Lynda Benglis Basks in the Light of Her Art

LOS ANGELES — In Lynda Benglis’s newest exhibition, Excavation at Blum & Poe, the sensuality of her sculptures is as seductive as at any time, but the forces of gravity that defined her seminal poured latex and polyurethane items are traded for lightness. The huge bronze sculptures, accompanied by a place of little ceramics, are spiral bursts that even further the artist’s inquiry into the “gestural and the knot” as they look into destructive and positive room. This rationalization conveys the formal considerations but not the vitality of the functions, and the perception of ecstatic movement that they seize.

The large sculptures outcome from a approach of 3D scanning the small types, making foam products, and then casting the bronze employing the shed-wax technique. In some situations, the twisting, cylindrical sorts of the bronze works evoke tire treads or fragments of blown-out tires, references to movement that use an organic medium to gesture towards the artificial: the clean surface of “Black Widow” (2021), coated in a black patina, could be rubber, when its sheen resembles porcelain or a shell, and its unfurling spiral implies a snail. The most striking of the sculptures are a luminous metallic (significant-polished White Tombasil or Everdur bronze). The meandering “Yellow Tail” (2020) twists about by itself in a determine 8 springing up from the floor, “Striking Cobra” (2020) surges out into the room of the gallery like a bolt of liquid gentle.

Benglis has extended generated will work that problem gravity — the cast aluminum “Wing” (1970) is a lava-like agglomeration of viscous drips that defies physics to jut off the wall the drama is heightened in 1971’s goopy, phosphorescent “Phantom.” What is significantly less apparent, notably with the polished bronze functions, is the pressure amongst body weight and lightness, and, by extension, the artist’s play with the politics of the abject.

In past performs these kinds of as the influential “Contraband” (1969), “Phantom,” or even the crystalline, geologically encouraged “Hills and Clouds” (2013–15), Benglis confronts the implicit coding of the abject (or the informe, as it was redefined in 1990s artwork theory) as woman by embracing the unruliness of her varieties, but refuting the conflation of flowing or oozing masses of matter with lowness or passivity. In the custom of the carnivalesque that animates considerably of her function, she turns the signifiers of abjection on their head and reclaims all that is vibrant, tender, increasing, or uncontained — undefinable as both matter or item, as Julia Kristeva may well say — to make an active, joyful aesthetics. This top quality endows Benglis’s art with its celebratory feminist politics, dependent significantly less in a straightforward affirmation of sexuality (as is sometimes said of her) than in an exuberant alliance of touch and imagined.

In this feeling, Excavation’s good reflective spirals that stand eye to eye with or tower above viewers absence some of the political immediacy of her previously will work, made at a time when colour and play have been transgressive within the context of significant art — and, as numerous critics have pointed out, artifice and vulgarity were being antithetical to the method-oriented aims of her put up-Minimalist friends. Absent listed here are the glittering and Day-Glo hues that exposed the absurdity of publish-Minimalism’s claims in opposition to illusion. The little ceramic kinds on pedestals that occupy 1 gallery area veer towards the elemental forces of character, though the shimmering bronzes are practically chic.

Which is not to say that the get the job done has no political relevance. The most outstanding aspect of Excavation is its sense of independence. A lifelong experimenter, pushed to defy physical obstacles in recognizing objects, Benglis’s unabashed embrace of illusion is on complete exhibit. But no for a longer time is the illusion in a dialectic with the item to generate a stress among the symbolic and materials reality. The metallic sculptures revel in the dematerialized participate in of mild, with no need to have or motivation to be grounded — in the physics of gravity or formal problems with process and material, in spite of the arduous system included in their creation. To paraphrase an generally-quoted passage from Nietzsche, the visual chaos that Benglis has defiantly cultivated for many years has given birth to a dancing star.

Lynda Benglis: Excavation continues at Blum & Poe (2727 South La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles, California) as a result of June 25. The exhibition was arranged by the gallery.