Lynda Benglis

In Lynda Benglis' latest exhibition at the Thomas Dane gallery - her first UK retrospective - the artist employs a variety of media (wax, rubber, clay, bronze and glitter to name a few) to create forms as extensions of the body. I personally found the pieces shown across the gallery's two spaces to display a consideration of material process, managing to marry organic forms in a very unnatural way. Her works almost blur the line between painting and sculpture vividly coloured latex seems to ooze across the floor, while works such as her 'Sparkle Knot IV', right, appeared to me at initial glance to be constructed from torn and knotted canvas.

Entering the second gallery space, we are greeted with Benglis' video work 'Female Sensibility' (1973), below left, which shows the artist and a friend gently kissing. Through their knowledge of the camera, and hence the viewer, and sense of very controlled and constructed gestures, the women here elevate themselves above the status of objects, and as such perhaps escape the tyranny of the male gaze. Set to the soundtrack of an appropriated American radio station, punctuated by country music tracks, as described Aesthetica magazine, it is 'uncomfortably stereotypical in its

masculinity, made worse by the later introduction of a preacher sermonising on the creation of Adam and Eve.'

The press release claimed "Her defiant nature was exemplified by a mythical advertisement in the November 1974’s edition of ArtForum, in which she posed naked brandishing a dildo – satirising the machismo of the art world." In an interview concerning this collection, the artist herself claimed she was interested in showing 'that an artist can be both masculine and feminine. But most importantly, an artist is an artist.'For me, this work attempts to display masculinity and femininity simultaneously, perhaps displaying visually both having the phallus in a physical sense of the signifier, and being the phallus, through the female form of her exposed breasts and hips. Continuing my exploration into childhood toys, I recreated the pose of the photograph below, using my manipulated "drag king" Barbie as my "penis" (I was, coincidently, wearing an almost identical shirt); this experimentation allow me to begin to consider the function of the Barbie in a child's development of a sense of self. Which the little girl can identify with this image outside of herself, it is precisely this outside otherness which presents the child with a sense of the female body as object.Through editing, I was able to heighten the lighting and contrast to remove my face, adding a far more ambiguous quality, and I found it gave more clarity to my previous ideas.

Developing from this initial concept, Inspired by the surrealist works of Hans Bellmer and his search for the missing female phallus through drawings such as 'L'Aigle Mademoiselle', in which the girl's "penis" is made visible, I created the collages below. Taking images from a section of a local newspaper, I created the collages below, taking inspiration from the gender splicing of Hannah Höch's photomontages. While I do not feel these works to be particularly successful, they do open up areas for further contemplation and manipulation; I am particularly interested in Barbie's lack of genitalia, its penis like shape, and the acceptance of her as a "woman" despite this biological lack.

GemmaGem