Lynda Benglis

New Museum

New York

Through June 19

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“Prepare to be floored,” said Andrea K. Scott in The New Yorker. Four decades after Lynda Benglis arrived in New York and shook up the art world by pooling bright latex swirls of color at gallerygoers’ feet, a “ravishing, radical, and long overdue” retrospective of the Louisiana native’s restless journey has arrived at the New Museum. Benglis has never stopped pushing into new territory. At a time when “painting was dead and minimalism was rising,” her poured paintings were thrillingly organic, even swamp-like. She then “literalized” the knots that artists were tying themselves in by putting “tangles of painted and glitter-flecked cotton bunting” on the walls. Later, she passed through a phase of creating “Zen-punk wonders” in glass and ceramic before her recent experiments in outdoor bronze fountains. “The through line” that ties each phase together, said Greg Cook in The Providence Phoenix, “is her repeated flouting of avant-garde taste.”

“Nothing was beyond the pale when it came to making a visual statement,” said Roberta Smith in The New York Times. Art’s stars were fussing with grays when Benglis poured glow-in-the-dark foam over chicken wire and hung the cascading forms in a dark gallery. Seen today, Phantom proves still capable of “burning holes in your visual memory.” Most notoriously, Benglis mocked the macho art establishment and her own rising-star status by posing nude with a dildo in her hand for a full-page ad she placed in a 1974 edition of Artforum. Subscribers cancelled, staffers resigned. But the uncensored ad appears here in a small case, appropriately bolstering the message that Benglis’s work, no matter its form, has been “consistently, irrepressibly ahead of its time.” Indeed, she has lived “every renegade artist’s dream.”