‘This threatening, and possibly functioning object: Lee Bontecou and the Sculptural Void,’ Art...

‘THIS THREATENING AND POSSIBLY

FUNCTIONING OBJECT’: LEE BONTECOU

AND THE SCULPTURAL VOID1

J O A P P L I N

This article addresses the issues of violence, spectatorial invasion and psychic

affect in the large-scale, wall-mounted metal and fabric reliefs made by female

sculptor Lee Bontecou in New York between 1959 and 1967. Bontecou’s reliefs vary

in size from a few centimetres square to several metres in length and height. Her

earliest reliefs such as Untitled, of 1959 (plate 5.1), were small and square, usually

with one cavity, located just off-centre, leaning away from the frame at an oblique

angle. The works were made by welding together a series of flat steel rods to form

an oppressive skeletal structure which builds up towards a central void of varying

depth. The steel armature was then covered with a skin of fabric and welded

metal or epoxy sections, fixed together by a kind of patchwork, except that instead

of cotton thread the fabric swatches were punctured and adhered to the armature

with short twists of wire. The finished result is a dirty and dank object, as though

a fleshy membrane or carapace, its large metal and burlap void jutting out and

into the space of the spectator: for example, the panels of blades and sharp

overhanging sections of Untitled from 1962 (plate 5.2). Hanging at head height, the

black hole in Bontecou’s work has variously been interpreted as a gun head,

volcanic crater and gaping bodily orifice.

In some of Bontecou’s earliest works the crater almost fills the frame, with the

black void threatening to engulf the entire surface of the work. Black, Bontecou

claimed, ‘opened everything up. It was like dealing with the outer limits.’2 The

limits of that void, and how the space or absence it articulates disturbs the

boundaries of both the viewing subject and the sculptural object is the central

problem addressed in this article. Rather than merely signalling a switch of focus

from object to subject – that is, the space outside of the object which installation,

performance and conceptual art have sought to investigate – Bontecou’s reliefs

stage the tension between the two. The object is not relinquished; neither is the

space and position of the viewer facing it. Rather, the encounter between the two

is dramatized.

ART HISTORY . ISSN 0141-6790 . VOL 29 NO 3 . JUNE 2006 pp 476-502476 & Association of Art Historians 2006. Published by Blackwell Publishing,

9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

RES TAG ING THE SCU LP TURAL ENCOUNTER

Although receiving much attention at the time (Bontecou was the only woman

artist represented by Leo Castelli, and for a while she was one of his most

successful artists, showing alongside minimalists Frank Stella and Donald Judd),

the sculptor’s work has been for the most part somewhat neglected in subsequent

histories of the period. This article seeks to situate Bontecou’s work within the

context of 1960s sculptural production whilst at the same time drawing attention

to those moments at which her work is most resistant to such categorization. That

is, it will be argued that Bontecou’s work both engages with and destabilizes the

sculptural encounter as it was reconfigured at that time. In tracking the shift

from the phenomenological reading of how subjects encounter objects in space,

which was so important to artists such as Robert Morris, this article discusses the

5.1 Lee Bontecou, Untitled, 1959. Welded steel, wire and cloth, 147.6 ! 148.6 ! 44.1 cm. New York:

Museum of Modern Art. Digital image r 2005 The Museum of Modern Art/Scala, Florence.

L E E B ON T E COU AND T H E S C U L P T U R A L VO I D

477& ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2006

movement towards a psychically charged encounter that is less stable and which

draws instead upon psychoanalytic readings of blindness, desire and aggression.

This is argued in relation to an important article on Bontecou from 1965 by

minimalist artist, critic and writer Donald Judd, who offers an extraordinary

account of her work which attempts to unite the formal and metaphoric aspects

of Bontecou’s ‘erotic and psychological, and deathly’ works.3 Written the same

year as his famous ‘Specific Objects’ article, in which Bontecou is also discussed,

Judd’s writing on Bontecou remains one of the most important analyses of

her work. The point is not that Bontecou’s work offers an alternative to all that

the minimal object repressed or denied, but rather, that at the heart of those

accounts of the minimal object lies a mode of encounter which is dramatized in

5.2 Lee Bontecou, Untitled, 1962. Welded steel, canvas, wire and grommets,

172.7 ! 182.9 ! 76.2 cm. Houston: The Museum of Fine Art. Gift of D. and J. de Menil.


