Lee Bontecou’s Retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
By Amoreen Armetta
Sometimes a retrospective is powered by the fame of the artist or the work’s relevance to historians, and is no longer alive under its own steam. Not so of the long-anticipated Lee Bontecou retrospective, which reveals the sculptor’s seldom, seen, nearly five-decade output. The exhibition opened in October at LA’s Hammer Museum, traveled in February to Chicago’s MCA, and will arrive at New York’s MOMA in July; it is a joint project of MCA curator Elizabeth A. T. Smith, and Hammer Museum director Ann Philbin.
This retrospective is lent intrigue by Bontecou’s mysterious self-exile from the epicenter of the 1970s art world. Bontecou——even at the height of her fame in the 60s as sole female artist in Leo Castelli’s influential gallery——was not the type to hang out at the bar, preferring to work in her studio. Her failure to hang unfortunately leaves her characterized as somewhat monastic——an Agnes Martin type——which is the other side of the coin of the more popular artist-as-rock-star typology. As this exhibition demonstrates, though she eschewed the New York scene to move to rural Pennsylvania, teach at Brooklyn College, and show occasionally in LA, she remained connected and engaged enough to produce a consistent, curious, and alive body of work.
The MCA’s airy, chronological installation of nearly 150 sculptures and drawings overwhelmingly leads to the conclusion that Bontecou’s charm is due to her alchemical employment of materials. Her fame was sealed with the reliefs that she began in 1959——welded metal geometric frames onto which pieces of industrial and military canvas are attached with spiky bits of copper wire. Each sculpture juts several feet from the wall, receding here and there, where large holes, painted black or lined in black velvet, are built into the structure. These reliefs were predicated on drawings in which she blasted the paper with soot released from an oxygen-deprived blowtorch, creating impossibly matte black holes and stratifications. By the late ‘60s, Bontecou’s sculptures and drawings increasingly dealt with the reality of the Vietnam War through more blatant use of military detritus and the fierce energy with which they were constructed. However, they manage to do more than elicit pathos due to associations drawn from the materials alone. As Donald Judd wrote in a 1965 Arts Magazine review, "The black hole does not allude to a black hole, it is one". This work feels like walking in the dark. It is also exhilarating in both its material frankness and its spirit of resistance. These holes are far more interesting presences than the vaginas, assholes, and mouths which they have been said to evoke. Though this work does probe the same murky territory in which the surrealists and Bataille have wallowed, it does so without wallowing.
In the next major body of work, from the late 60s and early 70s, Bontecou turned to plastic——a material that embodies the hope of and disillusionment with post-war technology. Hanging from the ceiling is a sleek orange fish whose scales are individually vacuum-formed in translucent orange plastic and then riveted together. A fish tail emerges from its mouth. A rust-colored plastic flower, from 1968, looks like a bong crossed with a pinwheel and has unconnected wires dumbly hanging from its face. Though quieter and less physically engaging than the reliefs, these are beautiful, tactile objects——like Brancusi sculptures. They also allude to pathology, similar to Eva Hesse’s work, but in a more externalized way. Instead of delivering bodily anxiety, Bontecou conveys empathy.
In work from the late ‘70s to the present, Bontecou explores clay and porcelain. Pieces from the ‘80s and ‘90s are comprised of skeletal metal armatures, mesh, bits of copper wire, and clay spheres. Imagery in both the drawings and sculptures look like electronic eyeballs, sailing machines, archeological models, and tiny alien civilizations. These smaller pieces culminate, by the mid-eighties, in poised yet explosive mobiles of cream and turquoise orbs, which are suspended on thin wires and buoyed by canvas sails. These objects don’t really allude to anything. They are fiercely themselves, and communicate the excitement of something never before seen; they embody possibility and expansiveness.
Given the success of this new work, it is tempting to debate what affect Bontecou’s position as a formerly inside outsider has had on her development as an artist. A more interesting question is what would we learn if her latest work had been included in this year’s Whitney Biennial, since she has, with breadth and grace, so consistently captured the zeitgeist.
