2 American Art | Spring 2018 This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on March 20, 2018 05:57:54 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Feature Articles Lynda Benglis Recrafts Abstract Expressionism Bibiana K. Obler Lynda Benglis has been written into the canon of twentieth-century art history as a feminist heir to the Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock. In this essay, I will investigate another, largely unacknowledged lineage between Benglis and the “father” of modern ceramic sculpture, Peter Voulkos. Although Benglis has not called attention to how her work relates to Voulkos’s sculpture as explicitly as she has connected it to Pollock’s painting, her approach to clay extends and comments on the potter’s legacy in ways that parallel her engagement with the painter’s. Benglis could not help but be aware of Voulkos’s impact on the ield of ceramics, and her ceramic sculptures are only fully legible in light of that history (frontispiece). In bringing Voulkos into the picture, it is not that I want to replace one father igure with another. Rather, I want to consider how Benglis, by working intensively in the so-called craft medium of ceramics, suggests a reassessment of the place of craft—and relatedly gender—in modern art. Her work in clay engages with the rich histories of both modern art and modern craft, revealing how closely these histories are intertwined—not exactly coextensive but incomplete when apart. As a result of this expanded modernist heritage, the medium of clay—in her hands—allows a sensuality free from strictly demarcated gender binaries. Benglis irst established a reputation for herself with her Day-Glo latex pours, such as her Corner Piece (ig. 1). Adapting Pollock’s techniques, she amped up the color by using pigments that read as psychedelic owing to the complete absence of black and took his lead to an extreme conclusion by leaving the inished composition on the loor.1 With another pour, Odalisque (Hey, Hey Frankenthaler) (1969, Dallas Museum of Art), she acknowledged Color Field painting as the intermediate step between Pollock’s work and her own. If Helen Frankenthaler achieved unity between igure and ground by staining her canvases so that paint and surface were one, Benglis eliminated the canvas altogether. Poured latex congealed to form the object itself, which was lattish like a painting but occupied space like a sculpture, thus collapsing the formalist distinctions between media codiied by the modernist critic and Pollock-promoter Clement Greenberg.2 Benglis rebelled against the constraints of medium speciicity, yet she positioned herself and was positioned by the press very much in Pollock’s lineage, continuing rather than overturning an expressionist tradition. In 1970 Life magazine featured the twenty-nine-year-old Benglis in “Fling, Dribble and Dip,” an article on “young sculptors” who “pour their art all over the loor.” Wearing a workaday blue turtleneck and black bell-bottoms, Benglis Lynda Benglis, Olla, 1998. Glazed ceramic, 13 2 × 11 × 12 in. Unique, CR# BE.2104. Art © Lynda Benglis /Licensed by VAGA, New York. Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York American Art | Spring 2018 Vol. 32, No. 1 © 2018 Smithsonian Institution This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on March 20, 2018 05:57:54 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 3 1 Lynda Benglis, Corner Piece, 1969. Latex, 106 2 × 105 8 in. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., Holenia Purchase Fund, in memory of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 2005. Art © Lynda Benglis /Licensed by VAGA, New York. Photo: Cathy Carver 4 American Art | Spring 2018 appeared in a sequence of six photographs showing how she made her loor pieces, pausing at intervals to assess her progress. A 1950 photograph of Jackson Pollock linging paint on prone canvas hovered in the far left corner, as if providing an imprimatur.3 Benglis may have irst made a name for herself with her pours, but she ensured lasting notoriety with a photograph in the November 1974 issue of Artforum.4 he two-page spread featured Benglis greased up and showing of her tan lines, sporting sunglasses and a two-way dildo. Gone are the turtleneck and bell-bottoms. his polite southern girl from Louisiana had lost her baby fat, dyed her hair red, and decided to tell the New York art world that some women could see right through the macho and masturbatory machinations of the artists, dealers, and critics who were dressing up greed and power with veneers of good taste and conceptual sophistication. And they—women—wanted a piece of the action. he photograph, which Benglis managed to place in Artforum by paying for an “advertisement” through her gallery, caused an art world uproar. Five of Artforum’s six editors wrote a letter in the next issue asserting their disapproval, horriied by what they perceived as antifeminist pornography and defensive because Benglis seemed to equate their own editorial work with sexual exploitation.5 In works such as Corner Piece and the fearless satire of her Artforum “centerfold,” Benglis situated herself in the grand avant-garde tradition of artists shocking the bourgeoisie, claiming the privilege not to separate herself from her forefathers or brethren (or “sisters” or “mothers”) but to participate in the dialogue over what art can be and do. In titles, formal allusions, and interviews, Benglis refers to precursors, including Pollock and Frankenthaler, as well as to such contemporaries as Carl Andre, Eva Hesse, and Robert Morris.6 Corner Piece, for example, alludes to corner-sited work by other artists in her circle: Morris, Richard Serra, Ron Gorchov, and Marilyn Lenkowsky. If art historians and critics are quick to see the resonance with highproile names like Morris and Serra, Benglis ensures that her colleagues Gorchov and Lenkowsky remain in the conversation.7 By inviting critics to compare her work with that of a wide variety of artists, she has facilitated the incorporation of her art into art history This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on March 20, 2018 05:57:54 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 2 Lynda Benglis, Jeantaud, 1986. Sprayed aluminum over wire armature, 34 × 60 × 13 2 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Corcoran Collection (Gift of the Women’s Committee of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and Museum Purchase with the aid of funds from the National Endowment for the Arts), 2015.19.3921. Art © Lynda Benglis /Licensed by VAGA, New York but also combated the reductive tendency of canon formation, encouraging instead an expansion of art history’s scope. Benglis is likewise voracious when it comes to exploring media: in a long and productive career, she has investigated everything from canonically high-art materials such as bronze to hobbyists’ glitter, probing the relations between organic and industrial, sincerity and artiice, taste and vulgarity. For Modern Art (1970–74, Museum of Modern Art, New York), she had four scatalogical plops cast in a series of metals, crude jokes raised to the stature and permanence of high art. In series of sparkly knots and “lagniappes” (a Creole word for a trinket or small gift, a little something extra for the customer, or decorative triles thrown from loats in Mardi Gras parades), she brought New Orleans glitzy handicraft to the austere New York art scene.8 In 1973 she started experimenting with a metallizing gun, setting sumptuous Rococo pleats in tension with the machismo of a process typically used to build cars. Sometimes she even alluded to the art of the automobile with her titles— Jeantaud, for instance, refers to a French car from the turn of the twentieth century (ig. 2).9 hese examples convey a sense of how she often plays connotations of low against high—whether by juxtaposing elevated media with lowly forms or lowly media with reined genres like relief sculpture.10 In the 1990s Benglis turned considerable attention to ceramics.11 A well-established midcareer artist, Benglis risked—even courted—marginalization all over again through her sustained engagement with studio craft.12 By “studio craft,” I mean a historical phenomenon characterized by a rise of institutional support—educational, commercial, and exhibition-based—for practitioners dedicated to reviving, continuing, and building on traditional techniques of making that involve considerable dexterity and knowledge of materials. Whereas the studio craft movement originated in the nineteenth century with an emphasis on manufacturing functional items with unalienated labor (for example, William Morris), by the 1980s the primary goal of much high-proile studio craft in the United States was to be art.13 Studio craft tended to serve as a showcase for virtuosic skill and was championed by its advocates as a bastion of aesthetic competence in the face of Minimal and Conceptual art’s redeinition of what it meant to be an artist.14 Ironically, from the late 1960s through the naughts, studio craft’s aspiration to high art was precisely what made it seem ludicrous to certain inluential arbiters of “advanced” taste: even as artists such as Benglis were abandoning frames and pedestals and throwing their art on the loor, craft aicionados were pulling pots and platters out of the kitchen and placing them in vitrines and on walls.15 Attempts to eradicate hierarchical distinctions between modern art and craft have always failed, although—as I will show—sometimes the gap seems closer to bridgeable. It is also worth noting that, while certain vocal critics and high-proile institutions increasingly deepened a divide between art and craft in the late twentieth century, many self-identiied artists and craftspeople collaborated on American Art | Spring 2018 This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on March 20, 2018 05:57:54 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 5 3 Lynda Benglis, Gila River Knot, 1993. Ceramic, 20 × 12 2 × 14 2 in. CR# BE.9776. Art © Lynda Benglis /Licensed by VAGA, New York. Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York 4 Lynda Benglis, Cavity #E, 1993. Glazed ceramic, 21 × 16 × 18 in., as illustrated in Jeanne Siegel, “Lynda Benglis, Jackson Pollock and Process,” Arti 34 (May–June 1997): 84. Art © Lynda Benglis /Licensed by VAGA, New York. Image courtesy Smithsonian American Art Museum /National Portrait Gallery Library, Smithsonian Libraries, Washington, D.C. 5 Sculpture by Jackson Pollock, ink on paper drawings soaked in Rivet glue over chicken wire mounted on a wood door, approx. 60 in. long (JPCR 1054). On display in Sculpture by Painters, Peridot Gallery, New York, March 27– April 21, 1951. On the wall behind it is Pollock, Number 2, 1951, 1951. Collage. Courtesy Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, East Hampton, N.Y. © 2018 he Pollock-Krasner Foundation /Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York friendly terms. It was in the context of a highly visible and heightened antagonism in the 1990s that Benglis started working intensively with practitioners of studio craft, producing works that could be mistaken—at least to the inexpert eye—for the kind of art made in studio craft circles.16 Sculptures such as Gila River Knot (fig. 3) and Olla (see frontispiece), which she made with the help of Hank Saxe and Cynthia Patterson, who ran a ceramics workshop in Taos, New Mexico, are smaller than much of the work for which Benglis is well known, from the Day-Glo pours that stretch across floors to such pleat pieces as Jeantaud, many of which inhabit a space comparable to the size of a person. Gila River Knot and Olla are in the realm of objets d’art—likelier candidates for a corner table in a well-appointed interior than a pedestal in a museum. I use the term “objet d’art” advisedly, conscious that its connotation can be somewhat negative, sometimes used to poke fun at the pretension of using French words to describe a decorative, collectible item, perhaps an African mask or a vase (pronounced with French accent).17 I use it, also, to remind us of the difference between the status of ceramics (and glass and fiber arts, which are other interests of Benglis’s) then and now. At the time of her traveling retrospective in 1991, Benglis chose not to include her glass work “because [she] considers them secondary in her oeuvre,” according to Amy Jinker-Lloyd, and Peter Plagens expressed reservations when Benglis, in his opinion, took her craft leanings too far, for example with her cloth banners made in India: “Benglisized native craft.”18 In contrast, Benglis’s next major traveling retrospective two decades later (2009–11) included a selection 6 American Art | Spring 2018 This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on March 20, 2018 05:57:54 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). of glass and ceramic sculptures. Since about 2010, craft has become fashionable again in art world circles, making it perhaps increasingly difficult to remember what it was like when it was not.19 It is not that craft’s secondary status has disappeared, but the stigma is not as pronounced (although, given past rises and falls in its reputation, the current situation is likely only temporary). In the 1990s, I would argue, Benglis turned to ceramics knowing their tenuous reputation, prompting her viewers to wonder what she—a radical artist—was doing making such apparently tame, uncontroversial objects that may have seemed more bourgeois than revolutionary. hese endeavors have received less scholarly and critical attention than her early name-making work. What literature there is on Benglis’s ceramic sculpture strives to connect it to the same arthistorical narrative in which she is already enmeshed—in dialogue with other ine artists but not with studio craft.20 For example, in her article “Lynda Benglis, Jackson Pollock and Process” (1997), Jeanne Siegel illustrated Benglis’s recent work with a photograph of Cavity #E (ig. 4). Interviewed by Siegel about her sources of inspiration, Benglis noted coming across an installation shot of a sculpture by Pollock (ig. 5). Siegel implies a direct connection between Pollock’s paper-clad chicken-wire construction and Cavity #E, leapfrogging the decades Benglis spent making constructions much more closely related to Pollock’s—wire armatures, often using chicken wire, and covered with sundry other materials, as in Jeantaud (see ig. 2). Siegel’s point is that Pollock’s impact resounds for Benglis up to the present day, even in work that at irst glance may seem to have nothing to do with the painter. hus for Siegel, what matters is that Benglis is still investigating the relationship between painting and sculpture.21 Siegel’s choice of Cavity #E is strategic: more forcefully than some of Benglis’s other ceramics American Art | Spring 2018 This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on March 20, 2018 05:57:54 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 7 6 Peter Voulkos, Rocking Pot, 1956. Stoneware with colemanite wash, 13 8 × 21 × 17 2 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., Gift of the James Renwick Alliance and various donors and museum purchase, 1983.79. Artwork © Voulkos Family Trust from this period, it foregrounds a concern for turning paintings into sculpture. he cavity is formed from a supple sheet of clay that has been folded, bent, pressed, and propped to stand on its own, even if it sags because it was still moist and unsupported when left to dry. Benglis has taken a brush to the swathes of clay surface, using glaze to paint, not splashing puddles of color, as in Olla, or evenly coating the entire composition, as in Gila River Knot. Wet drips quote Pollock. Granted, Siegel’s focus is Pollock’s legacy.22 But the lengthiest treatments of Benglis’s ceramics, essays in a few exhibition catalogues and brochures, also situate her in the post–World War II canon of advanced art without attempting to consider her ceramics in relation to other artists working in clay.23 Some curators and critics go so far as to denigrate the unnamed but inferior potters who could never hope to achieve what Benglis has, because she comes to clay with a background in ine art.24 Others celebrate how her use of the medium connects her with other cultures—“Asian, Indian, Amerindian, tribal African, Christian”; one critic mentions George Ohr (“the mad potter from Biloxi”) but quickly points out that Benglis’s objects could never be mistaken as functional.25 he relation between Benglis’s approach to clay and the history of ceramic sculpture in the United States after World War II has to be disavowed, it seems, for her ceramic sculpture to maintain its status as art on par with her other endeavors. his omission is striking given that so much of her work operates precisely through a juxtaposition of “low” and “high.” For most critics during the 1990s through the mid-naughts, craft was the point where Benglis pushed the envelope too far. By 2004 allusions to pornography were no problem, but an ainity with studio craft was still beyond the pale.26 Even when an author devotes considerable attention to the particulars of process, the framework put into place for aesthetic judgment remains irmly ensconced in ine art. Lynda Benglis: From the Furnace, an exhibition catalogue with a detailed essay by Andrew 8 American Art | Spring 2018 This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on March 20, 2018 05:57:54 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 7 Peter Voulkos building a sculpture in the Glendale Boulevard studio, Los Angeles, 1959. Courtesy of Peggy Voulkos and the Voulkos & Co. Catalogue Project Bogle documenting a residency Benglis had in New Zealand in 1993, is an invaluable resource on the artist’s intensive drive to tap into what the local ceramics and glass workshops and factories had to ofer. Yet, for all the speciicity of Bogle’s report, we receive no explanation of how her obviously informed engagement with clay relates to other artists working in clay.27 If we bring the history of ceramics into the picture, we ind that Benglis’s exploration of the medium harnesses discourses and technologies from the intersecting arenas of modern art and modern craft. Taking my cue from Roberta Smith, one of the few art critics—if not the only one—to acknowledge a ceramics artist as a precedent for Benglis, I will focus on a comparison with Peter Voulkos.28 Benglis (b. 1941) and Voulkos (1924–2002) were thrown together a couple of times in the 1990s because of their shared Greek heritage but not, until recently, because of their shared interest in clay, even though their contributions to ceramic sculpture invite consideration.29 Both artists delighted in the medium’s particular resistances and malleabilities but also confronted and played with clay’s sociohistorical connotations—not least, its association with craft. his comparison helps make sense of Benglis’s ceramics but also works against the strong tendency on the part of critics and scholars to oversimplify Voulkos’s approach when they depict it as a heroic quest to convert clay into a medium for ine art.30 he signiicance of Voulkos as precedent has