478 & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2006

Bontecou’s staging of the relationship between spectator and object, where the

viewer is faced with that open, cavernous black void in which spatial relations

begin to disintegrate.

For a body of such resolutely abstract work, the kinds of sexualized and

aggressive readings that Bontecou’s works have engendered far exceed in number

those on the formal aspect of their appearance. It is not intended simply to dismiss

these eroticized readings – far from it – and nor is it necessary to replace them

with a formal language that seeks to re-orient Bontecou’s practice towards the

pared-down, minimal and geometric form which dominated 1960s practice.

Rather it is the uneasy fit between the two that structures the following argument.

Bontecou has suggested that the void in her work may also abstractly evoke a

range of human and social concerns: of warfare, fear and atomic destruction. In

her work on Bontecou Mona Hadler has drawn attention to Bontecou’s fasci-

nation with sci-fi literature and outer space, citing contemporary interests in

cybernetics, space exploration and the burgeoning spectacle culture of television

as important influences on Bontecou’s work.4 However, whilst Hadler is right to

point to the multivalent nature of the void in Bontecou’s works, from the erotics

of the cyborg to connotations of outer space and the unknown, it is necessary to

take seriously those claims for aggression and sexuality that were so prominent

in contemporary accounts of her work in order to expand upon the implica-

tions both for the viewing subject and the conditions of sexual difference

they abstractly, yet insistently, evoke. As Hadler points out ‘[i]t is in her formal

language, above all, that Bontecou most effectively expressed her social concerns.’5

The intention is not to distance Bontecou from her cultural or sculptural milieu.

On the contrary, by paying close attention to the particularity of her work,

important questions will be raised about how the viewer encounters and navi-

gates the sculptural object.

Bontecou’s work does, to an extent, fit into the recent history of monumental

modernist sculpture: David Smith’s open, welded structures, the gestural, welded

pieces of Anthony Caro and even the early totemic figures by Alberto Giacometti.

However, rather than unproblematically continuing that tradition of modernist

sculptural practice, the claim here is that Bontecou’s work instead enacts an

assault on both the staging of that spectatorial encounter and the object’s own

material status and objecthood.

In 1972 Carter Ratcliff invoked a bodily reading of Bontecou’s works in terms

of their conflation of the mechanical and biological, of ‘carapaces, shells, exposed

membranes’,6 highlighting the ‘powerful specificity of the openings they reveal –

eyes, mouths, vaginas’.7 Not all writers, however, were so keen to describe the

apertures in Bontecou’s work in terms of bodily orifices or as abstracted, eroti-

cized forms. In 1965 John Ashbery questioned the widespread sexual reading

of her work, in an attempt to deflate such metaphorically laden descriptions,

pointing out that ‘it is hard to feel very erotic about something that looks like the

inside of a very old broken-down air-conditioning unit.’8 Other writers, however,



were keen to keep sexually charged accounts of Bontecou’s work strongly in play

as they sought to connect her to artists such as Yayoi Kusama and Claes Oldenburg

and their engagement with soft sculpture, imagined as eroticized bodily corre-

lates. In 1967 Udo Kultermann stated bluntly that Bontecou’s works are ‘as much

a symbolic expression of the basic sex-wish as Kusama’s objects overgrown with

phalluses or nets’.9 Writing in 1972, Robert Pincus-Witten focused on the

apparently obvious sexual imagery of Bontecou’s work, referring to the ‘frequent

reference to a castration archetype’.10 Whilst not all writers and critics have

insisted upon such interpretations of the void in Bontecou’s work, it is an analysis

that has retained currency even today, and which, although tempered somewhat

by more nuanced accounts of her objects, is still referred to, if not fully

supported, in virtually all writing on the artist.11 Recent reviewers of her work

have still felt compelled to point to Bontecou’s ‘allusion’ to an ‘ominous vagina

dentata’.12

Just as resolutely abstract as the reliefs of Bontecou, the work of fellow female

sculptor Eva Hesse has also often been described in terms of the body, as though

sexual objects: absurdly inflated, elongated, bandaged and multiplied penises and

breasts. Hesse was very keen on Bontecou’s work, and, after visiting Bontecou in

her studio in 1963, noted in her diary,

I am amazed at what that woman can do. Actually the work involved is what impressed me so.

