Three (or More) Women

Summer 2004: Lynda Benglis, Cindy Sherman,
and Lee Bontecou

Feminism means living with contradictions. It comes with the burden of living with the past. Maybe that is why, after so many years of culture wars, it remains so critical.

The issues are almost too familiar by now to repeat. Feminists must give due recognition to women whose achievement have been overlooked, but they must also point out the obstacles to achievement. They must refuse to be seen solely as women, while insisting on perspectives that differences may bring. They must probe whether the differences come defined for them by men or by nature, while showing how every definition is an act of description and creation. They must refuse to be defined solely by men, while acknowledging how self-definitions, too, can perpetuate old roles and old biases.

Does it make any difference that a man just wrote all that? Does it make any sense that I took my title here from a film directed by a man?

Any minority will recognize the conundrums, except that women outnumber men. Since the conundrums involve the connection between power and self-representation, no wonder artists have the ability to explore it. Perhaps this Web site has driven all those issues to death by now, but I had to remember them again this spring and summer. I thought in particular of high-profile exhibitions by Lynda Benglis, Cindy Sherman, and Lee Bontecou. Each has put art by women in focus while competing on allegedly male territory—themselves.

Cockiness erupting

In a spring when past generations of sculpture—David Smith, Donald Judd, and Carl Andre, to name just three—held court in Chelsea, Lynda Benglis extended the saga one more decade. A supposed gallery retrospective looked curiously small and overly familiar. Yet it helped make sense of two almost shockingly different views of the artist.

How dreadful to be so creative that, in retrospect, one becomes simply part of one's time. And she was, but oddly one remembers two very disparate images. One was so singular that who could care outside Soho? When she took an ad in an arts magazine, picturing herself fondling a dildo, she caused an outrage that I have trouble understanding this long after. Imagine how some shock art today may look in, oh, six more months.

Conversely, one remembers her sculpture as the opposite side of the 1980s, not as the politics of art-world celebrity, but the end of dogma in art. She and others cast Minimalism aside for "expression" and even "decoration." They broke down the formal boundary between painting on the wall and sculpture, and they looked formal, iconic, and even pretty all the same. She fits so nicely in one's historical memory with Joel Shapiro, Elizabeth Murray, or Frank Stella, just for starters. The new had become neo, without even the artists themselves noticing.

Unlike traditional sculpture, Benglis's works hang on the wall. Their bows, knots, and delicate folds, painted in gaudy, metallic shades, flaunt associations with such "feminine" media as fabric. Betty Woodman sometimes does the same with ceramics that invoke classical friezes. Like Woodman, in fact, she demands the solidity of sculpture.

They may also seem to have little to do with her ad, as if her press agent had handled that for her. Yet for me her exhibition proved a revelation. It emphasized a side of her as comfortable with postmodern installations as with sculpture—but also as assertively and confusingly sexual as her ad. How could I ever have taken her for granted?

The ad's feminism points both ways. It shows a woman, but a woman in your face. And, sure enough, her layered floor pieces, like molten lava frozen into place, do the same. They, too, suggest the paradox, an artist ready to accept liquid, flowing compositions but also grunge, as if the lava still represent an eruption—or perhaps the product of what that dildo represents. They cast a fresh light on the wall pieces that share the room. Her career's solidity and classicism looks as assertive now as its feminine imagery.

The baggy pants in this family

One could call Cindy Sherman a photographer, but she appears on both sides of the camera. One could call her a visual artist, but she spends less time snapping pictures or manipulating images than reinventing each staged setting—and herself. One could call her an actor, but no one will never view the movies imagined in her Untitled Film Stills. One could call her a performance artist, but no performance tries to hard to keep the artist from the public eye.

So why not a clown? Judging by her latest show, she agrees. A clown, like a women in Sherman's typically scathing analysis of gender roles, can move from laughter to tears behind heavy makeup. As ever, though, she does her best to subvert one's ideas of art and entertainment. The circus is in town, but think less of Cole Porter's advice to "Be a Clown" than of "Desolation Row."

Each clown here exaggerates a part on the stage of life, including ones that no children's performer would dare to face. Costumes simultaneously cover and exaggerate breasts. Makeup truly lays it on thick while emphasizing the wrinkles.

That said, I found the show monotonous. Sherman, as a leader in the wave that brought photography into the mainstream of pomo galleries, has always stood for the conundrums with which I began. No one so belabors images of women, but no so puts gender in quotes. No one hides herself so well, but no one so lacks for self-exposure. With her star status, one sees her now everywhere and nowhere, embracing and crossing gender boundaries. This time, she takes on roles a little too easily.

In her scariest works, Sherman provokes me most when she settles for less of a close-up. When she curated Robert Mapplethorpe, she brought out the personality of the sitters and their roles in the art world as much as perhaps the severest disguise of all, of nudity and transgression. Here, she definitely wears the pants in art's dysfunctional family.

In Sherman's fashion work, she sits on the ground, with fewer smiles, frowns, or gestures. She makes a clown costume into a fragile burst of color. One could almost believe with Porter and fashion magazines that "dress in huge baggy pants / and you'll ride the road to romance." Here she reverses the procedure, tempting one with the romance only to end up in baggy clothing. In her different roles and the increasing familiarity she brings to them, she keeps recalling a harsher paradox of the 1980s: the very critique of originality gave birth to a disturbing explosion of art markets, passing fame, and serious fortune.

