Verbal Description: Lynda Benglis, Contraband, 1969

Narrator: Lynda Benglis, Contraband, 1969. Contraband is an irregularly shaped pigmented latex “spill” displayed on the floor. The spill measures just over 9 feet tall and 33 feet wide and is about an inch thick. It is positioned diagonally in the middle of the gallery space. Composed of blue, green, red, orange, yellow, and the hues made from colors mixing, this work offers a non-shape as a deliberate alternative to the rigidity of paintings stretched on canvas. The spill’s center is primarily dark blue with pink, yellow, and flecks of green swirled within. The blue “center” extends tendrils of varying sizes to the upper right where the blue latex pools, almost suggesting a river’s course meeting the mouth of an ocean. On the left side of the spill, orange, yellow, and red gather to resemble bumbling lava, a gooey portal where some greens and blues swirl and puddle. Like many of her contemporaries, Benglis didn’t try to represent specific images or content in her work. But her approach was  influenced by nature, politics, bodily emissions, and contemporary technologies. 

The work’s title, Contraband, references a bayou of the same name near her childhood home in Louisiana, and Benglis said the work reminded her of oil slicks on the water. This reference, along with the artwork’s faded Day Glo hues and industrial scale, brings to mind the destruction of natural landscapes. In doing so, Contraband might even question art’s relationship to the environment and the resources we extract from it.