The artistic result I have seen and know. This was the unveiling to me of what can be done, what

I must learn, and what there is to do. The complexity of her structures, what is involved,

absolutely floored me.13

It is Hesse’s emphasis on the material aspect of Bontecou’s working process that

is interesting here, focusing not on the metaphoric or potentially figurative

meanings that might be wrested from them, but on the visibly labour-intensive

physicality of their construction. Both artists’ objects are subject to change and

deterioration. For Hesse, this was an important aspect of her later latex works,

which even now have lost much of their elasticity and translucency – many of

which are too fragile to display. Bontecou’s objects, whilst made from hard-

wearing materials, share something of this gradual breaking-down. The small

tears and ruptures which have appeared as the burlap begins to give; or the

copper wire that has gradually oxidized over time; and the occasionally faded

sheet of black velvet which cloaks the back of the works, resonate with a sense of

their slow disintegration.

Although both Hesse’s and Bontecou’s sculptures have been discussed as

though they contain a sexual or bodily ‘subject matter’, it is the abstract yet

bodily aspect of Bontecou’s work that connects her output to that of Hesse. Their

shared activation and deflation of sculptural space is seen, for example, in Hesse’s

Hang Up (plate 5.3), which Hesse famously described in terms of its absurdity,

because of its ‘coming out of this frame, something and yet nothing’.14 Mean-



5.3 Eva Hesse, Hang-Up, 1966. Acrylic paint on cloth over wood; acrylic paint on cord over steel tube,

182.8 ! 213.36 ! 198.12 cm. Chicago: The Art Institute. Through prior gifts of Arthur Keating and

Mr and Mrs Edward Morris, 1988. 130. r The Estate of Eva Hesse. Hauser and Wirth Z .urich London.

Photography, r The Art Institute of Chicago.



while, Bontecou is quoted as saying that she desired to capture ‘[s]omething soft

. . . something hard . . . something aggressive’, something of that absurdity so

often discussed in relation to the work of Hesse.15 In the light of such radical

renegotiations of the parameters of the three-dimensional object, to read the

central cavity figuratively as ‘vaginal’, seems, as Bontecou put it, ‘reductive’.16

TOWARDS RE L I E F

Up until Bontecou’s move into her better-known large-scale reliefs, she had been

experimenting with a number of other works which ranged from drawings and

prints to large freestanding sculpture. Although varying in format and medium,

these early works were united through Bontecou’s concern with depicting or

exploring the void. In the late 1950s she made a series of soot drawings in which

sheets of paper were coated with a thick field of velvet-black soot. In order to

produce these effects she used an acetylene welding torch in which the oxygen

had been turned down to its lowest setting, a technique she would later use to

blacken the surfaces of her reliefs. For a brief period Bontecou toyed with working

in a wholly three-dimensional box format, creating in the 1950s a series of soot-

blackened pieces which stood on the floor as though rat traps or a series of prison

cells. The large scale of some of these boxes points to a route Bontecou’s work

could possibly have taken, towards large, floor-bound pieces and the serial repe-

tition of the box structure. Actually, she moved in a very different direction,

flattening out the black box form and raising it to the wall. Working with relief,

yet retaining the suggestion of its having an interior space or centre, allowed

Bontecou to work with the implications of the three-dimensional box whilst

expanding its form and permutations in a relief format.

It was through experimentation with these boxes that Bontecou realized how

her work should develop. Up until then she had been working on semi-abstract

cast sculptures of chunky, fantastic-looking birds, begun whilst on a Fulbright

scholarship in Rome. Living in a terracotta factory in Italy, she would cast sections

of this earth-bound material, drying them out over welded structures which she

then cemented back together. The recurring thematic of covering, her use of

black voids and her interest in various materials for her surface coverings struck

Bontecou later on, once she had begun to create the large-scale pieces, when she

discovered that ‘the strange thing is that even after you have changed, as you

believe you have, and then look back, you see there is one thread through it all.’17

Explaining her move into large-scale structures from the small boxes that she

began to make on her return to New York, Bontecou says: ‘I welded a frame and

realised I could hold everything together inside it. So I got to work. And the pieces

opened up onto the wall. It was a nice freeing point. The pieces got larger

and larger.’18 Bontecou’s decision to lift her works onto the wall stemmed from

a dissatisfaction with floor-bound sculpture; in 1963 she said, ‘I wanted to get

sculpture off the floor – sculptures standing on the floor, they don’t have

anything to do with anything.’19 The welded structure became a controlling



device, so that the void could be contained within its larger frame. By opening up

the framework, Bontecou could work through the tension of the void’s presence,

allowing it to anchor the work to the wall, rather than letting it take over the

entire surface.

