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Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective

February 14 - May 31, 2004

Museum of Contemporary Art
220 E. Chicago Ave.
Chicago, Illinois 60611
Tel.: 312-280-2660
Hours: Tues 10a-8p, Wed-Sun 10a-5p
http://www.mcachicago.org

While viewing the Lee Bontecou exhibit I overheard people talking about looking for meanings, a reasonable response to art in these times. But it is the nature of Bontecou's work to consistently elude meaning. It inhabits that moment critic John Berger identified in which "seeing comes before words." In order to appreciate this work on its own terms, we might remember that abstraction came into being in order to release painting from the weight of meanings that were tangled up with narrative and didactic codes. At the moment in which abstraction reigned, reason and rhetoric were suspect. Representations, symbolic codes, tropes, associations, argumentation and analogies -- all strategies for ascribing meaning -- were seen as tainted by the ethical compromises connected with language. They were pushed out of the gallery space by the momentous gravity and physical presence of abstract and non-objective work.

The first rooms of early work in the MCA's retrospective exhibit of Bontecou's oeuvre are filled with large, dark, brooding sculptures, which hang on the wall like paintings, but protrude from their welded steel substructures like high relief. Even a contextual or historical analysis seems to be held off by the visual, tactile and spatial demands of the work. The exhibition is an ample, even impressive retrospective, with 168 pieces distributed among six galleries, and the impact of the work is compounded by the repetition of the forms and reiteration of themes. These early works are covered with cloth, meticulously chosen from a spectrum of dun-colored sections of thick canvas in a complex piecework of arcs, diagonals and shifting planes. The viewer moves from one to the next in anticipation of the play and progression of shape and color guided by curves and flow. Each piece offers the surprise and security of variations. In each we notice another detail: a twist of copper here, the trace of a marking on the canvas there, a velvet lining first black, then brown, a multiplication of forms, or a shift in energy. Rising from the midst of the planes of canvas like a volcanic cone is a hole, often lined with velvet to confirm the depth of each void's reach by trapping the light in the velvet's fibers.

It is these dark, mysterious orifices which generate argument. Are they feminine? Are they openings or pits? Voids or thresholds? As one proceeds through the gallery, the holes multiply. It seems as if the artist is collecting with these pieces, building up materials and shapes. Some pieces have as many as seven of these round spaces protruding from the patchwork topography of army-surplus canvas on which writing and other details like zippers are still visible. If the negative spaces must stand for something, is it something other than what the orifices in the single openings do? Around the corner from these more complex sculptures, one's search for a simple meaning, particularly a feminine meaning is obliterated by two large, perhaps six feet in diameter circular drawings of jet engines. Here are the circular voids again, but now their significance has changed completely.

The drawing of the jet engine is a framed circle, with indications of the blurred propellers over a dark round space. Remembering that airplanes used to be covered in cloth, I was able to confirm with Bontecou her remembrance of playing as a child in a cloth-covered airplane. I began to see the skill with which she covered the welded steel armature with the surplus canvas as somehow analogous to the skill of the inventors and experimenters who used fabric, that most feminine of materials, to approach the aether.

These pieces are so strong that they activate the often deadening space of the museum's garage-like interior. Bontecou's choice of materials -- steel and scraps of thick canvas, saw-toothed zippers and wires -- evokes a kind of military or industrial process. In interviews she has talked about working on the pieces while she listened to the radio, particularly listening via the shortwave to stations all over the world, to get multiple views on international affairs and specifically, her feelings about the Vietnam war. It seems that she reorganized elemental materials that alluded to or were actually connected with these wars to which she was listening, allowing them to unfold as she worked into art, into enigma renouncing reason -- without the flourish of a surrealist but just as irrevocably.

Among the sculptures are drawings which display the same power of invention and exquisite skill. While the sculptures have a somber, stately and elegiac presence, the drawings are filled with movement and vitality. The next set of clues about the nature of those dark openings come with Bontecou's more recent work, which is as aerial and light as the older work is earthy and heavy. Wire mesh, ceramic beads and bladder-like forms ascend in a tangle of line and shape, catching and redirecting light rather than soaking it up. The turn in the work is from earth to sky, but the greater subject is still the same. A page of fanciful and delicately-colored eyes attends the ariel constructions. Now it seems as if the openings represent vital energy, eyes, bladders, jet engines and canvas holes through which light and energy come and go. One thinks about engendering, or even engineering, rather than gender.

As much as I admire the artist who 'just did her work' during the years that many women artists were on the barricades, it is important to remember that when Bontecou came into the art world, she would not have had the choice to express her views about gender. This is the other side of abstract and non-objective artists: words had failed them, and at the same time they did not have the same recourse to words on which we have come to rely in the visual arts. Bontecou only had to prove herself in a male world. She was smart and lucky enough to be accepted as one of the guys and then leave, interestingly enough, when she was pregnant. The 50s were repressive times -- artists in America, like intellectuals, did not have the opportunity to voice their opinions. The great women sculptors of Bontecou's time were all androgynous, enigmatic giants. One thinks of Louise Nevelson and Louise Bourgeois, and although they have had more to say, they still seem eccentric, heroic and laconic.

Lee Bontecou was a woman who was working among the men of the New York School during the 50s and 60s. She had had so much success that it seems nearly every museum in the United States has one of her enigmatic pieces hanging from the wall, quite an achievement for any artist. Then she moved to rural Pennsylvania and disappeared. Bontecou's disappearance seems absolutely reasonable as one studies the work. It is strong solitary work apart from the contentions of the time; she was going on in solitude, pursuing a set of mythic questions. The work is not about selling oneself, about grant applications and projects and spheres of influence. It does not have anything to add to the unrelenting self-consciousness and double-consciousness that is not a true give-and-take with an audience but an endless game of second guessing. If we can believe what Bontecou says about listening to the short wave radio during the Vietnam war and thinking over the various problems of the world from her studio, her scope is much broader than what often passes for politics in artistic and intellectual circles.

According to the many profiles and interviews that have accompanied the artist's reemergence, Lee Bontecou seems to have escaped the debate and contention and fracturing of positions concerning the presence and progress of woman in the world of the visual arts. Bontecou's response to what she hears, to the moral complications and endless betrayals of twentieth century history, is to produce work which makes no statement. She uses no rhetoric which might slide or spin. She chooses common materials: steel, cloth, carbon, graphite and paper. She builds simple forms, patterns of rectangles and angles of incline and circles which are variously holes, thresholds, voids or origins. She perfects them, varies them, builds them and in turn they exemplify her astute dedication and clarity of purpose. Her work seems all the more desirable because its power and integrity exist beyond texts and beyond words.

Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective was previously at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles from October 5, 2003 - January 11, 2004. It will tour to the Museum of Modern Art, New York from July 28 - September 27, 2004.

--Janina Ciezadlo

Janina Ciezadlo is a Chicago painter, printmaker, photographer and freelance writer. Her art writing has appeared in the Chicago Reader and in Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, among other publications. She is a member of the Chicago Area Critics Association and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at University of Illinois/Chicago.