Part of an ongoing video correspondence with sculptor Robert Morris, Mumble features Benglis, Morris, the artist’s brother Jim Benglis, and Marilyn Lenkowsky in a series of recordings nested within recordings. The piece opens with the image of a monitor, on it is the image of another monitor, on it is yet a third. Abrupt, in-camera editing shuffles characters disjunctively. The soundtrack is a chorus of voices: the artist’s observations about her surroundings, Morris's Marxist musings, and Jim Benglis and Lenkowsky’s muffled conversation. (Adapted from Video Data Bank and Electronic Arts Intermix)

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Renowned for her bold and tactile sculptures, Lynda Benglis produced a body of groundbreaking videos in the mid-1970s. Immediate and visceral, these works gave new form to Benglis’s ongoing exploration of gender, self-presentation, and the media. She also used them to translate many of her radical experiments with physical materials—dayglo latex poured directly on the floor and large-scale polyurethane foam structures cantilevered off of walls—into the electronic pulse of video, layering sound and image into provocative collages of the body and time. This program brings together her earliest experiments, including Document (1972) and Mumble (1972), produced as part of an ongoing exchange with the artist Robert Morris; such seminal tapes as Now (1973) and Female Sensibility (1973); and her only narrative work, The Amazing Bow Wow (1976), a tale of gender, family, and difference, produced with the director Stanton Kaye.

Lynda Benglis lives and works in New York, New York, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Using materials as an extension of her own body, she has created biomorphic forms that explore the physical gesture. Over the course of her career, these materials have included wax, polyurethane, latex, cast metal, glass, and video. Benglis is the subject of a current exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and a forthcoming exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2022). She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts grants, among others. Her work is in the permanent collections of public institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Art Institute of Chicago; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and Tate, London.

Presented in partnership with Video Data Bank.