Nature, culture, and then some

If one takes Benglis for granted, one sees Sherman everywhere. Lee Bontecou, in contrast, has made a point of vanishing. If they taunt those who would categorize them as women artists, she simply dismisses the question. And why not, since she's literally holding a blowtorch while she works. Yet she typifies the enigma of gender roles just as much—or more. She offers one last pressing reason to visit Long Island City, before MOMA reopens in Manhattan and MOMA QNS fades into memory.

Fittingly, in concluding its escape from midtown Manhattan, the Modern hopes to rescue the memory of an artist who showed with the mainstream but kept her distance from it. Bontecou, once the sole woman on Leo Castelli's roster, stopped displaying but continued her teaching and her art. A Soho loft dweller before that meant anything, she departed for a farm. A pioneer along with Eva Hesse of materials at once loose, tactile, fragile, and menacing, she offered a model for feminist art while refusing to let the images be written off as a woman's work.

Bontecou began with drawings in black and black that may recall the delicacy and rigor of Agnes Martin. However, her signature pieces, like Benglis's both extend and undermine the wall as much as hang on it. They thrust forward several feet. They also surround central cavities that seem to borrow deep into the space of the gallery, not to mention the unconscious. They look at once industrial and organic, until one recognizes the seams as common wire, the terra cotta hues as torn canvas, and the black space behind as velvet. If that suggests the goth fad, they stay way too grown-up for Metallica fans, but they also trade more on metaphor and shock than the use of canvas and wire by Richard Tuttle.

After a few shaped rather like broken TV sets—and with about the same functionality—she found her trademark construction of concentric arcs. Some whirl outward. One has black, steel teeth deep inside. She shied away, however, from the association with a vagina, dentata or otherwise. She knew that she worked with the same hybrids of machine parts and art supplies as any number of artists after David Smith.

Her later work has the same confusion of nature and culture. Translucent fish and flowers revel in the tackiness of salmon-colored plastic. Still later, more chaotic works, suspended from the ceiling, look vaguely like a cross between galaxies and something in need of vacuuming up. They leave the wall for good, but they never gain the mass or envelop the space of the cavities.

I fear that both series approach tchotchkes. I can see the fish in the window of a craft store, shopping-mall variety. They help make the retrospective a little disappointing, after the expectations one has from the emblematic cavities and for a forgotten woman artist. Still, they help place in a larger arc Bontecou's explorations. They show her always pursuing the mass produced and the handmade, the appropriated and the constructed, the human and the industrial, the late modern and the directions that art is again beginning to follow.

Soot and gunpowder

I came to Queens with great expectations. I had been anticipating her work for months, as the pattern of an insufficiently appreciated woman's art—perhaps the real global feminism in the city's most multicultural borough. Strangely enough, however, I encountered connections to a male artist of her time, working a continent away. It had to do with those first, dark gray drawings.

Also this summer, a show of Ed Ruscha changed my view of an artist by focusing on drawings in a medium that I had never seen before. I had never responded to Ruscha's early paintings, although I had admired his interest in an artist's book and his insights into a bleak, changing America. His words on canvas seemed too visually boring to relate to painters of his time like Sol LeWitt, too much like bad jokes about Los Angeles to pass for more conceptual paintings like those of Lawrence Weiner or Om Karawa. I get a smile at reading "Honey, I weaved through more damn traffic today," but how much more? Judging by the drawings, it should be a lot more.

In his drawings, Ruscha he turns into an illusionist. Letters leap into three dimensions, against a background of light and shadow executed with consummate precision. One sees the same patience with the medium as he shows for subject matter in his encyclopedia photographs—also at the Whitney—of Southern California emptiness. Only one thing: the gray may look like pencil, but Ruscha somehow draws with gunpowder. It makes his painting of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on fire sound dangerous.

Bontecou's abstract drawings also look like pencil but burn like fire. She applied soot—at times with that blowtorch. Soft textures and holistic imagery may suggest a gently feminine take on Mark Rothko's sublime, but the artist cannot afford to transcend time. She has taking command of the first industrial revolution and is working on the second. The drawings help situate her sculptural cavities and meandering career that much better.

Her own statements notwithstanding, I prefer to think of her as denying the purity of the female body and its identification with nature rather than neglecting it altogether. A more subtle twist on sexuality and sensation makes a perfect antidote, in fact, to a show of model skyscrapers just next door at MOMA QNS. Harping on male and female private parts makes for bad jokes and lousy art criticism. Still, as a friend put it, sculpture is always one or the other, and one might as well deconstruct the story rather than ignore it. At her best, Bontecou does, with the same laughter that Maddy Rosenberg brings to The Secret of the Sex.

I wanted to find an artist at the center of my art history, but I have to settle for one who has dark issues about centers. Like Hesse and, nearby at P.S. 1, Lee Lozano, she makes one rethink the "minimal" in Minimalism. Dia:Beacon could swallow even Louise Bourgeois, but I wonder if it could stomach these.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Lynda Benglis ran at Cheim & Read through April 3, 2004, Cindy Sherman at Metro Pictures through June 26, Lee Bontecou at MOMA QNS through September 27, and Ed Ruscha's drawings and photographs at The Whitney Museum of American Art through September 26, with a related display of a collaboration with Lawrence Weiner on a book of photographs at P.S. 1 through September 27 as part of a group show, "Hard Light."