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Cora Chalaby: 'To Flood' - Lynda Benglis' Contraband.

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Lynda Benglis, Contraband, 1969, Pigmented Latex, 7.6 x 295.3 x 1011.6 x 0.3 cm, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

This article considers explores the relationship between formal, material and conceptual confrontation in Lynda Benglis’ (b. 1943) Contraband (1969). My title ‘To Flood’ evokes both the physical properties of Benglis’ sculpture and makes specific reference to Richard Serra’s (b.1939), Verb List (1967-1968). The Verb List is a handwritten list of a hundred and eight potential processes divided between eighty-four verbs Serra referred to as ‘actions’, and twenty-four he defined as ‘outcomes’. Serra famously described the list as ‘actions that relate to one’s self, material, place and process’. The Verb List has often been associated with process art and used to examine the relationship between language and sculpture in Serra’s early work. What is less often discussed is the Verb List’s latent violence. Several of the verbs Serra invokes speak to an underlying impulse toward confrontational forms of making within process-oriented art of the 1960s and 1970s. ‘To force’, ‘to crumple’, ‘to ensnare’, ‘to fire’, and as I discuss here ‘to flood’ each took visual form within the art of this period

Richard Serra, Verb List, 1967-8, Pencil on Two Sheets of Paper, 25.4 x 21.6 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York.


Contraband is a major early work by the American artist Lynda Benglis (b.1943). Monumental in scale – extending to over 10m in length - and confrontational in its jarring Day-Glo colours, this sculpture immediately declares its power. Contraband seeps across the floor, as if to engulf the spectator. Indeed, Laura Hoptman has aptly likened this work to an ‘invading army’ on a march towards domination. The sculpture evokes a sense of real aggression and urgency. Far from any static or contained gesture, Caroline Hancock argues that Contraband conveys a sense of ‘being and becoming’. Contraband appears in the process of spreading. The luminous pigments bleed into one another and the undulating lines stretch out across space. Invoking Robert Pincus-Witten’s argument, I believe Contraband conveys a sense of ‘scalelessness’ defying any fixed measurement. Encroached by this sculpture, the viewer is overwhelmed by its colour, form and scale provoking a visceral and physical response.

Contraband was originally created for James Monte and Marcia Tucker’s pioneering exhibition Anti-Illusion: Procedures/ Materials (1969, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York). While the catalogue for Anti-Illusion proclaimed the exhibition celebrated art which was ‘disordered, chaotic or anarchic’ Benglis’ sculpture was seen as going too far. Tucker and Monte feared that Contraband’s size and fluorescent colour would overwhelm the neutral-toned and small sculptures meant to surround it. Benglis decided to withdraw the work following the suggestion that Contraband should be exhibited on a slant outside the main galleries. By removing the work from the exhibition, Benglis imbued Contraband with a confrontational history appropriate to its stature.

Contraband demonstrates Benglis’ dual interests in process and illusion. Her work is often interpreted as a form of Process Art, a style popular in the late 1960s and 1970s in which the process of making is fundamental to the finished artwork. However, Benglis saw this style as a ‘closed system’. Rejecting categorisation, Benglis has frequently emphasised that in her work process and materiality are in a symbiotic relationship with the creation of form: ‘the image flows out of some information about the material itself. In Contraband, like many of Benglis’ latex works, this relationship manifests as a form of flooding or other liquified natural disasters. For example, in ‘Chronicles: New York Letter’ (1969), Peter Schjeldahl interpreted Benglis latex sculptures as ‘prodigious volcanic pools’. Benglis made Contraband by pouring 227 kilos of latex and pigment onto the floor of her studio. Latex is a sticky, fluid plastic that can extend to any scale and fit any environment. Through her act of pouring, Benglis enabled the material to take on its own form. She leaves her work open to chance, relinquishing total control. As a result, works like Contraband appear to be organic. Their form is dictated by the flow of latex powerfully evoking the sensation of an uncontrollable fluid.

However, Contraband does not present an image of pure nature. Rather, it is vision of nature distorted by emphatically artificial colours and materials. Benglis stated Contraband was inspired by her childhood memory of seeing toxic oil slicks on a local bayou Indeed, the sculpture was titled after a bayou sharing its name near Benglis’ native Louisiana. Contraband’s fluid psychedelic colours resemble light refracting and contorting through oil on the surface of water. Indeed, in 1970 Benglis irreverently reflected ‘I’m mocking nature with plastics’. Using latex to simulate the effect of oil spills on water, this work evokes the destruction of nature through artificial materials. As a result, Contraband extends beyond its art-historical and social context and becomes a proto-environmentalist statement. The violence of this work takes on a new meaning when considered through contemporary environmental concerns. In Contraband, both nature and the viewer are overwhelmed and flooded by artificial materials.

Cora Chalaby (@corachalaby) is a PhD Candidate in History of Art at UCL, researching American abstract painting by women artists during the 1960s and 1970s.