Many believe an exhibition to be the final, climactic stage of any artist’s creative process — an attractive idea in terms of art’s social necessity, but placing not just the measure but also the power of creative achievement squarely in the lap of the gallery system. I asked Bontecou if she felt that the retrospective was somehow the culmination of her three decades of studio retreat. She laughed. “I was pretty happy with it just there. The creative part, the most rewarding part, is working on it and having breakthroughs. Afterwards, they’re gone and they’re really not mine. But I guess I really haven’t experienced this for a long time, so it’ll be something new for me.”
Why has she decided to re-emerge at this point? “When Elizabeth came to the farm and saw the work and wanted to have a big show and I said yes, it was a relief. I hadn’t been well, and I didn’t want to have all that stuff left for my daughter or husband to deal with. And I guess I still feel that way.” In spite of her own pragmatic existential indifference, Bontecou’s sudden reappearance — with a body of work as powerful as any she’s shown before — is bound to have significant repercussions in the art world.
For starters, the show’s itinerary just happens to cover the three major art-education centers of America, and Bontecou’s laboriously handmade, emotionally charged objects (with their unironic incorporation of the aesthetics of post-apocalyptic science fiction) will undoubtedly have a major impact on the next generation of young artists, sick of the slick fabrications and anemic pseudo-conceptualisms of the ’90s.
Then there’s the feminist angle. Like many female artists who achieved success before the advent of the women’s movement, Bontecou rankles at reductivist ideological interpretations of her work. “I don’t go with all that. There’s men and there’s women, and we have to live together. There’s terrific issues all over the world with the suppression of women, but art is art. It’s either good or bad or in between. So women’s art wasn’t sold as high, but so what? The most important thing is to work, and the hell with all that. You just have to keep going, and you can’t waste time. The studio is where the fight is.”
Nevertheless, Bontecou’s heroic return erases the taint of defeat that accompanied her disappearance for many women in the art world. The artist’s silence about the motives behind her withdrawal left open the possibility that the male-dominated art world had successfully silenced what was arguably its strongest female voice of the 1960s. Says Smith, “I had a conversation about this with Kiki Smith [no relation], who told me that for her it was absolutely significant that Lee is coming back, because many of the women artists of the ’60s were role models for Kiki’s generation, but they all stepped away like Lee or passed away like Eva Hesse. And from Kiki’s perspective as an artist, it’s very important for someone like Lee — a woman in her 70s — to be back on center stage.”
While emerging and mature women artists alike can take heart from Bontecou’s revised example, the significance of her comeback has even more profound implications for artists in general. Unintentional as it may be, these spindly cobweb Trojan horses carry a depth charge into the heart of the institutional art world, and its message is this: Artists don’t need any of it. Not the fame, not the glory, not the feedback, not the community, not the validation, not the authorization. There’s the dark mystery of the Void, and there are the vessels we craft to contain or navigate it. There’s the seemingly insurmountable stupidity and greed of human nature, and there’s the will to create. And that’s enough. To hell with the rest. The studio is where the fight is.
LEE BONTECOU: A Retrospective | UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood | October 5 through January 11
