• The Return of Lee Bontecou – By Edward Rubin

    Date posted: June 29, 2006 Author: jolanta

    It’s funny how these things work.

    The Return of Lee Bontecou

    By Edward Rubin

    Untitled, 1961. Welded steel, soot on canvas, and wire, (72.4 x 39.4 x 45.1 cm). Elvehjem Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin ñ Madison; Edna G. Dyar, Humanistic Foundation Fund and National Endowment for the Arts Fund purchase (1973.5)

    Untitled, 1961. Welded steel, soot on canvas, and wire, (72.4 x 39.4 x 45.1 cm). Elvehjem Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin ñ Madison; Edna G. Dyar, Humanistic Foundation Fund and National Endowment for the Arts Fund purchase (1973.5)

    It’s funny how these things work. A couple of years ago, seventy two-year old artist Lee Bontecou was merely a blip in the consciousness of the public. You may have heard the name, perhaps you had even seen one of her works, but that was it, just another artist, another work of art. And then, seemingly out of nowhere, the Bontecou Retrospective, exhibiting forty-three years of her sculptures and drawings, many of which have never been shown before, is on everybody’s lips, as the flavor of the year.

    Bontecou, something of a name during the 60s and early 70s when she was Leo Castelli’s only female artist – she showed along side Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Donald Judd – after thirty years of quietly flying, well below the radar of critics, curators and public alike, is back on the scene. As the latest, long lost and newly discovered, Queen of the Artworld – Good Bye Louise Bourgeois – a title that the diminutive, self-effacing artist, would quickly shoot down, Bontecou was holding court at the Museum of Modern Art in Queens through September 27th. It was the final venue of the Bontecou Retrospective. Coincidentally, it was also the last exhibition that MoMA Queens would host, as the newly reconstructed MoMA reopens in November.

    The story of Bontecou’s life, though a matter of facts, is both simple and complicated. Simple because like everybody else she grew up and got older. Complicated because at the height of her fame – museums were both showing and collecting her work, glowing articles were being written about her – she turned her back on the art scene, albeit, after one less than favorably praised exhibition, in which the critics roundly trounced her work’s change of direction. They wanted the old stuff; she wanted the new stuff.

    As Bontecou puts it, "It was a conscious decision to not give shows. I didn’t want to talk about the old work. I wanted to explore and expand; I didn’t want to have to make things, and finish things, and show them every two years. I am so glad that I did it." Removing herself even further from the glare, if not temptation of the artworld, and closer to the nature that she loved since early childhood, Bontecou moved with her husband, artist William Giles, and her now grown daughter to a secluded farm in central Pennsylvania where she continued to work. To keep her mind fecund and fingers nimble she joined the faculty of the art department at Brooklyn College where she taught sculpture and ceramics two days a week until she retired in 1991.

    Bontecou’s retrospective is mind blowing. It is a rare opportunity to get to see a tracjetory, all at once, of a reputation being both resurrected and still very much in the making. It is equally rare to come across an artist, especially in today’s climate, who is able to infuse her work, so very subtly, with private and universal meanings, and still have the work retain both its power and importance. Therein lies Bontecou’s gift to us.

    The exhibition, slightly pared down from its first two venues (the UCLA Hammer Gallery in Los Angeles and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago), opens up with the artist’s wall sculptures, the very works that first brought Bontecou to the attention of the public. These welded steel and canvas wall reliefs, arguably her most important works to date – twenty six, and all untitled, taking up fully one fourth of the show – are as fresh and intriguing as the day they were created.

    These sculptures, dating from 1957-1967, some as small as the front page of the New York Times, others as large as eight feet by nine feet, are instantly recognizable as coming from the same family tree, in both the materials used and their manner of construction. Using canvas, velveteen, saw blades, soot, pipe screening, spark plugs, helmets and other army surplus materials, Bontecou stitches, wires, welds, glues and rivets the materials into place leaving the viewer faced with 3D, cubist-colored, works that are at once wondrous and totally stunning.

    Viewed as a series of concentric elements, the protruding wall sculptures appear to advance and retreat in a succession of outward and inward movements. Many of these works contain a prominently raised, volcano-like black hole, a mysterious existential void that offers either a haven, an escape from everyday life, or a descent into hell if you are so inclined. While early critics have made much of the artist’s signature black hole, likening it to a mouth, a vagina or both, the artist, who is adamant about not being misinterpreted, refutes such claims. For Bontecou, these blackened voids are meant to evoke "mystery, along with the sublime." The fact that these works were created during the Cold War, when Bontecou’s ears were glued to the background music of her radio’s bad news, informs many of these works to a large degree. They reflect the turmoil of the time.

