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Article

French

ID: <

10670/1.l9nqjo

>

Where these data come from
Lynda Benglis — Robert Morris (1974), a plastic body economy across identity

Abstract

New York, April 1974, on a poster realised for his double exhibition in the famous Castelli-Sonnabend Gallery, the body of the artist Robert Morris appears topless and oiled, dress up with a military helmet, sunglasses Aviator model on the face, a metal collar with chains he grasps. In November of the same year, on the right third of a “centerfold” of the as well famous Artforum magazine, the body of the artist Lynda Benglis appears totaly naked and oiled, sunglasses Cat-Eye model on the face, with a large double dildo she holds, as if it is penetrating her vagina on a side, and on the other side it is pointing a large black monochrome surface covering the left tow thirds of the double page. This tow images sparked off a lot of discursive reactions between admiration and rejection, even in the critical literature, almost starting from the feminin and masculin identity opposition. Lynda Benglis and Robert Morris are at this moment in multiple faces relation between private and professional. In the begenning of the 1970s, they introduce an artistic collaboration through an exchange of video material, with images and comments which refer to art, politics and sex among others. Even though they are not regarded by art history as famous figures among political artists who are frontally interrogate sex identity and gender representations (both are not publicly engaged in feminism art movements of the 1970s), and perhaps because they are not subject to an instrumental political calandar, they constructed a singular personnal and artistic relation in step with the most influancial area of the sexual and homosexual liberation of the West in the 1970s whose they borrow some attributes to constructed their iconic figures.On this essay, I claim this tow figures they manage as a real ad for Morris and a real fake one for Benglis, between art and ad, private and public areas, could not be studied starting from psycho-sociological category or concept of the identity (in his singular or a plural form) as the alpha and the omega of sexualities and genders topics and problematics. I regard the fictional and performative caracteristics of the iconic process as a different way that work as a practice above all, in a cultural and politics context, and which can be a singular strategy to go over the identity paradigm as a sufficiency of the reality of the subject. Plasticity, exchange, fetichism, pornography, S/M, etc., could be translated here in a symbolic, materialist and practice way for a such excess.

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