much to do with the mythology surrounding him, as rehearsed in countless reviews, catalogues, and articles. What emerges is a picture of a quintessentially American artist in the Pollock mold: unpretentious and manly. Voulkos wanted to be a painter, but—so the story goes—when he inally got around to taking the required ceramics class at Montana State College, it was love at irst touch.31 In almost no time, he developed a national and then international reputation, winning ceramics competitions with functional vessels decorated with patterns evoking storied traditions. In 1953 he went to New York, where he met such notables as Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. Abstract Expressionism went to his head.32 After taking a job at the Los Angeles County Art Institute (now Otis College of Art and Design) and no longer content with making functional objects, he moved toward sculpture, self-consciously deconstructing the principles of ceramics he had learned.33 Rocking Pot was a turning point: one of pottery’s cardinal rules is that ceramics should rest stably on lat surfaces. Voulkos thumbed his nose at convention with this hole-ridden pot that sits on wobbly skis (ig. 6).34 From there, the next frontier was scale. Voulkos kept getting bigger kilns, making possible such assemblages as his Hack’s Rock (1959, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden), almost six feet high, constructed from bits of wheel-thrown cylinders torn apart and sealed together while still moist enough to manipulate.35 A photograph of Voulkos working in 1959 provides a sense of scale as well as the variety of forms this method could produce (ig. 7). Unlike the taut compression of the elements piled to form the tower of Hack’s Rock, this voluptuous American Art | Spring 2018 This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on March 20, 2018 05:57:54 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 9 8 Peter Voulkos, Untitled, 1976. hrown, hand-shaped, incised, pierced, oxide-washed, and glazed stoneware and porcelain, 5 × 20 8 in. diameter. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., Gift of KPMG Peat Marwick, 1993.54.21. Artwork © Voulkos Family Trust sculpture retains the voluminousness of its thrown parts. By 1960 Voulkos felt he had hit a wall when it came to clay and leaned more toward bronze, which ofered him even larger scale. During this time, he kept up with ceramics mainly because he was forever being invited to give demonstrations; his ability to throw one hundred (some say two hundred) pounds of clay at a time was an impressive sight.36 Voulkos returned to ceramics in earnest in the late 1970s, focusing for decades on two forms, the plate and what he called a “stack” (ig. 8, see ig. 14).37 hese objects epitomize some of Voulkos’s long-standing concerns. He launted his mastery at the wheel. he objects are large. “Plate” was his understated coinage, but platter seems more accurate. Most potters would be proud to pull of the delicate concavity of Untitled (ig. 8)—but then he jabbed holes in it, pimply scabrous dents, some ludicrously sealed from behind with little wads of porcelain. Voulkos, in sum, was a potter who transformed his craft, through a combination of “heroic” skill, scale, energy, and sophistication, into high art— sculpture—although his work is still more likely to end up at the Renwick Gallery (the branch of the Smithsonian dedicated to American craft) than the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (the branch dedicated to modern and contemporary art).38 For all his success, Voulkos’s status as a ine artist is still not secure. In the 1970s Voulkos seemed close to having consolidated his stature as someone who belonged in the big leagues. In an Artforum review of an exhibition of his plates 10 American Art | Spring 2018 This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on March 20, 2018 05:57:54 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 9 Peter Voulkos, Clay Drawing, 1975. Stoneware ceramic with porcelain and cobalt oxide slip/ engobe, 19 in. diameter. From Ann-Sargent Wooster, “Reviews,” Artforum 14, no. 6 (February 1976): 60. Artwork © Voulkos Family Trust and coiled pots at the Braunstein/Quay Gallery in New York, Ann-Sargent Wooster discussed his “highly personal sculptural style” without fussing about whether his work should be categorized as craft or art. he review was illustrated with a platter entitled Clay Drawing (ig. 9).39 As presented in the photograph, the plate’s position on a horizontal surface exists in tension with the title. Viewers are asked to relate to the object simultaneously as a plate, which we typically look down on as we contemplate our dinner or reach for a piece of fruit, and as a work of ine art, which we might expect to see hung on a wall. Although his champions often made overweening claims about Voulkos’s deinitive transformation from potter to sculptor, the artist himself left the distinctions between craft and art deliberately vague.40 And in the pages of this issue of Artforum, Voulkos’s plate does not come across as a token example of ceramic art in a journal dedicated to painting and sculpture. It its with the diversity of “advanced” developments, such as Benglis’s Primary Structures (Paula’s Props ), an installation of Ionic columns, drapery, a fake tree, and a toy Porsche, which Wooster described, in the review immediately following that of Voulkos’s show, as a “memento mori for traditional historical attitudes about the display of sculpture.”41 he magazine presented Voulkos’s Clay Drawing in the context of other artists moving away from the separation of painting and sculpture but still concerned with inherent properties of speciic media. he situation had changed, however, by the time Benglis started dedicating extensive attention to ceramic sculpture in the 1990s. he hopeful, conident tone of clay art’s champions in the 1970s began to shift in the next decade. Instead of celebrating the recent breakthrough of ceramic sculptors into the art world, critics increasingly noted the persistence of distinctions between craft and art.42 In 1982 John Perreault, responding to the exhibition Ceramic Sculpture: Six Artists at the Whitney Museum of American Art, sought to explain the continued prejudice against clay. Although almost all materials had become fair game for art in the 1970s, clay never escaped its association with “pots,” that is, with function and craft—but the Whitney’s exhibition failed to confront this fact. “I would have preferred an exhibition of pots . . . because it would have forced the issue of crafts versus art, instead of simply disguising it once again. It is clear that what some of these artists have done is to ‘masculinize’ clay with ActionPainting tactics (Voulkos and Mason) or with humor (Arneson, Gilhooly, and Shaw).”43 he exhibition, far from elevating clay “oicially” out of the “‘craft’ corner,” as Voulkos’s dealer Ruth Braunstein had hoped, marked the end of a triumphalist trajectory where claims of virility were suicient to extract the medium from its domestic connotations.44 For Perreault, the absence of women artists was glaring. he sixth artist in the show was Kenneth Price: Where were Judy Chicago? Joyce Kozlof? Toshiko Takaezu? Betty Woodman? Perreault urged Artforum’s readers to move beyond their “ethnocentric,” “sexist,” and “class bias[es]” and come to terms with the idea that “a pot can be art and craft; sculpture and painting; masculine and feminine.”45 American Art | Spring 2018 This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on March 20, 2018 05:57:54 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 11 10 Advertisement for Metallized Knots at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, May 1974. From Artforum 12, no. 8 (April 1974): 85. Image courtesy Gelman Library, George Washington University. Photo © Marcia Resnick 1972 11 Peter Voulkos throwing in the Glendale Boulevard studio, Los Angeles, 1959. Courtesy of the Voulkos & Co. Catalogue Project. Photo: Henry T. Takemoto 12 Enter Lynda Benglis. My argument, let me be clear, is not that she was assiduously following these developments in ceramic history and decided it was time to intervene. Benglis, like Voulkos, had studied painting and ceramics in college, but she did not work much with clay again until 1991, when she sculpted several models in clay to be cast in bronze. In 1992 she began her ongoing collaboration with Hank Saxe, inspired by her exposure to the landscape and architecture of New Mexico and perhaps also by the recent experience of manipulating clay with bronze in mind.46 Whatever the spur, she could not have been oblivious to clay’s secondary status nor to Voulkos’s legendary role in the ield. In creating abstract objects that revel in the impact of hand and body on viscous matter, Benglis took up Voulkos’s baton at a time when his approach was no longer ascendant. here is a parallel here to her extension of Pollock’s pour. Just as she adapted Pollock’s process a generation after its debut, she embarked on “Abstract Expressionist ceramics” another twenty-odd years after John Coplans coined the phrase to describe the work of Voulkos and his compadres.47 Yet operating in Voulkos’s wake enabled something diferent from what the connection with Pollock made possible. Much as Benglis emphasizes her interest in Pollock for formal reasons, her pours always also read as feminist rebuttals: Pollock’s machismo to Benglis’s “macharina,” a term she invented to describe her ad for a show of metallized knots that took place in May 1974 (ig. 10).48 By contrast, in the context of clay sculpture, masculinity and femininity were already muddled—Voulkos’s manliness was not quite enough to eradicate craft’s intractably feminine connotations. Arguably, Benglis’s gender-bending performativity owes more to Voulkos’s example than to Pollock’s. Just as Pollock loomed large, in absentia, in the New York art world of the 1960s, Voulkos’s presence was still forceful in Los Angeles during the 1970s even though he had moved on to Berkeley in 1959. Wherever he went, Voulkos cultivated a hardworking, hard-playing community that lourished even when he was not there. As homas Albright put it, “His macho image . . . : booze, boots, denims, poker, pool, pickup American Art | Spring 2018 This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on March 20, 2018 05:57:54 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 12 Lynda Benglis sculpting Sixty at Matakana, Morris and James Pottery and Tileworks, Matakana, New Zealand, 1993. Art © Lynda Benglis/Licensed by VAGA, New York. Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York. Photo: John McIver trucks—helped set the lifestyle of a generation of younger California sculptors (and painters) in the 1960s.”49 Voulkos’s students and their friends gloried in their masculinity while making explicit the humor inherent in their guru’s unrelenting use of his body to sell his work. If the innumerable photographs that capture Voulkos showing of his glistening musculature betray no irony (ig. 11), the same cannot be said of Ken Price’s 1961 exhibition announcement featuring himself on his surfboard. he discrepancy between action (man suring) and product (ceramic sculpture) exposes the mechanisms of the art market, not as provocatively as Benglis’s “centerfold” but with a related underlying logic.50 In the mid-1970s Benglis spent time in California as a visiting professor at CalArts, and she hung out with such Voulkos students as Billy Al Bengston, whose photograph of himself in bed with Peter Alexander she cites as a precedent for her investigations into the pinup genre—using herself as model.51 In her “macharina” ad of April 1974, Benglis humorously put into question the determinants of artistic judgment and allied herself, not with Judy Chicago and her feminist workshop’s “schlocky ceramic ware,” but with cars and the men (and women) who love them. he photograph was the irst of her exhibition announcements that featured Benglis herself rather than the work to be exhibited. In this case, knots are nowhere to be seen; instead, Benglis poses conidently in front of her Porsche, signaling that she has embraced the Southern Californian lifestyle.52 he photograph shows Benglis lampooning but also participating in the California art scene that Voulkos had helped shape. Benglis’s self-portraits (with car, as pinup, with dildo) are self-aware and saturated with irony, but they also manifest a great deal of sincere and playful pleasure. Benglis and her cohort (Bengston, Alexander, et al.) may have been more self-critical than Voulkos, but their debt was substantial. Like Benglis, Voulkos made sure that viewers knew there was more to him than his pots (her knots). Both Voulkos and Benglis were (are) badasses, savvy self-promoters, strategically deploying their vexed identities (as potter, as woman) to undo or at least resist the constraints of those categories.53 he artists’ tough but also sensitive personas ind tangible expression in their muscular approach to clay and their investment in adapting industrial means of production to artistic ends.54 Benglis’s ceramics share Voulkos’s Abstract Expressionist ethos in their vivid demonstration of what Smith called Benglis’s “wildly manipulated clay.”55 At the same time, just as her pours both upend and extend Pollock’s practice, her ceramics both follow and transgress Voulkos’s lead. hrough an openness to technological innovation taken to logical extremes beyond what Voulkos would have done, Benglis’s work in clay manifests debt and critique. Benglis’s physicality vis-à-vis clay as well as her interest in utilizing industrial technologies were recorded by Andrew Bogle, one of the coordinators of her residency in New Zealand in 1993. She wanted to work at a ceramics factory, and they managed to place her at the Morris and James Pottery and Tileworks, “a cross between a factory and a pottery studio.” Here, Benglis could work with large-scale extruded pipes (ig. 12). Bogle focuses on the importance of the artist’s bodily encounter with her material: “She American Art | Spring 2018 This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on March 20, 2018 05:57:54 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 13 spontaneously engages with the pliable clay hugging, pinching, punching and slapping the pristine tubes, which yield to her every gesture.”56 Compare this suggestive rendering of her powerful relation with the receptive earth to Voulkos’s discussion of his process in a 1969 interview: “he large scale of my early clay sculpture was a necessity. hey had to be bigger than I am because clay is sensitive, yielding. I physically tend to overwhelm small things.”57 Voulkos encouraged sexualized interpretations of his process, and Bogle slots Benglis into a comparable role, a dominatrix of the clay. As Bogle continues, the innuendo builds: Taking up a wooden instrument like a bat, she begins striking the clay tubes with violent body blows. . . . She sashays between the tubes, casually butting one with her hip, then grasping another in a bearhug, she squeezes it with her knees, collapsing the sides.58 In emphasizing Benglis’s physical prowess, Bogle evokes the Voulkos who dazzled audiences during pot-throwing demonstrations. But Bogle also alerts us to Benglis’s commitment to industrial production, yet another important connection to the “father” of modern ceramic sculpture. Voulkos not only revived and harnessed ancient ceramic techniques (the potter’s wheel, which had been falling out of use; the anagama kiln), he also innovated—adapting for new purposes machines and materials found in industrial supply warehouses. For example, he used a mixing machine from a bread-baking plant to prepare the giant quantities of clay he and his students needed; also, on occasion he complemented glazes with epoxy paints more typically employed by hobbyist modelmakers (ig. 13).59 It is signiicant that Benglis wanted to work with ceramics at a factory. Like Voulkos, she was eager to take advantage of resources outside the domain of the studio potter. here is, however, a diference. Voulkos’s actual making always relied on a traditional process, whether the potter’s wheel or lost-wax casting.60 Benglis, conversely, takes extrusions as her starting point and allows their identity as industrially produced elements to remain intact. Extrusion is a technique that has become increasingly widespread among potters in the last forty years but has yet to be incorporated into most histories of ceramics, not to mention art history. It is a process that can be used on materials such as clay, metal, polymers, concrete, and pasta to make objects that have a “uniform cross sectional shape.” Pipes are an excellent example—the Morris and James Pottery produced pipes for Benglis by driving clay through a die—but extrusions come in many shapes and sizes.61 For example, Gila River Knot is composed partly of slabs of clay but also thick extruded coils that Benglis bent, knotted, and broke of to create the armature, the skeleton of this creature. She knots and bends in other work as well, but she always attends to the speciicity of each medium, whether polyurethane foam, chicken wire, bronze, and so on. Building up a vocabulary that describes her procedures and materials when working in ceramics helps make apparent how the clay sculptures are related but also distinct from her other bodies of work. Voulkos would have been familiar with extruders from the time he worked in Archie Bray’s brick factory, but the machines are not among the technologies he is celebrated for harnessing.62 he process was developed during the Industrial Revolution, yet studio potters only seem to have started using the technique extensively in the 1970s.63 Often used as a practical means to an end (an expedient way to make handles for mugs, jugs, and teapots, for example), extrusions have also made their way into ceramic sculpture, discernible as such to the expert eye but generally manipulated to the point where they lose much of their initial character. For many, they are a time-saver, 14 American Art | Spring 2018 This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on March 20, 2018 05:57:54 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 13 Peter Voulkos, USA 41, 1960. Glazed stoneware, overall 34 × 11 4 × 10 2 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Corcoran Collection (Gift of Wayne Parrish), 2015.19.3905. Artwork © Voulkos Family Trust American Art | Spring 2018 This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on March 20, 2018 05:57:54 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 15 14 Peter Voulkos, Hole in One, 1978. Ceramic, 43 2 × 16 2 in. diameter. