Lynda Benglis and the Return of the Scandalous Dildo

It was arguably the biggest thing to happen to art in 1974: Lynda Benglis and her dildo in the November issue of Artforum. Benglis, who’d been making sculptures out of latex, was the subject of an Artforum article by Robert Pincus-Witten called "The Frozen Gesture." Benglis told the editor of Artforum, John Coplans, that she wanted to include a centerfold of herself with the article. Coplans said he couldn’t do it–Artforum, he said, didn’t sell editorial space. So Benglis paid for it as a gallery advertisement, a double-page centerfold. Artforum’s publisher, Charles Cowles, took a few days to decide whether to print it, because he didn’t want to upset his mother. And then he decided to print it, and then the printer refused to print it. So Cowles told the printer, who was a retired brigadier, that he would sue him if he didn’t run it, and the photograph finally came out in November.

So what’s the picture? It’s Benglis on the right-hand quarter of two pages, naked. She’s got bikini tan lines, a half-opened mouth and white cupid-bow sunglasses like Sue Lyon’s in Lolita. And her legs are slightly spread, and she’s pressing an enormous dildo to her crotch.

Was it a feminist statement? An artistic statement? Everyone had a theory.

Things usually dissipate, drift, and you’re left to wonder what happened. But in the case of Artforum–in terms of what changed the magazine for good–the editors point to the "Lynda Benglis thing" as that moment. After the photo ran, the associate editors (all but one) sent a letter to Artforum that began: "For the first time in the 13 years of Artforum’s existence, a group of associate editors feel compelled to dissociate themselves publicly from a portion of the magazine’s content." They went on to say that it was an "object of extreme vulgarity" that trashed women’s lib and made a "shabby mockery of the aims of that movement" and the art world in general. And then they quit the magazine. Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson, two editors at the time, went off to start October, which was modeled after the old (i.e., pre-Benglis) Artforum: nothing commercial, no tie-ins, no ads.

New York magazine licked the blood off the floor: it did a 1975 cover story on Benglis called "The New Sexual Frankness." And then, some backlash-humor. Art critic Peter Plagens, in a letter to Artforum, wrote: "I am shocked. For some years now I have depended on Artforum as consistently, patently, inoffensive family reading, a publication filled only with photographs of Minimal, Process, and Conceptual art... Imagine my perplexity when my nine-year-old son, who’d met this ‘artist’ only weeks before here, in our home, asked me if that dildo was really made of some Japanese plastic which would further depress the situation in our domestic styrene industry!"

The art critic Robert Rosenblum countered: "Let’s give three dildos and a Pandora’s Box to Ms. Lynda Benglis, who finally brought out of the closet the Sons and Daughters of the Founding Fathers of Artforum Committee on Public Decency and Ladies’ Etiquette."

Remember, this was 1974, when you could smear yourself with ketchup and get an audience; when artists were scandalous and macho and sexy like rock stars. You were scandalous and you photographed yourself in sexy poses. It was a different era. You had men and women calibrating their roles. It was all there–civil rights and war and assassinations–but it was Benglis who made people uncomfortable.

Now the photograph is contemplatively sandwiched between Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen and Hannah Wilke’s "S.O.S." photographs in a current show at David Zwirner called "New York ca. 1975." It’s not hard to figure out how the curator thought this one through: "Put it over there–with the other feminist/political artists." There’s Benglis’ double-pronged and bronzed, slightly curved dildo, called The Smile, in a case underneath her Artforum photo. (When is a dildo not a dildo? When it’s art. I call Cheim & Read, the gallery that represents Benglis, and mention the Zwirner show. "It’s not up yet," John Cheim tells me. "It is," I say, "I saw it." "Ooohh," he says, pausing. "So the sculpture’s there too." "The sculpture?" The dildo. "Right," I say, "the sculpture.")

The photo’s ceremoniously included as–what? political art? feminist art? Anyway, it’s grouped contextually. And the 1974 Benglis looks quaint now. Everyone, feminists and postfeminists alike, has got a position on pornography at this point. And MacKinnon/Dworkin have made it embarrassing ever to be shocked by porn, so no one is.

But seeing the Benglis photograph presented as part of history still seems strange. I call Benglis at home in Santa Fe, she’s making dinner. "I’d rather not be quoted," she says. "I’m moving, it’s hot..."

I call Benglis a couple of hours later when she’s feeling more quotable. "I was very involved with the feminist movement at the time. Men were meeting–they were very paranoid. Their art was directed by the feminist movement. It was also the beginning of the punk movement. It had a lot to do with Nixon and the media. I wanted to introduce a little humor. L.A. had much more play and theater."

And New York was serious, kind of dull?

Totally, she replies. Totally old-style politics.

I ask her if it’s strange to now be grouped as a political artist. "We were all out there. It’s just that the women weren’t feeling it." Do you think the photograph would get that kind of response today? "The ideas were original at one time. They’re not original anymore." Benglis brings up another work she did a year later involving a hermaphroditic Dalmatian. "Then I decided–that’s it. I made my statement there."

So this is all irrelevant?

"If someone does a gesture–like a Pollock movement–like in the movie, that fellow learned to do the dance, he was a good dancer–I danced with him at CalArt. But even if someone does a dance and it’s not the original dance, they’re dancing."

That makes sense, I say.

"Of course it does," she says, and then she tells me about the stuff she’s now working on, and all the while I’m looking at a one-inch reproduction of her Artforum photo on the back of a David Zwirner postcard, perpetually stuck like that, in 1974.