The Brooklyn Rail

Lynda Benglis: Knots & Videotapes 1972–1976 at Thomas Dane Gallery is an opportunity to consider key works from two facets of her 1970s production: knot sculptures and video works. These facets shed light on her idiosyncratic approach to form, as well as reveal two of the influences on her work in this moment, Color Field painting and Minimalist objects. In the early 1970s, while such work was still being made, these were more so modes of the recent past, neither of them dominant at a point when Process and Conceptual art, as well as performance and video—including Benglis’s—had supplanted them at the cutting edge of artistic production.

The earliest work in the exhibition, Hoofers I and II (1972), consists of two long vertical tubes wrapped in cotton, allowing them to retain painting’s traditional support but in three dimensions, just as their pairing suggests the painterly convention of the diptych. Daubing them with colorful passages of paint and glitter, Benglis evokes the vibrant washes and juxtapositions of Color Field painters, like Helen Frankenthaler, and even the acrylic gels and other luminous surface treatments that artists working in the mode, such as Larry Poons and Jules Olitski, had taken up by the end of the sixties and into the early seventies. At this moment, Color Field painters were also responding to the period’s dominant, cross-medium impulse to make visible the process by which the work was made.

Works like Hoofers I and II allow us to see that, for Benglis, it was never a choice between one or the other approach, but rather a matter of taking cues from each to forge a new path forward, one complicated—to be sure—by humor and brushes with vulgarity that extend the innovations of these previous developments into a feminist-inflected politics of form. In doing so, Benglis reinforces how her sculptural work conveys not just a physical presence, but one that is always also optical: shimmering and shifting as we move around it. Eye and body are thus harnessed together as two interconnected parts of a person’s sensorium, rather than addressed independently, as is the conceit of Color Field painting and Minimalist objects, respectively.

This is evident in the knots that followed on works like Hoofers I and II, examples of which greet us in the exhibition’s first room where they twist, turn, and flit across the wall. The knots like Klaus and Dill (both 1974) take on structured linear forms evocative of certain minimalist objects—Dan Flavin’s tubes of fluorescent light and Donald Judd’s stacks are just two examples that come to mind—and twist and subvert them. In Benglis’s hands, form is endlessly malleable, with each knot presenting itself at a bodily scale, such that we can imagine using our own hands to perform similar actions.

The knots are declarative, presenting us with a frozen gesture, as critic Robert Pincus-Witten famously described them, while the videos are temporal, feeding back and on top of themselves in self-referential loops. Different sensations of movement are evident as we compare one knot to another. Some are heavy and static, bundled, tangled balls like November (1973-74), while others have a sense of directional velocity, as in the flighty aluminum and copper 7 Come 11: Tres (1976). Benglis’s continued use of the glitter and metallic paint seen already in Hoofers I and II means that the works often change as you move around them. The glitter and metallic paint on the knots is one way to interpolate the viewer’s body through vision, rendering the opticality of color field painting physical. This is married to knotting as a physical gesture and process. We as viewers retrace the work’s making by envisioning the tying action executed by Benglis.

Ultimately, Benglis’s artistic allegiance is not so much to a particular medium as to different strategies by which to activate the beholder’s body. Her videos also accomplish this by staging the body—often Benglis’s own—and her personal history, processed through various framing devices. The result is that the narrative often unfolds in real time, and incorporates the idiosyncrasies of what happens when the camera is left on to record indiscriminately, in the tradition of Andy Warhol’s films. The framing and layering in videos like Now and Collage (both 1973) evokes the sequential one-after-another of Minimalism, but also incorporates a loose simultaneity and cyclical returns that evoke the similarly open-ended nature of her sculpture. In Home Tape Revised (1972), Benglis narrates over footage of one of her visits to see family in Louisiana, collapsing different moments in time while also self consciously staging the distance between the viewer, herself as narrator, and the filmed events.

With Benglis’s knots, we encounter a full plenitude of experience. These works acknowledge us not just as the generalized subjects of vision and space. Through their shifting and fugitive qualities, we are invited to discover ourselves as their empowered interlocutor. The videos work in tandem, suggesting how we might address and analyze such self consciousness. Hence the video’s insistence on presence and authorship in all its messiness—replete with stutters, forgetfulness, and errors; but also moments of prescience and insight—constantly reflect back on itself rather than either revealing new depths or pontificating on some abstract subject.