In his ‘Notes on Sculpture, Part 1’, in 1966, minimalist Robert Morris’s

objection to the wall relief, published at the height of Bontecou’s success in New

York, stemmed from his objection to the ‘limitation of the number of possible

views the wall imposes’.20 For Bontecou, however, it was precisely that ‘imposing’

status of her works, and the ways in which they controlled how the viewer

encountered them, that was the central concern of her large, signature wall-

mounted reliefs. For Bontecou, relief sculpture provided the means through

which to re-imagine the sculptural encounter. No longer painting, but not quite

sculpture either, relief was instead situated on that pressure point between the

two. This was not quite what Judd meant when he famously described what he

considered to be the best new work being made in the early 1960s as ‘neither

painting nor sculpture’,21 but, then, it is not that far removed from it, either.

Whilst Rosalind Krauss insists upon relief sculpture’s reliance on the pictorial in

terms of its placement, mode of address and demands placed on the viewer,22 the

focus here is on those instances where the situation is less stable or, to borrow

Judd’s language, less ‘specific’.

The materials used by Bontecou in her early works were always recycled, dirty

and reclaimed. She used old fire hoses, discoloured laundry bags, postal sacks and

stained sheets of burlap, alongside the more solid casings of old sections of

aircraft and other found objects – like the sections of dryers she scavenged from

the Chinese laundry below her studio. Occasionally, Bontecou would use denim

alongside the more industrial sections of burlap, where the already present seams

and stitching of the cut-up jeans are echoed in the joins and seams of the pieces of

fabric themselves, fixed to each other and the structure via a method of patch-

work. The use of the denim fabric presents a curious conflation of every-

day clothing with the rather more unsettling skin-like carapace evoked by the

stretched, stitched surface.

Trawling Canal Street for the remainders of New York City’s junk and piecing

them together to form large, composite, three-dimensional sculptures was not, of

course, Bontecou’s invention. She has often been grouped together with those so-

called ‘assemblage’ artists of the 1950s and 1960s, such as Robert Rauschenberg

and John Chamberlain.23 In fact, in a recent statement Bontecou cited Cham-

berlain as one of very few artists with whom she claims to have had any formal

connection at this time.24 In the catalogue accompanying William Seitz’s exhib-

ition Art of Assemblage held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1961, Essex

(plate 5.4), Chamberlain’s large, crushed metal relief from 1960 was shown

alongside Bontecou’s Untitled of the same year (plate 5.5), although ‘assemblage’

was a label Bontecou was never comfortable with, recently claiming, ‘I have no

connection to assemblage – that was stuck on by the gallery.’25



However, as Untitled demonstrates, the incorporation of the detritus or

emblems of everyday America is not the point of Bontecou’s work – unlike that of

Chamberlain and Rauschenberg. Rather, Bontecou’s reliefs are characterized by

the way in which she presents the void only to absent it. The void which punctures

5.4 John Chamberlain, Essex, 1960. Painted metal, 269.24 ! 213.36 cm. New York: Museum of

Modern Art. rARS, NY and DACS, London 2005. Digital image r 2005 The Museum of Modern

Art/Scala, Florence.



the surface of this work seeks to remainder that world, staging its disappear-

ance through the black hole that anchors the work and arrests our attention.

The result of Bontecou’s working process, a physically demanding and time-

consuming practice, is a paradoxical fusion of the sheer materiality of these

objects with the void’s sinister sense of intangibility and infinite depth.

L EAP INTO THE VO ID

Since the mid-1950s the monumental status of large-scale sculptural practice had

been rendered impoverished, damaged, awkward and contingent. Many artists

had begun to work in a relief format, creating objects that were situated

5.5 Lee Bontecou, Untitled, 1960. Welded steel and canvas, 182.9 !142.2 ! 50.8 cm, Richmond: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. rVirginia

Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Gift of Sydney and Frances Lewis: Photo

Katherine Wetzel.



