Hear curator Lauren Hinkson discuss how artists in this exhibition, including Richard Serra and Lynda Benglis, adopted Jackson Pollock’s active art-making process in their monumental sculptures of the 1960s and ’70s.
Transcript:
Narrator: Welcome to "Knotted, Torn, Scattered: Sculpture after Abstract Expressionism". Here’s the exhibition’s curator, Lauren Hinkson.
Lauren Hinkson: In this exhibition, we’re looking at the artistic practices that emerged after the death of the famed Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock.
What’s revelatory about Pollock is that he opens up a space for an embodied, singular experience of the artist making the work physically.
When I say “embodied,” I mean that Pollock is exerting an immense amount of physicality to produce his work. He is leaning over the canvas. He’s throwing his arm out, dripping paint intentionally. He’s an artist performing with his materials. He’s embodying action and the act of painting.
What we see in the ’60s and ’70s is artists taking this idea of the act of painting. And they’re picking up found materials—felt, rubber, rope—and they’re harnessing the evocative potential of those materials to make sculpture that speaks to these questions of scale and one’s body.
There’s a real sense that the artists have just finished touching the sculpture’s surface. We see this play out in several works on view in this exhibition, from the deflated, shimmery knots of Lynda Benglis to the seemingly exhausted lines of Robert Morris’s felt works.
Richard Serra is an artist many people know for his large-scale, rolled-steel sculptures. So it may be a surprise when you approach the work "Belts", from 1966–67, and realize it’s the beginning of Serra’s work in process-based and post-Minimal art. He was a trained painter, and he was very attracted to what Pollock was doing, especially in "Mural"—the way lines move across the canvas, the scale of the work. And he wanted to translate that into a sculpture.
Serra picked up found rubber near his studio in SoHo and started to work with it and see how it responded to gravity. And the lines and loops of this rubber were starting to look like the black lines moving through Pollock’s "Mural".
Walk along the length of "Belts" and you get a sense of the depth and detail of the work. But you can also step back and take in the entire work as one image, and that was really important to Serra as well.
As you turn the corner in the adjoining gallery to view Pollock’s "Mural", you may reflect on the way that Richard Serra has animated Pollock’s spectacular twirling lines to make, as he said, “a drawing in space.”
Like Richard Serra, Lynda Benglis critically engaged Pollock’s legacy and key works. Benglis is an important figure in the feminist art movement in the 1970s and made evocative sculptures from latex, foam, and knotted metal bunting. In 1970 Benglis was photographed pouring vibrantly colored liquid latex directly from industrial buckets onto the floor. The images were published in Life magazine, and they documented Benglis in the process of making one of her sculptures, taking on that famous pose of Pollock’s outstretched arm flicking paint across his canvas.
When we’re looking at Abstract Expressionist artists like Pollock, they’re typically white men, and they’re painting these really big, gestural, monumental works like Jackson Pollock’s "Mural" from 1943. So for Lynda Benglis to claim that heroic image of the great Abstract Expressionist painter was really significant for what was to come.
Richard Serra, "Belts", 1966–67. Vulcanized rubber and neon, approximately 6 feet 8 inches x 16 feet 6 inches x 1 foot 8 inches (203.2 x 502.9 x 50.8 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Panza Collection 91.3863. © 2020 Richard Serra / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
