American sculptor born in 1941. Her work is usually wax paintings and poured latex sculptures.

Known for her exploration of metaphorical and biomorphic shapes, she is deeply concerned with the physicality of form and how it affects the viewer, using a wide range of materials to render dynamic impressions of mass and surface: soft becomes hard, hard becomes soft and gestures are frozen.

From the 1960s onwards, Benglis’ work has engaged with both the physicality and process of material-based practices while simultaneously confronting femininity in the context of a male-dominated art world.

“My work is an expression of space. What is the experience of moving? Is it pictorial? Is it an object? Is it a feeling?” she has said. “It all comes from my body.”

Benglis started as an Abstract Expressionistic painter, inspired by the gestural style of the traditional paintings. However, she claims she to want to ‘redefine’ what painting means. This is how she began using different materials and mediums to mimic the gestural style of painting but within a sculptural body. Benglis is interested in capturing fluid and motion in her solid sculptors, playing and juxtaposing from the hard and the soft, the fluid and the solid state of matter. she allowed the process of making to dictate the shape of her finished works, wielding pliant matter that “can and will take its own form.”

Often working in series of knots, fans, lumps, and fountains, Benglis chooses unexpected materials, such as glitter, gold leaf, lead, and polyurethane. In her use of candy colors, glitter and other craft materials, she distanced herself from the serious, brooding color and macho materials used by her contemporaries. In doing so, she sought to question traditional gendered distinctions in art, above all the opposition between art and craft.

Benglis took inspiration from Jackson Pollock’s dripping methods in painting, but took to a new level, coming away from the 2D canvas of flat surfaces. She began pouring directly onto the floor, removing the use of the canvas. This had a feminine approach to the method that Pollock had first introduced. Rejecting vertical orientation—as well as canvas, stretcher, and brush—the “pours” push conventions of easel painting to the point of near collapse. Examples of her work that had this feminist approach are Fallen Painting (1968) and Contraband (1969). Both of these floor works had the essence of invoking “the depravity of the ‘fallen’ woman” or, from a feminist perspective, a “prone victim of phallic male desire”. (Jones, Amelia (1998). Body Art/Performing the Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. pp. 96–97)

Also, being one of the few female artists of the 1960’s, Benglis was highly involved and interested in feminist art, challenging the male-dominant minimalist movement. She was highly intrigued by mediums that were uncorrupted by male artists at the time, and started working in videography and photography to produce art that favored the feminists.

Some examples of her video works are Female Sensibility (1973) and Now (1973). Now is the most well-known of these works, and made a significant impact on the field of video art and critical theory. The screen shows the artist standing in front of a monitor, viewing another recording of herself inside it. These dual versions of the artist talk throughout the film, while the artist’s voice can be heard in an additional voiceover. Throughout the film, these three different versions of the artist shout instructions and questions, such as: “now!”, “now?”, “start recording”, and “do you wish to direct me?” The theme of auto-eroticism is palpable. At one point Benglis French-kisses her double inside the monitor. The overall effect is disorienting, yet sensuous, beckoning the viewer into the self-referential world of the video. It was the inspiration for Rosalind Krauss’ seminal essay on video art, ‘Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism.’ (1976) As Krauss acknowledged, Benglis had broken new ground in examining how the artist’s voice and image might act as subject, object, and raw material for the artwork.

She also used media interventions (such as a well known ad placed in Artforum in 1974, showing the artist nude with a dildo between her legs) to explore notions of power and gender relations. Benglis was initially refused an editorial space in Artforum before paying for an advertisement within the art magazine, of a full page photograph of herself in the nude, wearing glasses and holding a dildo between her legs.

The advertisement was in part a response to an earlier ad by her friend, Robert Morris, who featured an equally sensational image: himself, naked from the waist up, bound in S&M regalia. Both images were intended to highlight the absurdity of the sort of hyper-masculinity that dominated the art world. As Richard Meyer has put it, what was particularly shocking about the image was “its refusal to fall comfortably into either a feminist critique of pornography or a pornographic critique of feminism”. The artist’s active, even hostile stance, cropped hair, and of course, her penis, do not conform to the conventional guidelines of heterosexual eroticism, some feminists felt she was too willing to make a joke out of deep divisions in the art world, capitalizing on the attractiveness of her own spectacular body. – Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, library collection

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