somewhat uneasily between abstract painting and assemblage sculpture: for

example, Alberto Burri’s dirty, damaged Sacco reliefs, Lucio Fontana’s slit, slashed

and peeling works and Niki de Saint-Phalle’s Tirs, or shooting paintings.26 Just as

these artists generated relief surfaces punctured with holes and voids that

seemed to evoke a metaphorics, or even erotics, of violence, damage and

wounding, of bodily orifices or gaping cuts, they just as quickly pull back from the

brink of such associations in order to insist upon the surface as pure abstract, or

even ‘base’, material.27

Although Fontana had been making sculptures for many years by the time

Bontecou began working, it was not until 1949 that he first ‘penetrated’ his

canvas, as he moved into a prolonged engagement with the wall-mounted relief,

specifically with the holes, rents and sutures it could incorporate, variously

interpreted as sexual orifices or fleshy wounds. Like Bontecou, Fontana had also

spent the early stages of his career in Italy moulding small ceramic and terracotta

figurines and animals, before abandoning small-scale three-dimensional objects

in the late 1950s. By around 1957 Fontana shifted towards making larger wall-

mounted reliefs and, one year later, whilst working in Italy where she would

no doubt have been aware of Fontana’s work, Bontecou also moved from

constructing her small black boxes to the larger reliefs, and her own exploration

of the void and ‘blackness’. Fontana’s project of spatial investigation was also, like

Bontecou’s, caught up within a wider concern that seemed to imply the ruin, or

undoing, of the material structure of the object, claiming in 1963, ‘I am seeking

to represent the void.’28

In Concetto spaziale ‘Attesa’ (Spatial Concept ‘Waiting’) from 1960 (plate 5.6),

Fontana made one long gash in the centre of the monochrome surface. In other

works from this period, he would paint the canvas in thick, coloured paint, often

a bright, fleshy pink which he would cut and then pull back to create a central,

thickly lipped hole. The ruptured surfaces of Fontana’s ‘spatial concept’ works

unmistakably evoke aggressive, sexual readings even as they actively resist

figuring the body.29 In fact, although Judd used an eroticized, aggressive

language in his writing on Bontecou, when he compared her work with that of

Fontana, he drew a formal rather than sexual parallel between their reliefs.30

Instead of focusing on a connection based on an analysis of their ‘sexual’ imagery,

what interests Judd in the work of both Bontecou and Fontana is their formal

commitment to exploring the void and space.

Since the early avant garde the void has variously been claimed as utopian,

deflationary, haptic and optic, resistant and enveloping. Although on the one

hand Fontana insisted upon the materiality of his works as objects, for him the

void in his work also represented the transcendent and mysterious, claiming

that ‘[h]umanity, accepting the idea of Infinity, has already accepted the idea

of Nothingness.’31 For all Fontana’s and Bontecou’s shared concerns with the

material structure and support of the void, however, Bontecou resisted the lure

of the void as it had seduced the older artist. In this respect Bontecou’s inves-



tigation of the void shares more with the younger generation of postwar Euro-

pean artists, such as Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni. When Yves Klein staged his

infamous Leap into the Void in 1961 (a doctored photograph of the artist suspended

in mid-air as he leaps from the top of a building, a look of rehearsed transcendent

bliss plastered across his face), one year after his Le vide exhibition at the Iris Clert

Gallery, Paris, at which he displayed nothing but the empty space of the gallery, it

was through the well-worn tradition of the void as signifier of the infinite and

transcendent that Klein sought to assert his elevated position as artist–creator.

Unlike Klein, Manzoni chose to invoke such notions through a series of

deliberately deflationary gestures. One can cite, for example, his series of achrome

reliefs, made of bread rolls, cotton wool, wrinkled kaolin and fake fur. By

invoking traditional avant-garde declarations of the void and monochrome as

5.6 Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale ‘Attesa’ (Spatial Concept ‘Waiting’), 1960.

Oil on canvas, 93 ! 73 cm. in frame; 116.1 ! 98.2 ! 8.6 cm. London: Tate.

r Fondazione Lucio Fontana, Milan and Tate, 2005.



