because I don’t use glue.
I found my space so to speak
because I was particularly interested in painterly materials and also form
and space and where the gesture could take the material.
All of them are drawn with either a bucket or a can.
The use of the body, the use of the hand,
the use of the movement of the body.
Dancing and rhythm,
I was just very interested in that kind of bodily gesture.
- Take it down, Bill. Quick!
They’re all polyurethane.
The same polyurethane that’s used in installation.
I made a couple of pieces of phosphorescence.
I had to light them and they absorbed the light and
then the lights were turned off on a timer.
And what happened,
because of the flows in the pours and the gravity,
what you would see is them coming down and rising again
at the same time.
I’m very interested in how things change through
our reading of the gravity and the form.
If a waterfall freezes, how do you really read it?
You can read it going up or down and how do you read it?
[ static buzzing ]
- This is my sister Jane.
She's getting on the...
motorbike.
Still motorbike.
Weight-reducing bike.
The camera had to be turned sideways so I could get Jane in.
She was riding the bike.
She's trying to figure out how to turn it on.
My father's warning her to hold on to the handlebars.
And it started up.
Now she wants to turn it off.
And she's wondering how to turn it off.
It's being unplugged.
This is my grandmother's house. We're rounding the corner.
She lives about ten-minutre ride in small town called Sulphur, Louisiana.
There she is.
She looks quite pale to me, and I was very surprised
that she was so pale.
She's asking me, what am I doing?
[ creaking ]
[ LYNDA BENGLIS ] I really had a very rich childhood I think and also traveled to Greece very early on
with my grandmother.
Traveled the islands and into the mountains.
- Ahh!
- Well, my bros live out there man.
[ LYNDA BENGLIS ] It’s pretty classic, Greece.
They say, even on this island that there were the beginnings of man,
woman, just really early, early civilization.
- Oh, well what do you do on a weekend?
- Nah, man, we go looking for a few fights, you know.
[ LYNDA BENGLIS ] I was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana.
I really liked the carnival on Lake Pontchartrain
and the funhouse.
- That girl is so big and so fat,
it takes four men to hug her and a boxcar to lug her.
[ LYNDA BENGLIS ] Images jumping out the phosphorescent quality of the images.
They seemed very real to me at the time.
- This image here. - This image here?
- Good. - Which image?
- Okay, let's start recording now.
- This image here. - Start recording now.
- We are recording. - We are recording.
- Start recording, I said.
No, I said start recording now.
- This is a tape I made. - This is a tape he made of a tape she made
of a tape he made in her studio - In my studio.
- This is a tape he made
[ LYNDA BENGLIS ] Louisiana had a whole area of waterways
that led to a big lake that then led to the Gulf.
So there were all kinds of channels and I knew them,
riding around in a little motorcar.
Being right there on the water.
I had horses.
- This tape on screen is raw material.
Rephotographing his tape made it her work.
Or commenting on it made it her work.
Or both.
She is heard but never seen.
Nothing here has been rephotographed.
[ horn honks ]
[ LYNDA BENGLIS ] It started by an invitation from Anand.
Anand Sarabhai would like for you to come to India and
Rauschenberg and Robert Morris are introducing me to you.
I visited India the last 35 years.
After about ten years Anand said to me,
"Lynda, I have a well here and I want to cover it."
I said, "Well I’d like to make a fountain."
He said, "No I don’t want a fountain," that’s....
He said, "I want a sculpture to cover the well."
I made a 15-foot trapezoid wall.
I began drawing on this wall.
I thought I could draw an elephant when I was two or three years old.
So I began drawing an elephant, never having carved a piece of this scale.
I grew up in a brick home, recycled brick.
So when I visited here, this kind of reminded me of Louisiana.
We have a semi-tropical place there.
So brick is very familiar to me.
This particular brick is soft so it was easily carvable.
It ended up at one end being very vase-like and at the other end,
being kind of elephantine.
When I finished, rather than a fountain,
I had a planter for a palm tree. So I planted a palm tree.
There was another image that I also created after that,
a two-headed snake.
And I thought of it as kind of inside-out.
People began to come there and worship.
Snakes can take on other forms.
A snake could be a knot and a knot could be the beginning of a life.
It was a way of arriving at something else other than
a wall around a tree, or out into space.
A knot is sometime an implosion
but a knot could also be an explosion of energy.
I have done both with the idea of that form.
It’s embryonic, it grows, it comes about, it extends its arms, legs.
The floral aspect has occurred.
I was showing these wrapped pieces of gauze.
I was beginning to think of the gauze as being the skin
and the canvas wrapped in the structure of the wire.
And someone said, they were like Kotexes.
And I was insulted but I realize they were right.
They were long and tall.
And for me they were kind of ghost images
and took the place of the canvas and the paint.
And then I started tying them in simple knots.
I was thinking of organic cubism
and I wanted to create a space.
And then Stella saw the "Sparkle Knots,"
he was on the panel, and I got a Guggenheim for these.
When I was at the Acropolis as a very little girl I remember
being totally caught up with the caryatids
because they were female.
They had an ice-like quality.
When I discovered the polyurethane plastic that
looked as glass,
I was very pleased that people thought it was glass.
And I had an illusion of ice, of frozen water
and I wanted these "Graces" to be a fountain.
- We are here to take this lovely girl.
Watch what she does.
Into the box, sweetheart.
You know where your head belongs?
This way. Look at that.
Her head is here,
her feet are here.
Ladies and gentlemen,
noticing that there is not very much room for the little girl to be in there.
Watch what we're doing.
Close the little box like so.
We take a solid blade.
We cut right down between the gazippy and the gazoppy.
Or we could do the other end. Doesn't matter.
And now, the other end. The gazippy and the gazoppy.
Then we take another blade,
and we go between the flippy and the floppy.
[ chuckles ] You got to know where the flippy is and the floppy.
Right down there, we cut off her gazoopakyper.
[ mysterious electronic music ]
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