WEEKEND RUBRICS: 7/19/26

STARS IN BLACK TURTLENECKS: Linda Benglis

Christopher Lane photographed Lynda Benglis, above, in 2015 for The Times. I have been reading about her and looking at her work the past week or so after Jonathan Anderson used his couture collection at Dior - dresses that appeared not sewn so much as sculpturally poured upon the body, accessories sculpted in the same flowing flopping mannered plop, the shrug, the curve, the tug, the knot, the bow, the gesture just frozen, the moment of it - as an homage to her and her art which sent me in my contemplation to other female sculptors who, like Benglis, live so much of their lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Santa Fe - “The City Different” - is a place that has always acknowledged the presence of an iconoclastic class of folk who cast themselves as artists as they cast about in the light there that casts its eye on them in its own acknowledgement.

I, a neighbouring southerner, have always been predisposed to Benglis and her work. She grew up in Lake Charles, Louisiana, like Tony Kushner did. I had some non-Cajun cousins down the road a piece in DeRidder over in Beauregard Parish. Benglis, conversely, had people in Mississippi. Like her, I was fascinated by the formation of crawdad holes, the mounds the crawdads made in the muddy ditches of my childhood. Hell, unlike her, I’d even call the private parts of my female playmates back then “crawdad holes.” That’s how mounded in Mississippi I am. She’s mounded, too, in that muddiness of her southern childhood lived in the part of America that always felt like it, America, had ditched down there.

Anderson’s Dior show the other week led me back through its Benglis-like shapes to the childhood that shaped me where I felt ditched myself as I tried to find some artistic way out of it. Benglis, now 84, more bountifully creative than I, more viscerally visual, has been finding her way out of what made her all her resculpted life - that Louisiana mud, the watery murk of maleness, the mama-madness that took a crafty turn toward creativity, the overlapping looming landing of it, the spillage that became her art before its spoilage could. “I had a boat,” she told Sasha Weiss for a 2022 New York Times profile in its T Magazine when it put her on the cover as one of “The Greats” featured in that issue. “We had crawfish lines strung with a piece of bread.” Weiss then described how crawfish build those muddy, bulbous mounds to protect themselves and their young. “They look like my textures,” Benglis said. “I was born with the sense of building textures. We’re born with patterns. “

Above: 1. Untitled (1970), one of a number of sculptures made with poured polyurethane foam. 2. One of the 66 looks from Anderson’s Dior show. 3. Cloak-Wave Pedmarks (1998), bronze with black patina. 4. Kissel (1985), bronze wire, nickel, chrome plated. 5. Another Anderson look at Dior. 6. A plopped moment - a shrug, a tug, a bow - on the runway.)

(Above: Left, Lynda Benglis’s Toyopet Crown (1989), stainless steel wire mesh, sprayed zinc, and aluminum. Right, transformed by Jonathan Anderson for his Fall/Winter Haute Couture show in Paris on July 6th at the Musée Rodin.)

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