NEW YORK, NY.- Pace, in collaboration with Lynda Benglis and her studio, announced that it will launch an online educational resource about the artist’s 1974 Artforum Advertisement to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the famed artwork.
In November 1974, Benglis rocked the art establishment with the publication of her Artforum Advertisement. For this provocative work, she commandeered two pages in the front of the magazine with a glossy field of black space and an image of herself naked, wearing white sunglasses and holding a comically large double dildo between her thighs. Five of Artforum's editors denounced Benglis's artwork in the magazine's December 1974 issue. Two subsequently left the staff.
Benglis has stated that her intention was to create a work "ambiguous enough that it couldn’t be said what it was." This embrace of open-endedness gave the work a life far beyond its original context. Pinned to a studio wall, pored over in a library, or paraded through the streets during New York's 2017 Women's March, the Artforum Advertisement has resonated with generations of art lovers in the years since its original publication, mirroring major issues in the art world decade by decade.
Accessible on the gallery's website, the online hub will trace the ad's history and legacy, featuring archival images, a fact sheet, a short list of essential reading, and a full downloadable bibliography. For the month of November only, the site will present a compilation of every published statement Benglis has made about the work over the past 50 years.
Pace has also collaborated with the artist to design a limited-edition t-shirt—produced by the gallery—with a glow- in-the-dark image of Ghost of Smile, a phosphorescent double dildo sculpture which relates to the cast metal dildos, titled Smile, that Benglis made shortly after the publication of her Artforum Advertisement. A limited number of these t-shirts, priced at $75 each, will be available for sale on Pace’s website through November.
Pace, which has represented Benglis since 2019, will make the online resource available on November 1.
From November 14 to December 21, as part of this commemorative initiative, the gallery will exhibit two copies of Artforum’s November 1974 edition—one closed, showing the magazine’s cover, and one open to Benglis’s advertisement—in a vitrine in the lobby of its 540 West 25th Street location in New York. The artist’s work Ghost of Smile (1974/2016) will also be displayed in the lobby vitrine. This cast phosphorescent pigmented polyurethane sculpture reflects Benglis’s enduring practice of reimagining her work in different materials and scales over the years.
Since the 1960s, Lynda Benglis (b. 1941, Lake Charles, Louisiana) has been celebrated for the free, ecstatic forms she has made that are simultaneously playful and visceral, organic and abstract. Benglis began her career in the midst of Postminimal art and has pushed the traditions of painting and sculpture into new territories throughout her career. Comprised of a variety of materials—from beeswax, latex, and polyurethane foam to later innovations with plaster, gold, vaporized metals, glass, ceramics, and paper—her works demonstrate an enduring fascination with process. The embrace of flowing forms, color, and sensual surfaces attests to her inventive and radical spirit. Benglis’s experimental videos expand her interest of process to new media, featuring performative actions and using technological mediation to explore themes of physical presence, narcissism, sexuality, and gendered identity.
Through her multifarious practice, Benglis continues a long-running investigation of the proprioceptive, sensory experiences of making and viewing her works.