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., Bequest of Edith S. and Arthur J. Levin, 2005.5.73. Artwork © Voulkos Family Trust 16 like Voulkos’s bread machine. For Benglis, they are something more: she makes sure to leave the extrusions suiciently intact so that the industrial origins remain identiiable.64 Benglis, more so than Voulkos, brings to the fore juxtapositions that may discomit viewers who like clear-cut categories. Her experimentation with extrusions—a technique associated with industry but also studio craft—exposes the extent to which handicraft is not all handmade. In her intimately scaled ceramic sculptures, she raises the specters of both craft and the industrial, making visible the ways in which Voulkos’s muscular approach to clay exists in tension with the fraught history of the ceramic arts. Two sculptures—Voulkos’s stack Hole in One and Benglis’s Anagama 5 (igs. 14, 15)— demonstrate what the two artists do and do not have in common. Certain similarities stand out. Each of the objects rests on a cylindrical foundation, with a vertical rise, made of composite parts. Both suggest a mouth: Anagama 5 sports a gaping maw, Hole in One has an underbite. Yet Hole in One is more than twice the size of Anagama 5, and it is composed of hand-thrown pots, whereas Benglis started with ready-made extrusions, supplied by Saxe. In other words, in the particularities of these sculptures, their apparent closeness yields to diference. he impact of Hole in One is predicated on Voulkos’s established mastery of the medium. He made so many pots in his life, with such ease and virtuosity, that he could aford to “waste” them, piling them upside down, eliminating their potential function, denting and disturbing their casually spiraled surfaces. Hole in One is the prerogative of the master who has worked his way up to the construction of these bizarre totems, understatedly vaunting the skill required to throw the forms that make up this assemblage. Anagama 5 is the product of the loving neophyte in the process of discovering the ways clay works, American Art | Spring 2018 This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on March 20, 2018 05:57:54 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 15 Lynda Benglis, Anagama 5, 1995. Glazed ceramic, 20 × 19 × 10 in. CR# BE.13640. Art © Lynda Benglis /Licensed by VAGA, New York. Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York thrilled by the efect of adding grog (ired ceramic grit) to the clay to get that crumbly surface somewhat disturbingly reminiscent, with this yellow glaze, of vomit. 65 According to Saxe, Benglis challenges him to question his assumptions about what is possible in working with ceramics. Not trained in the technology of ceramics as he is, she is not interested in tried-and-true methods for sealing two pieces of clay together, for example, but instead prompts him to igure out new ways to solve problems. Benglis remembers hand-building pots as a student at Newcomb College and presumably could have rekindled those skills and even learned how to throw, if she wanted. 66 But that has not been the ceramic efect she is after. She instead heightens the collision between industrial and handmade within the object (just as in her Day-Glo pours she juxtaposed the artiiciality of the latex and its unnatural color with the natural process of the liquid low). Further, unlike Voulkos, who sought to transcend barriers between art and craft, she exploits that friction. Most of her work in ceramics is small in scale—not small enough to hold in the hand, but closer to the size of a baby, who must be held carefully and set down somewhere safe. hey are delicate yet not overly precious objects. hey can withstand gentle handling (although Gila River Knot has a chip now on its horn). 67 heir formal qualities refer back to her previous work: Gila River Knot is in line with her other series of knots (in plaster, in glass, in metallized pleats); Olla sports the cheerful colors of Mardi Gras, and the crenellated strips of lat clay evoke a child’s cardboard crown. he titles link the works to craft: Olla, for example, is Spanish for a pot—even if this pot could not hold water, cobbled together as it is out of folds and bends that connect only intermittently. Voulkos deconstructed pots in order to escape craft (see ig. 6); Benglis evokes pots (Olla) in order to provoke the thought, What happens when an “artist” turns to “craft”? For Benglis, the beneits are both formal and conceptual. She refuses to let conventions prevent her from experimenting with whatever media she chooses, and she takes full advantage of ceramics’ vexed and convoluted history. American Art | Spring 2018 This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on March 20, 2018 05:57:54 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 17 16 Rena Small, Lynda Benglis, 1992. Silver gelatin photograph for Artists’ Hands Grid Continuum. Reproduced at Benglis’s request on exhibition announcement for Ceramic Sculpture, Tavelli Gallery, Aspen, Colorado, 1993. Lynda Benglis, Art & Artist Files, Smithsonian American Art Museum /National Portrait Gallery Library, Smithsonian Libraries, Wash ing ton, D.C. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Libraries, Washington, D.C., consulted March 15, 2012 © Rena Small 18 An exhibition announcement for a show in 1993 provides understated commentary (ig. 16). Initially, it may seem that the photograph simply calls attention to how Benglis explores the sensual properties of clay. he camera has zoomed in on her strong hands, her ingers gripping a thick coil that already shows the efects of her energetic kneading but continues to resist her grasp. he core is still solid; it does not let her squeeze it apart. Benglis’s attraction to the elemental qualities of clay, its sensual pleasures, connects her to Voulkos—look again at his hands, drenched in slip, expertly bearing down on a giant pot spinning on a wheel in his Glendale studio (see ig. 11). he photograph of Benglis’s hands seems harmless enough until the viewer recalls the infamous Artforum spread featuring one of those same hands brandishing a two-way dildo—a thought that may well occur given how large that photograph looms in the scholarly and critical literature on the artist. he allusion lends a humorous tinge to the otherwise innocuous photograph, a sense of facetiousness, perhaps a gentle poking fun at the accrual of associations between potters and sex appeal (remember that the blockbuster movie Ghost, with its pottery-wheel sex scene between Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze, had just come out in 1990). he comparison exposes the sexual innuendo of Benglis’s manhandling of her clay, but it also highlights the tameness of her turn to ceramics—which was not shocking or controversial, even if there was a bit of a frisson of a “ine artist” risking a foray into craft. In recalling the earlier image, I do not want to reduce Benglis’s ceramics to hypersexualized objects. On the contrary, the contrast between the photographs helps remind us of the expansiveness of Benglis’s associations and concerns. In a sense, the Artforum ad did its work too well. Whereas in the 1970s critics tended to understand her work in terms of neither strictly female nor male, by the early twenty-irst century the emphasis shifted toward touting Benglis as a champion of empowered female sexuality.68 In 1975, quoted in an article about the uproar following the “centerfold,” Benglis declared: “[My art] is all about female sexuality, about being a woman.”69 But since then, while not denying her feminism, she has emphasized the capaciousness of her project. For example, in 2011, describing her intentions regarding the two-way dildo, she explained: “I was interested in posing the question: What are we? Aren’t we everything—gods and goddesses? It’s a humanist issue.”70 I suggest that ceramics has been one way that Benglis pushes viewers to open themselves up to manifold sensual and intellectual delights, including but not limited to eroticism and certainly not coded as exclusively feminine. If Benglis’s ceramics are a feminist riposte to Voulkos’s masculine bravado, they do not simply reverse the terms. Sure, a viewer eager for sexual innuendo has plenty to ind: look again, for example, at Anagama 5—those drooping phalluses, that beckoning cavern. But that is not the main efect of Benglis’s objets. Pottery provides Benglis with a range of efects, some purely formal, some rooted in context: the evenly spaced circular indentations of Gila River Knot’s surface turn glazed ceramic into exotic leather; Olla combines shiny and matte glazes. hese objects are not so much sexual as sensual.71 Benglis would no doubt be critical of the excessive masculinity of Voulkos’s bid to blast ceramics out of its marginal—inevitably somewhat feminized—position as craft, but when she turned to clay, she did so not principally to critique the gendered hierarchies of art and craft. Rather, given the complicated status of ceramics in the 1990s, clay ofered Benglis a site for exploring a sensuality that eludes gender speciicity. Unlike textiles, American Art | Spring 2018 This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on March 20, 2018 05:57:54 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). which are strongly associated with the feminine, by the 1990s ceramics—thanks in no small part to Voulkos’s exertions—had (and still have) more complicated and ambiguous gendered connotations.72 Neither explicitly male nor female, the medium ofers some respite from categories that can be subverted, resisted, or undone but still constrain and limit because set deinitions are on the surface. According to Perreault, as noted above, “A pot can be art and craft; sculpture and painting; masculine and feminine.”73 What does it mean to unite these poles? Take sculpture and painting, for example. Yet one more way in which Benglis follows in Voulkos’s footsteps is by investigating how ceramics lends itself to both of these categories—sculptural because three-dimensional, painterly because glazed. In