Lynda Benglis in "Boundaries" - Season 6 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

[ 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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