Lynda Benglis

Just to put things where they belong

As two heavily made-up women take turns directing each other and submitting to each other’s kisses and caresses, it becomes increasingly obvious that the camera is their main point of focus. Read against feminist film theory of the “male gaze”, the action becomes a highly charged statement of the sexual politics of viewing and role-playing; and, as such, is a crucial text in the development of early feminist video.

“This video is Benglis’s emphatic response to the notion of a distinctly feminine artistic sensibility and to the belief in a necessary lesbian phase in the women’s movement—ideas that were often debated in the early 1970s.”

—Susan Krane, “Introduction”, Lynda Benglis: Dual Natures (Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 1991)

This title was in the original Castelli-Sonnabend video art collection.

—in Video Data Bank (video)

Centerfold by Lynda Benglis published in Artforum magazine, 1974.

 

Lynda Benglis by John Baldessari 

@ Interview, March 2015

JOHN BALDESSARI: The first thing I want to say about you, Lynda, is how much you've been an influence on me, all the way back to when I first started going to New York in the late '60s and '70s and I saw your work at Paula Cooper Gallery. They were showing your poured pieces. And jumping forward to today, I know how much of an influence you are for younger artists. I have a young protégé, a student of mine, who is very much influenced by your idea of materials, rather than art as some abstract thing. And I know when we both taught together at CalArts, what a huge impact you had on the students. For that time, you were a real Angeleno. [laughs] You went to all the openings.

LYNDA BENGLIS: I think the only time I went to your house for a little get-together, I thought my Porsche was a bumper car. I banged up the front and back of it getting to wherever I was going. Now, I was trying to think of when I first saw your work, John. It was before I met you. Was it your first New York show at the Feigen Gallery?

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Benglis in a 1974 photograph @ Wikipedia

Wikipedia on Lynda Benglis

Lynda Benglis on Pinterest

The Art Girl

Barbara Kruger ' We don't need another hero', 1987 (cropped)

A discriminação de género nas artes continua. Porquê?

“O que é a arte hoje? Talvez seja este um momento de reflectir sobre os propósitos da arte, sobre as audiências e sobre o que se dá a ver.

Assistimos a um momento em que a internet se abre aos artistas, tanto como via de divulgação dos seus trabalhos, mas também, como um negócio. Um mundo onde se abrem concursos ao minuto, onde em nome de promessas de exposições e divulgação, se promovem concursos semanais, em troca de inscrições a 15$ por cada imagem submetida”—The Art Girl.

Um blog português sobre o lugar das mulheres na paisagem artística dominante.

Mas também um blog sobre o endividamento crescente dos artistas, sobretudo daqueles que caem no caldeirão sem remédio das cadeias oportunistas da certificação académica e curricular, quase sempre sofisticados mecanismos de abuso do trabalho voluntário de dezenas de milhar de artistas à procura de uma oportunidade.

Um blog de artivistas para quem a arte não vive suspensa no limbo de ingenuidade perfeita.

A desproporção entre o número de mulheres licenciadas em arte, e de mulheres artistas praticantes, e a representação hiper-minoritária das mesmas em exposições, nos museus e na história e crítica de arte, persiste como um exemplo de que o Feminismo dos anos 70 não cumpriu a missão a que se propôs. Talvez seja esta a causa de um notório ressurgimento da discussão sobre o género nos processos de legitimação e valorização ecomómica da arte atual. O Feminismo está de volta, e com razões de sobra para exibir a sua nova irritação de género!

A arte portuguesa sofre do sonambulismo, do conservadorismo e dos comportamentos palacianos e burocráticos ancestrais da nossa sociedade. Mas não tem que ser assim.

Long live The Art Girl !

The feminism is back to art activism

See Wikipedia's description

Time for a new male/female discussion on contemporary art territories

Demographics are changing in favour of women. They outnumber males in art schools, they outnumber males at the graduation ceremonies, but they still have it hard when trying to get a show in a gallery, or to be part of a private or public art collection. Why is that? I can only guess.

When Shulamith Firestone wrote in 1970, “Feminism, when it truly achieves its goals, will crack through the most basic structures of our society,” she couldn’t have predicted she was referring to Wikipedia.
Although it’s user-driven, and so still not considered a scholarly source, Wikipedia has become an undeniable part of the status quo since its creation in 2001 — it’s the seventh-most visited site on the internet. Though there had long been speculation about gender disparity on the site, the first study to measure the gap wasn’t conducted until 2010, and the results were dismal: only 8.5–16% of editors on Wikipedia are women, with just 1% transsexual or transgender. As of this writing there have been no official studies on multicultural participation and representation on the site. Perhaps the largest hurdle to gathering such data is that it takes being well versed in Wikipedia to do so.

—in “Art-Minded Feminists Become Wikipedians for a Weekend”
by Sarah Cowan on March 12, 2015. Hiperallergic

A diagram for action

Click to zoom in

Female artists in three Portuguese art collections (est.)

• CAM-Centro de Arte Moderna, Lisboa: 237 female artists in 1135 authors (20,8%) 
• Museu Berardo, Lisboa: 58 female artists in 565 authors (10,3%) 
• Ellipse Foundation, Sintra: 29 female artists in 114 authors (25,4%)