his works such as USA 41 (see ig. 13), bright, shiny color acts as surface decoration but also as painting distinct from the volumetric structure, whose sculptural qualities are themselves ampliied through assemblage (clay not just modeled or thrown but built) even as the resulting faceted surfaces provide discrete planes for painting. Likewise, in Olla (see frontispiece), glaze is simultaneously integral to the entire ensemble and operates as its own composition, as if laid on top of thin slabs that were only then built up and around. hese objects are sculpture and painting, but at the same time, they are neither sculpture nor painting: they are, as Perreault noted about Voulkos’s work in the Whitney’s Ceramic Sculpture exhibition (which included USA 41), “vessels (or antivessels).”74 Being sculpture and painting, the objects are art; being vessels, craft. As antivessels, however, they are neither art nor craft.75 Both Voulkos and Benglis play with the multivalences. Only in the realm of gender, Voulkos was more timid, strenuously minimizing possible feminine connotations—vulnerability only acceptable because so clearly a masculine variant on sensitivity. USA 41 might poke fun at its own phallic structure, but it does so in the manly lingo of model building (painting spaceships in the basement with epoxy paints).76 Olla is more gender-neutral. Pink is for girls, sure, but at Mardi Gras, anything goes, and this assemblage just as well evokes a crown for a boy playing king (or queen) as for a girl playing queen (or king). Benglis’s ceramics remind us that pots can be both masculine and feminine, or neither. he formal concerns that Voulkos and Benglis share—of sculpture and painting, of medium speciicity, of the ininite gradations of viscosity of clay and glaze and paint in the making phase, and the subtle distinctions in the end efects of iring diferent varieties of clay, treated in myriad ways—move their work beyond dyads. If Voulkos helped create a ceramics ield in which Benglis could glory in the muddled codes of clay vis-à-vis gender, her contribution to the clay arts helps us revisit his— encouraging us to spend less time agonizing over how to prove his success at transcending craft and instead observe how much time he spent messing with the categories himself. Just as she critically extended Pollock’s legacy, Benglis took up ceramics where Voulkos left of, proiting from his impact, building on it, diverging from it. Her goal, of course, is not primarily art-historical, but if we pay close attention to her ceramics, we have much to learn. Craft, Benglis proposes with her unabashed dedication to this work, is central to the major history of modernism. It belongs as a serious component of an oeuvre that strives to intervene in that history. Benglis risks that this aspect of her production will be ignored, shafted in favor of loor pieces and controversial photographs that it more easily into our narrative of modern art, even as they alter its course. But these clay objects deserve serious consideration, too, for they bring to light the insuiciency of discrete categories in making full sense of modernism. Only by understanding her ceramics in terms of both art and craft can we grasp how Benglis takes advantage of clay’s fraught history to create a sensuality not pinned down to clear-cut gender categories. American Art | Spring 2018 This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on March 20, 2018 05:57:54 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 19 Notes I began this research during a James Renwick Postdoctoral Fellowship in American Craft at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where I beneited from the support of Nicholas Bell, Virginia Mecklenburg, Anne Collins Goodyear, Jane Milosch, Evelyn Hankins, Amelia Goerlitz, and my cohort of fellows (with special thanks to Emily Liebert, who reminded me of Benglis’s ceramics when I was still brainstorming). I am grateful for feedback I received when presenting versions of this article at SAAM, University of Illinois, Chicago, and Georgia State University, as well as comments on drafts from Elisabeth Anker, Soyica Colbert, Ivy Ken, Marie Ladino, Jennifer Nash, Samantha Pinto, Emily Shapiro, Robin Veder, and Tobias Woford. For their help with my research, thanks to Ellen Robinson at Cheim & Read, Cat Kron at Paula Cooper Gallery, Sueyun Locks and Marie-Claire Groeninck at Locks Gallery, Susan Richmond, Judith Tannenbaum, Hank Saxe, Cynthia Patterson, Sam Jornlin, Sarita Dubin, Nicole Root, and Lynda Benglis. 1 2 3 20 According to Benglis, “As I became more interested in viscous materials— such as the rubber latex and polyurethane—for me to describe the form through the physical material was a natural extension of Pollock’s ideas.” Benglis, quoted in Erica-Lynn Huberty, “Intensity of Form and Surface: An Interview with Lynda Benglis,” Sculpture 19, no. 6 (July– August 2000): 32. On Benglis, Greenberg, and Frankenthaler, see Lynda Benglis and Phong Bui, “In Conversation: Lynda Benglis with Phong Bui,” Brooklyn Rail, December 11, 2009, http://www.brooklynrail.org/2009/12 /art/lynda-benglis-with-phong-bui. David Bourdon, “Fling, Dribble and Dip,” Life, February 27, 1970, 62–63. Other early examples of critics linking Benglis to Pollock include Peter Schjeldahl, “New York Letter,” Art International 13, no. 7 (September 1969): 72; Bitite Vinklers, “New York,” Art International 14, no. 4 (April 1970): 65; Robert Pincus-Witten, “Lynda Benglis: he Frozen Gesture,” Artforum 13, no. 3 (November 1974): 54–59; and Vivien Raynor, “Avant-Garde Experiments in an ‘Alternative Space,’” New York Times, October 21, 1979, CN20. For Benglis on her relation to Pollock, see “Lynda Benglis in Conversation with France Morin,” Parachute 6 (Spring 1977): 10; Helen Harrison, “An Earthy Sculptor’s Organic Mysteries,” New York Times, May 9, 2004; and John Baldessari, “Lynda Benglis,” Interview, March 2015, 261. 4 5 6 Lynda Benglis, photo, Arthur Gordon, Artforum 13, no. 3 (November 1974): 2–3. On the photograph’s efects on Benglis’s career, see Catherine Houck, “Women Artists Today,” Cosmopolitan, January 1980, 199, 220; and Catherine Fox, “Pushing the Edges,” Atlanta Journal, February 3, 1991, N12. Lawrence Alloway, Max Kozlof, Rosalind Krauss, Joseph Masheck, and Annette Michelson, letter to the editor, Artforum 13, no. 4 (December 1974): 9. On the controversy, see John Corry, “About New York: A Serious Dirty Picture?,” New York Times, November 22, 1974, 78; Dorothy Seiberling, “he New Sexual Frankness: Good-By to Hearts and Flowers,” New York, February 17, 1975, 37–44; and Richard Meyer, “Bone of Contention,” Artforum 43, no. 3 (November 2004): 73–74, 249. Anna C. Chave, “Lynda Benglis: Everything Flows,” in Lynda Benglis: Everything Flows (1980–2013) (Philadelphia: Locks Gallery, 2013), 7; and Richard Marshall, Lynda Benglis (New York: Cheim & Read, 2004), not paginated. 7 Susan Richmond, Lynda Benglis: Beyond Process (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), 31–32; and Benglis and Bui, “In Conversation.” 8 On lagniappes, see Lynda Benglis and Seungduk Kim in conversation, “Liquid Metal,” in Lynda Benglis, ed. Franck Gautherot, Caroline Hancock, and Seungduk Kim (Dijon, France: Les Presses du Réel, 2009), 181; and Susan Krane, Lynda Benglis: Dual Natures (Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 1991), 47. On Benglis and Louisiana, see Lucy R. Lippard, “You Can Go Home Again: Five from Louisiana,” Art in America 65, no. 4 (July–August 1977): 23–25. On the knots, see Richmond, Lynda Benglis, 98–126. 9 Caroline Hancock, “Medusa in Ecstasy,” in Gautherot, Hancock, and Kim, Lynda Benglis, 150; Krane, Lynda Benglis, 35–36; and David Burgess Wise, ed., he New Illustrated Encyclopedia of Automobiles (London: Quantum Publishing, 2000), 338. 10 As Marlena Donohue put it apropos works like Jeantaud, Benglis’s art is “simultaneously elegant and kitsch.” Donohue, “Organic Gesture and Flashy Flutterings,” Christian Science Monitor, September 26, 1991, 17. 11 Chimera: Recent Ceramic Sculpture (Taos, N.Mex.: Harwood Foundation Museum, 1994). 12 Tongue-in-cheek, Benglis acknowledged the challenge of craft when she wrote to Jack Lenor Larson about working with clay: “I’m a struggling ‘young artist’ again.” Benglis to Larson, March 15, 1995, Paula Cooper Archives, New York. 13 On “the emergence of studio pottery as a major category of collecting [as] a phenomenon of the 1970’s,” see Rita Reif, “A Museum Survey of Ceramic Design,” New York Times, March 23, 1980, D31. 14 Jef Kelley, “Upward Mobility,” American Ceramics 9, no. 2 (1991): 39–44; and Cheryl White, “Toward an Alternative History: Otis Clay Revisited,” American Craft 53, no. 4 (August–September 1993): 120. 15 On the troubled relations between studio craft and “advanced” (read cutting-edge) art, see Howard S. Becker, “Arts and Crafts,” American Journal of Sociology 83, no. 4 (1978): 862–89; Bruce Metcalf, “he Fountain,” Metalsmith, Summer 2000, 28–35; and Garth Clark, How Envy Killed the Crafts Movement: An Autopsy in Two Parts (Portland, Oreg.: Museum of Contemporary Craft and Paciic Northwest College of Art, 2008). U.S. art critics during the 1960s and 1970s frequently used the word “advanced” to refer to cutting-edge art; for example, vis-à-vis Benglis, see Douglas Davis, “he Invisible Woman Is Visible,” Newsweek, November 15, 1971, 130. 