Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
My name is Lynda Benglis
and the name is "Contraband."
I did it in 1969.
These are ultraviolent colors--
the trade name was DayGlo--
and I ordered 500 pounds of the colors,
and had them in my small studio
and would go into larger studios
and actually pigment large vats
of rubber latex, and I would pour
the painting on waxed linoleum
and sometimes directly on the floor.
The scale was dictated by the places
that I actually did the work.
I was thinking particularly
where painting could go,
from a kind of defined area
that Greenburg had set forth.
However, I've never been
a gestural artist
in terms of an expressionist.
I think my interest in materials
is very contextual, and has not so much
to do with the expression,
but it has really to do with my learning
what the materials are
and what they can do
in relationship to art history
and contextually in relationship
to the environment:
the room, the wall, the floor.
The work itself
has a certain kind of demand.
It's moving.
It usually bespeaks of nature.
I think women are very involved
with the ebb and flow
of life and materials.
It has something to do with mixing
and cooking sometimes, chemically.
I'm very involved
with the way things taste,
and I think art is involved with surfaces
and chemicals and mixtures
and questions about matter and material.
I still think of myself as a painter
for some reason.
I think I'm painting with liquids
but making objects that are dimensional,
that have a sense of their own space,
but demand some viewing
in terms of walking around.
But to me it was always a situation
of making your own material
in order to work.
. �