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For Carl Andre
Artist
Lynda Benglis
(Born 1941, United States)
Date1970
MediumPigmented polyurethane foam
DimensionsOverall: 56 1/4 x 53 1/2 x 46 3/16 in. (142.88 x 135.89 x 117.32 cm)
Credit LineCollection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Museum purchase, The Benjamin J. Tillar Memorial Trust
Object number1970.27
Status
On viewInscribednone
Copyright© Lynda Benglis / Licensed by VAGA at ARS, NY. Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York.
Category
Label TextLynda Benglis’s For Carl Andre, 1970, a milestone commission for the Modern, appears as a black mass oozing from the corner of the gallery. The work is from the artist’s well-known series of poured sculpture. When For Carl Andre was commissioned in 1970, Abstract Expressionism and Pop art remained influential styles, and Benglis mixed the gestural movements of the former with the nontraditional art materials of the latter. The work’s titular reference, however, is to the Minimalist artist Carl Andre, whose reductive aesthetic made Benglis’s homage an ironic and humorous one.
The art of Andre and other Minimalists is characteristically ordered, flat, modular, and made of industrial forms. Benglis’s sculpture—an unconstrained, organic blob—defies this austere geometry in every way. Where Andre and the Minimalists shunned hands-on production in favor of a machined aesthetic, Benglis embraced the physicality of artmaking. For Carl Andre entailed an immediacy and a physically demanding process of mixing and pouring pigmented polyurethane in place.
The active, even virile process required to create For Carl Andre hints at Benglis’s emerging relationship to feminism—a movement she addressed more directly in 1974, when she submitted an advertisement to the November issue of Artforum. In this defiant commentary on being a female artist in 1970s, she posed nude, with slicked-back hair and sunglasses, holding a large plastic phallus to her genitals in a macho, confrontational stance. The counterdynamics at work in For Carl Andre—male/female, beautiful/ugly, natural/man-made, freeform/structured, abstract/representational—mirror the conflicting ideological and artistic developments of the era. Benglis acknowledged a debt to the artists and movements that preceded her, while also expanding the boundaries of art.
The art of Andre and other Minimalists is characteristically ordered, flat, modular, and made of industrial forms. Benglis’s sculpture—an unconstrained, organic blob—defies this austere geometry in every way. Where Andre and the Minimalists shunned hands-on production in favor of a machined aesthetic, Benglis embraced the physicality of artmaking. For Carl Andre entailed an immediacy and a physically demanding process of mixing and pouring pigmented polyurethane in place.
The active, even virile process required to create For Carl Andre hints at Benglis’s emerging relationship to feminism—a movement she addressed more directly in 1974, when she submitted an advertisement to the November issue of Artforum. In this defiant commentary on being a female artist in 1970s, she posed nude, with slicked-back hair and sunglasses, holding a large plastic phallus to her genitals in a macho, confrontational stance. The counterdynamics at work in For Carl Andre—male/female, beautiful/ugly, natural/man-made, freeform/structured, abstract/representational—mirror the conflicting ideological and artistic developments of the era. Benglis acknowledged a debt to the artists and movements that preceded her, while also expanding the boundaries of art.