16 For more on the history of studio craft and its relation to the art world, see Glenn Adamson, hinking through Craft (Oxford: Berg, 2007); and Jeannine Falino, ed., Crafting Modernism: Midcentury American Art and Design (New York: Abrams in association with Museum of Arts and Design, 2011). American Art | Spring 2018 This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on March 20, 2018 05:57:54 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 17 On the “objet d’art,” see Rémy G. Saisselin, he Bourgeois and the Bibelot (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1984), 71–74; see also Richmond, Lynda Benglis, 134. 18 Amy Jinkner-Lloyd, “Materials Girl: Lynda Benglis in Atlanta,” Arts Magazine 65, no. 9 (May 1991): 55; and Peter Plagens, “Objects of Afection,” Newsweek, June 3, 1991, 68. See also Richmond, Lynda Benglis, 131, 173n11. 19 Diana Franssen, “Chronology,” in Gautherot, Hancock, and Kim, Lynda Benglis, 429. On the shift in craft reception from the 1990s to 2012, see Glenn Adamson, “Goodbye Craft,” in Nation Building: Craft and Contemporary American Culture, ed. Nicholas R. Bell (Washington, D.C.: Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2015), 24–25. For recent interviews and reviews regarding Benglis’s ceramics, see Tracy Zwick, “Dancing with Clay: An Interview with Lynda Benglis,” Art in America, January 30, 2014, http:/www.artinamericamagazine .com/news-features/interviews /dancing-with-clay-an-interview-with -lynda-benglis/; Will Heinrich, “Lynda Benglis at Cheim and Read,” New York Observer, January 22, 2014; and Amah-Rose Abrams, “Lynda Benglis Talks Material and Controversy at Bergen Assembly,” Artnet, May 5, 2016, https://news.artnet.com/people /lynda-benglis-talks-bergen-assembly -487205. 20 A recent exception is Elissa Auther, “Dump and Death,” in Voulkos: he Breakthrough Years, ed. Glenn Adamson, Andrew Perchuk, and Barbara Paris Giford (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2016), 106, in which she draws on Bibiana Obler, “Lynda Benglis Recrafts Abstract Expressionism” (paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, April 13, 2012). 21 Jeanne Siegel, “Lynda Benglis, Jackson Pollock and Process,” Arti 34 (May– June 1997): 82. All Benglis quotations from this source come from a conversation with Siegel in 1994. 22 Siegel’s article on Benglis became a section in her book Painting after Pollock: Structures of Inluence (Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 1999), 105–10. 23 For example, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, “Lynda Benglis: Action Sculpture,” in Lynda Benglis: Recent Sculpture and a Screening of the 1973 Video Female Sensibility (New York: Cheim & Read, 1998); Chave, “Lynda Benglis: Everything Flows,” 9–17; Marshall, Lynda Benglis; and Anne Prentnieks, “Lynda Benglis,” Artforum, January 26, 2014, http://artforum.com/archive /id=45097. 24 For example, René Paul Barilleaux, ARTMATTERS 11: Lynda Benglis (San Antonio, Tex.: McNay Art Museum, 2007); and Kelly Klaasmeyer, “Lynda Benglis: Wax Paintings and Ceramic Sculptures,” Houston Press, August 2, 2007, http://www.houstonpress.com /2007-08-02/culture/lynda-benglis -wax-paintings-ceramic-sculptures/. 25 Klaus Kertess, “Chimera,” in Chimera, reprinted in Lynda Benglis: Chimera (Rottweil, Germany: Forum Kunst Rottweil, 1998); and Michael Klein, “Lynda Benglis,” Sculpture 18, no. 5 (June 1999): 70. 26 Julian Myers, “Lynda Benglis,” Frieze, no. 84 (June–August 2004), http:// www.frieze.com/article/lynda-benglis. Myers is a Benglis fan, writing with enthusiasm for her “auto-erotic video Now,” but he draws the line at her ceramics (and sculptures coated with gold leaf ), which he sees as “precious.” Conversely, Mario Naves, “Victim of Minimalism Triumphs with Bold Ceramic Sculpture,” New York Observer, May 17, 2004, 18, prefers her ceramics to the rest of her oeuvre. Both Myers and Naves miss the point: that ceramics is yet another means for Benglis to make her audience squirm. City Gallery, 1990); and Peter Selz and William Valerio, eds., Modern Odysseys: Greek American Artists of the Twentieth Century (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999), 30, 90. he Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York, featured Benglis as one of Voulkos’s torchbearers in No Rules, No Rules, September 16–October 29, 2016. J. H., “hree to See: New York,” Art Newspaper, September 22, 2016. 30 he essays in Adamson, Perchuk, and Giford, Peter Voulkos: he Breakthrough Years make signiicant headway in providing a scholarly, revisionist account of Voulkos. Glenn Adamson, “Back to Black,” emphasizes (77) Voulkos’s own lack of concern for elevating ceramics to high art’s level; and Jenni Sorkin, “Gender and Rupture” (13–24) points out how important women potters were to Voulkos’s development. Yet the exhibition and its reception retain a heroizing rhetoric; Adamson, “Introduction,” 7. See also Richard Deming, “Reinventing the Wheel,” Artforum 55, no. 7 (March 2017): 119. 31 Rose Slivka, “he Artist and His Work: Risk and Revelation,” in he Art of Peter Voulkos, by Slivka and Karen Tsujimoto (New York: Kodansha International in collaboration with Oakland Museum, 1995), 35. 28 Roberta Smith lists Voulkos along with Pablo Picasso and Reuben Nakian as “precedents” of Benglis’s ceramic sculpture. Smith, “Lynda Benglis,” New York Times, February 1, 2002, E37. 32 For Voulkos’s own comments on his interest in Abstract Expressionism, see Henry J. Seldis, “10 Monumental Voulkos Works,” Los Angeles Times, April 25, 1965, N9; homas Albright, “Peter Voulkos, What Do You Call Yourself? ‘Hell, I Don’t Know, I’m Just a Person Trying to Stay Alive,’” ARTnews 77, no. 8 (October 1978): 120; Rochelle Reed, “Wheel of Life,” New West, January 30, 1978, 24; Dana Self, “Interview with Peter Voulkos,” Art Forum (Kansas City Arts Coalition, Missouri) 17, no. 1 (December–January 1992): 3; and “Peter Voulkos, 1924–2002,” Ceramics Monthly 50, no. 4 (April 2002): 24. For a plea not to exaggerate the importance of Abstract Expressionism’s inluence on Voulkos, see Garth Clark, Shards: Garth Clark on Ceramic Art, ed. John Pagliaro (New York: Ceramic Arts Foundation, 2003), 299–301. 29 Benglis’s father was Greek; Voulkos’s parents were Greek; both artists were born in the United States. Christina Eliopoulos, ed., Hellenikon (New York: 33 Sam Jornlin and Garna G. Muller, “Chronology,” in Slivka and Tsujimoto, Art of Peter Voulkos, 163; and Slivka, “Artist and His Work,” 33. 27 Andrew Bogle, “From the Furnace,” in Lynda Benglis: From the Furnace (Auckland: Auckland City Art Gallery, 1993), 5–7, situates Benglis’s work in relation to Pollock, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, Carl Andre, Frank Stella, Robert Irwin, Jack Brogan, and Jean Dubufet, among other (male) artists. American Art | Sprint 2018 This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on March 20, 2018 05:57:54 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 21 34 On Rocking Pot, see Rose Slivka, “Introduction: he Dynamics of Duende,” in Slivka and Tsujimoto, Art of Peter Voulkos, 14; Slivka, “Artist and His Work,” 43; Karen Tsujimoto, “Peter Voulkos: he Wood-Fired Work,” in Slivka and Tsujimoto, Art of Peter Voulkos, 100; Garth Clark, “Subversive Majesty: Peter Voulkos’s Rocking Pot,” American Art 6, no. 4 (Autumn 1992): 110–12; and Andrew Perchuk, “Out of Clay,” in Adamson, Perchuk, and Giford, Voulkos: he Breakthrough Years, 38–39. 35 Perchuk, “Out of Clay,” 43, 47. 36 Jornlin and Muller, “Chronology,” 163; Slivka, “Artist and His Work,” 52–55; and Tsujimoto, “Peter Voulkos,” 103–4. For photographic documentation of one of Voulkos’s demonstrations, see William Hunt and Kathy Molnar, photos, “A Voulkos Workshop,” Ceramics Monthly 24, no. 2 (February 1976): 27–33. 37 Tsujimoto, “Peter Voulkos,” 112. 38 Technically, the Renwick Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum do not distinguish between their collections, but the Renwick houses object iles for most of their Voulkos pieces: Untitled (ig. 8), Lidded Jar (ca. 1955), and Rocking Pot (ig. 6), the latter two purchased by the Renwick Gallery. SAAM currently holds the object iles for the bronze Maquette for Barking Sands (ca. 1977) and Hole in One (ig. 14), which the museum received via a bequest. See object iles; also Elizabeth Anderson, e-mail to Nicholas Bell, July 26, 2013, forwarded to author. he Hirshhorn boasts one sculpture by Voulkos, Hack’s Rock, acquired in 1987. On Voulkos’s “heroic” raising of clay’s status, see David Bonetti, “Well-Rounded Works of Art,” San Francisco Examiner, June 20, 1990, D-3; Mac McCloud, “he Subversive Nature of Peter Voulkos’s Art,” in Peter Voulkos (San Francisco: Braunstein/Quay Gallery, 1991); and Bonetti, “Art,” San Francisco Examiner, March 1, 1991. 39 Ann-Sargent Wooster, “Reviews: New York,” Artforum 14, no. 6 (February 1976): 60. For another review of the show, illustrated with the same photograph, see Charles North, “Voulkos and Tchakalian at Braunstein/Quay,” Art in America 64, no. 1 (January– February 1976): 99. he photograph again appears in a review of a related 22 show at Exhibit A in Chicago: Andy Nasisse, “Peter Voulkos: Clay Drawings and Vessels,” Midwest Art 3, no. 2 (March 1976): 10. his mode of installation is unusual: photographic documentation of the plates typically depicts them on stands or head on. 40 For example, see Diana Leercher, “‘All My Vases Leak’—Potter Voulkos,” Christian Science Monitor, January 29, 1979, 16; Sarah Booth Conroy, “Berkeley Sculptor Peter Voulkos Dominates Contemporary Pottery,” Sunday Peninsula Herald, March 4, 1979, 12B; and Cheryl White, “A Conversation with Peter Voulkos,” Artweek 26, no. 5 (May 1995): 15. 41 Wooster, “Reviews,” 60. 