    Nearly half of the exhibition, 54 works in all, focuses on Bontecou’s drawings.

    These drawings cover the late 1950s through 2001, and echo some of the same subjects and motifs as her sculptures are considerably more varied in subject matter and material. Ever the experimenter, here she uses soot (applied with an acetylene torch), charcoal, white and black, colored pencils, pastel, paint, printer’s ink, graphite, aniline dye, applied variously to paper, wood, muslin, velour paper, wood board, plastic paper and canvas. The subjects range from landscapes, complete with blackened voids, similar to her early wall pieces, to fantastic and surreal fish, eyes with lashes that morph into feathers, scythes, and rotating wind currents. The drawings, even those that are studies of realized work, are as intricately, and no doubt as painstakingly, crafted as the finished works.

    Making one of their rare appearances since they were dismissed at her last exhibition at the Castelli Gallery in 1971 as being "kitsch" – Bontecou called that early exhibition "a big flop" – are the artist’s vacuumed plastic flowers, fish and plant sculptures. While these translucent layered, biomorphic sculptures do seem less serious than Bontecou’s earlier ground-breaking wall reliefs, at least at a cursory glance, one cannot help but get the feeling that there is more to these complex and enigmatic works than meets the eye.

    The assemblage methods alone, in which every bolt and gap of the assembly process is visible, are worth studying. Here we have sharply scaled see-through, fish, sinister mutated plants and flowers with flowing tubular tendrils. One flower is even wearing a gas mask. Bontecou, a life-long gardener and one preoccupied with human degradation of the natural world, reflects that the flowers, in their way, were saying, "Okay, we have to have plants. If you don’t watch out, this is all that we’ll have to remember what flowers used to look like, this kind of flower is made of plastic."

    Among the artist’s later works, suspended porcelain sculptures (1985-2001) of which there are 14 in this exhibition, we are presented with yet another facet of the artist’s diversity. Augmenting her interest in space exploration – the launching of sputnik and moon landing particularly blew her away – Bontecou creates her own cosmological systems. Stringing together, on thin wire rods, small porcelain orbs that she fired herself, with adjoining diaphanous sail-like planes made of wire mesh, evocative eyes, beads and assorted celestial-like bodies, the sculpture resemble jewel-like galaxies that seem to defy gravity. The way she both delicately balances and meticulously scatters the structural elements renders these galactic sculptures as scientifically plausible as they are mysteriously uncanny.

    Though the retrospective speaks for itself quite eloquently, Bontecou, still smarting from years of critical misinterpretation, some of it current and wanting to set the record straight during this exhibition, posted an artist statement online:

    "So much has been written about my work which has nothing to do with me that when I read it, I don’t recognize anything of myself or my work in it. I am writing this now during my retrospective to put all that to rest, and to express in my own voice about the inaccurate and irrelevant contextualization still being disseminated."

    "Since the my early years, till now, the natural world, with all its visual wonders and horrors, man-made devices, with its mind boggling engineering feats and destructive abominations, the elusive human nature and its multi ramifications of the sublime to unbelievable abhorrence, to me all are one. It is in the spirit of those feelings that they primary influences on my work have occurred."

    "Along with those feelings, walking through the Metropolitan, I would always end up looking at the Greek vases with the wonderful drawings and shapes; and then would wander with awe through the African halls. At the Museum of Natural History, the fossils, bones and panoramas, were and still are unbelievably exciting. At the Modern just to see a single Brancusi sculpture was enough. It is in that spirit those secondary feelings intermingled with the primary emotions that are basic to my work."

    The exhibition’s catalogue mentions in passing that Bontecou’s father was an engineer (along with his brother he invented the first, all aluminum canoe) and her mother assembled and wired submarine radio transmitters during WW II.

    More than likely this early exposure to various methods of construction, diverse materials and experimentation, played a seminal role in Bontecou’s education. It informed the artist’s love and respect of working with her hands. It also gave her a supreme confidence. She grew up feeling that she could make or do anything that she set her mind to as long as she absorbed the necessary technical skills. This retrospective is proof that she can and did. Few artists have anything to say of importance. Fewer are able to visual it. Bontecou appears to have mastered both.

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