42 For examples of the conident tone in the 1970s, see Nasisse, “Peter Voulkos,” 10; Charlotte Moser, “Peter Voulkos—a Hero of the Crafts Revolution?,” Houston Chronicle, June 18, 1978, 20; and Janet Koplos, “Peter Voulkos: Volatile Master of Clay,” New Art Examiner 6, no. 7 (April 1979): 22. Other commentators, though, noted the ongoing art-world prejudice against clay, especially in New York; for example, David Bourdon, “Di Suvero’s Sculpture Goes Public,” Village Voice, November 17, 1975, 109. For examples of the shift in tone beginning in the 1980s, see Mady Jones, “he Clay People: California’s Ceramic Artists,” San Francisco, June 1981, 65, 67; and Edward Lebow, “he Art of Peter Voulkos,” American Craft 56, no. 1 (February 1996): 72. Some critics continued to celebrate clay’s breakthrough into the ine arts, but the repetition of this revelation adds up to the opposite: the insistence on clay’s newfound status begins to seem necessary precisely because it has not been attained. For example, Kenneth Baker comments, “serious contemporary sculpture in ceramics is possible,” in “Strong New Work by Voulkos,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 2, 1991, C5. 43 John Perreault, “Fear of Clay,” Artforum 20, no. 8 (April 1982): 70–71. 44 Ruth Braunstein to Edy DeWilde, June 13, 1980, box 6, Braunstein/ Quay Gallery records, 1961–2011, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. On the reception of Ceramic Sculpture: Six Artists in New York, see Beth Cofelt, “East Is East and West Is West: he Great Divide,” California Living, April 4, 1982, 22–30. William Wilson exempliies critics’ unapologetic celebrations of masculinity in ceramic sculpture: “Ceramics huge and small, like chunks of belligerent time which a man’s ist has beaten beautiful, make ‘Abstract Expressionist Ceramics’ the most virile art event of many a season.” Wilson, “Ceramics with a Wallop,” Los Angeles Times, November 4, 1966, C16. 45 Perreault, “Fear of Clay,” 71. 46 Chave, “Lynda Benglis: Everything Flows,” 9; Lynda Benglis: Water Sources (New Windsor, N.Y.: Storm King Art Center, 2015), 46–53; and Nicole Root and Sarita Dubin, studio assistants to Benglis, e-mail messages to author, October 3 and 4, 2017. 47 John Coplans, “Abstract Expressionist Ceramics,” Artforum 5, no. 3 (November 1966): 34–41. 48 On “macharina,” see Benglis and Kim, “Liquid Metal,” 175; and Benglis, as quoted in Seiberling, “New Sexual Frankness,” 42. 49 Albright, “Peter Voulkos,” 118–19. 50 On the circle around Voulkos and for a reproduction of Price’s announcement, see Mary Davis MacNaughton, ed., Clay’s Tectonic Shift, 1956–1968: John Mason, Ken Price, Peter Voulkos (Claremont, Calif.: Getty Publications in association with Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery at Scripps College, 2012), 46; also see Rebecca Peabody, Andrew Perchuk, Glenn Phillips, and Rani Singh, eds., Paciic Standard Time: Los Angeles Art, 1945–1980 (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute and the J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011). 51 On the photograph of Bengston and Alexander, see Benglis and Bui, “In Conversation”; and Monica Steinberg, “Incongruent Humor, Labor, and Public Fame in Postwar Los Angeles,” Archives of American Art Journal 53, nos. 1–2 (Spring 2014): 20. On her friendships with Alexander and Bengston, see Benglis to Paula Cooper, May 3, 1977, and March 8, 1978, both in 1970s Correspondence Folder, Paula Cooper Archives, New York. See also Lynda Benglis, “Lecture by Lynda Benglis,” 19, Summer 1978, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, transcribed by Judith Stoodley, Skowhegan Lecture American Art | Spring 2018 This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on March 20, 2018 05:57:54 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Archives (Benglis, 1978), as seen at the Ernest G. Welch School of Art and Design, Georgia State University, Atlanta. 52 On Chicago’s Dinner Party as “schlocky,” see homas Albright, “Primarily Biological,” ARTnews 78, no. 6 (Summer 1979): 156; see also Richmond, Lynda Benglis, 116. On the importance of Bengston to Benglis’s work, see Krane, Lynda Benglis, 57n51. On her respectful but somewhat distant relationship with the feminists at CalArts, see Benglis, “Lecture by Lynda Benglis,” 23–24. On the car, see Franssen, “Chronology,” 40; and Benglis and Kim, “Liquid Metal,” 180. 53 Benglis and Voulkos even share a preference for Johnny Walker Scotch. Slivka, “Artist and His Work,” 58; Tennessee Williams, “Lynda Benglis,” in Five from Louisiana, Lynda Benglis, Tina Girouard, Richard Landry, Robert Rauschenberg, Keith Sonnier: New Work, New Orleans Museum of Art supplement to New Orleans TimesPicayune, January 30, 1977, 3. 54 On Voulkos’s work as muscular, macho, tender, and sensitive, see Mark Levy, “Tough Sensitivities: Voulkos and Nagle,” Artweek 13, no. 8 (February 27, 1982): 16. On Voulkos’s muscularity, see William Wilson, “Ceramics—Craft and Confusion,” Los Angeles Times, May 10, 1977, I2. 55 Smith, “Lynda Benglis,” E37. For more on Benglis’s ceramics as Abstract Expressionist, see Mario Naves, “Another Revelation from Lynda Benglis,” New York Observer, January 28, 2002, 14; and Naves, “Victim,” 18. 56 Bogle, “From the Furnace,” 8. 57 Voulkos, quoted in Patricia Degener, “Father Figure of American Pottery,” Sunday (St. Louis) Post-Dispatch, December 7, 1969, 4B. 58 Bogle, “From the Furnace,” 8. 59 Roberta Smith, “Peter Voulkos, 78, a Master of Expressive Ceramics, Dies,” New York Times, February 21, 2002, B9; and Slivka, “Artist and His Work,” 42–43. On epoxy as sacrilege for potters, see Reed, “Wheel of Life,” 24. 60 On Voulkos’s use of the wheel and other traditional as opposed to technologically advanced means of forming clay, see John Mason’s comments as cited in Frank Lloyd, “Vanguard Ceramics: John Mason, Ken Price, and Peter Voulkos,” in MacNaughton, Clay’s Tectonic Shift, 21–23; also Perchuk, “Out of Clay,” 42. On the ancient process of lost-wax casting that Voulkos revived in the United States, see his comments in “he Old Crafts Find New Hands,” Life, July 29, 1966, 40. 61 Raymond F. Veilleux, ed., Dictionary of Manufacturing Terms (Dearborn, Mich.: Society of Manufacturing Engineers, 1987), 45. On the Morris and James Pottery, see Bogle, “From the Furnace,” 8. 62 On Voulkos and the Archie Bray Foundation, see Rick Newby and Chere Jiusto, “‘A Beautiful Spirit’: Origins of the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts,” Montana: he Magazine of Western History 51, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 20–29. 63 Tom Latka and Jean Latka, Ceramic Extruding: Inspiration and Technique (Iola, Wis.: Krause Publications, 2001), 6–16; and Daryl E. Baird, he Extruder Book (Westerville, Ohio: American Ceramic Society, 2000), 2–3, who writes that the extruder “has yet to gain the wide-scale recognition it deserves [among studio potters].” Fred Meyer makes no mention of extrusions in his practical guide, Sculpture in Ceramic (New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1971). 64 Hank Saxe, interview by the author, May 31, 2013. Saxe, who ran the SaxePatterson Workshop with his wife, Cynthia Patterson, has worked closely with Benglis since the fall of 1992; Robert M. Ellis, foreword to Chimera. For more on Saxe, see https://www .hanksaxe.com/; and Bill Whaley, “Hank Saxe: An Inquiry,” Taos Friction, April 17, 2013, http://www .taosfriction.com/?p=6441. 65 Saxe interview. 66 Ibid.; and Lynda Benglis, interview by author, May 16, 2013. 67 hanks to Ellen Robinson at Cheim & Read, New York, for making Gila River Knot, Olla, and several other ceramic sculptures available for me to view. For more illustrations of Benglis’s ceramic sculpture, see Lynda Benglis: Everything Flows. For her most recent work, see the checklist for her winter 2014 exhibition at Cheim & Read, New York, http://www.cheimread.com /exhibitions/2014-01-16_lynda-benglis /?view=checklist#; also Lynda Benglis: Water Sources, 54–57. 68 For a brilliant, historically situated discussion of gender ambiguity in Benglis’s oeuvre, especially during the 1970s, see Richmond, Lynda Benglis, 45–69. In contrast, see Linda Yablonsky, “Artist Interview: Not a Material Girl,” Art Newspaper 20, no. 222 (March 2011): 43: “All of your work has distinct and aggressively sexual associations with the female body.” Also see Emily Nathan, “Lynda Benglis: Top Form,” Artnet, February 11, 2011, http://www.artnet .com/magazineus/reviews/nathan/lynda -benglis-new-museum-2-11-11.asp; and David Cohen, “Arts & Letters,” New York Sun, March 18, 2004. 69 Benglis, quoted in Seiberling, “New Sexual Frankness,” 42. 70 Benglis, quoted in Yablonsky, “Not a Material Girl,” 43. 71 Julian Kreimer, “Shape Shifter: Lynda Benglis,” Art in America 97, no. 11 (December 2009): 96. For an early discussion of Benglis’s sculpture as sensual, see Sandy Ballatore, “Lynda Benglis’s Humanism,” Artweek 5, no. 121 (May 22, 1976): 6. 72 On gender and the iber arts, see Elissa Auther, String Felt hread: he Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2010). 73 Perreault, “Fear of Clay,” 71. 74 Ibid. 75 On Voulkos’s work as “neither high art nor craft,” see Perchuk, “Out of Clay,” 47. But it seems to me important that the work is also both high art and craft. 76 Richard Marshall, “Peter Voulkos,” in Ceramic Sculpture: Six Artists; Peter Voulkos, John Mason, Kenneth Price, Robert Arneson, David Gilhooly, Richard Shaw, by Marshall and Suzanne Foley (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press in association with the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1981), 40. American Art | Sprint 2018 This content downloaded from 198.091.037.002 on March 20, 2018 05:57:54 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 23