signifiers of purity, revolution and the artistic tabula rasa, Manzoni pokes

fun at that utopian blank aesthetic space or void in a way that points

in a rather less utopian direction. Like Manzoni, Bontecou’s deployment

of the void signals less an euphoric leap into the void as infinite, transcendent

space, than a sustained and literal structuring of the void as specific, material

object.32

SPEC I F IC OB JECTS

When Judd reviewed Bontecou’s exhibition at Leo Castelli’s gallery in 1963 he

wrote ‘Bontecou is one of the best artists working anywhere’,33 a claim he was to

back up in his article on Bontecou published in Arts Yearbook two years later,

where he proclaimed her as ‘one of the first to use a three-dimensional form that

was neither painting nor sculpture’.34 Alex Potts has pointed out how Judd

employed an extraordinary mode of description which, delivered in his

customary deadpan style, activates a heavily metaphoric reading of Bontecou’s

work that nevertheless retains the minimal language of description and insis-

tence on the importance of the formal properties of the specific object.35 Potts

argues that Judd’s attempt at keeping in play both the sexually charged encounter

these works evoke and the resolutely abstract specificity of the image as ‘specific

object’ is a result of Judd’s insistence on ‘having it both ways’.36 In one particu-

larly evocative passage, Judd wrote:

This threatening and possibly functioning object is at eye level. The image cannot be contem-

plated; it has to be dealt with as an object, at least viewed with puzzlement and wariness, as

would any strange object, and at most seen with terror [. . .] The objects are loricate; fragments

of old tarpaulins are attached to the black rods with twisted wire. Black orificial washers are

attached to some pieces; some have bandsaw blades within the mouth. This redoubt is a mons

Veneris. ‘The warhead will be mated at the firing position’. The image also extends from

bellicosity, both martial and psychological – aspects which do not equate – to invitation, erotic

and psychological, and deathly as well.37

Judd’s description highlights the instability of reading Bontecou’s sculptures.

Although resistant to interpretations of how or what her works might mean,

specifically that central crater, Bontecou has claimed that her works could

encompass almost anything; they were, she said ‘like a worldscape sort of

thing’.38 What kind of a worldscape might this be that maps a topography in

which absence is plotted, rather than what is actually there? When mapped onto

the worldscape of the spectator, the coordinates of Bontecou’s topography seem to

converge at the point where those missing segments or blind spots find their

analogue in the spectator’s psychic terrain, a worldscape that Bontecou claimed

she wanted to ‘mentally scrape’.39

Judd’s account of Bontecou’s work is a curiously sexualized one, in which he

draws out what Potts compellingly describes as the ‘psychosexual dynamic’ of



Bontecou’s work.40 In the space of a few paragraphs, Judd moves from a

description that absolutely tallies with the formal structure of the specific object,

to one in which this ‘strange object’ is ‘seen with terror, as would a beached mine

or a well hidden in the grass’.41 The black crater is understood as a warhead,

and the ‘loricate’ welded structure as a ‘redoubt’, evoking a language of war and

aggressivity in which ‘the image also extends from bellicosity, both martial and

psychological – aspects which do not equate – to invitation, erotic and psycho-

logical, and deathly as well.’42

Judd’s odd description of Bontecou’s works, encompassing ‘something as

social as war to something as private as sex’,43 suggests an uneasy attempt on

Judd’s behalf to incorporate Bontecou’s objects within a rhetoric of non-allusive

object-making which sought the replacement, not entrenchment, of outdated

European modes of painterly, illusionistic works of art. More than merely a blip in

Judd’s systematization of sculptural practice (although a brief glance at the list of

artists included in his ‘Specific Objects’ article raises questions of just how much

of a system or collective description Judd actually intended),44 this conflation of

the sexual and the violent is shot through with the notion of the aggressor as

fundamentally feminine. When Judd claims that ‘Bontecou’s reliefs are an

assertion of herself, of what she feels and knows’,45 he expresses an ambivalent

attitude towards female sexuality through his evocation of sexualized violence; to

quote Judd again: ‘the warhead will be mated at the firing position.’ This is clearly

problematic, and is a result not of Judd’s misogyny, but evidence, rather, of his

attempt to resolve the dichotomy he has unwittingly set up between the ‘allu-

sional’ and the resolute material specificity of Bontecou’s work. Potts points out

that Judd’s usually vigorous formal and logical style gives way to a rhetoric of

sexual fantasy ‘that is every bit as self-aware as anything he writes about their

formal logic’.46 In one passage, Judd invokes the deathly, the aggressive, the

sexual and the bodily, whilst all the time retaining the work’s position as specific

object, insisting upon the materiality of the void as ‘object’ – that ‘what you see is

what you see’, to repeat Frank Stella’s famous dictum – when he claimed that

‘[t]he black hole does not allude to a black hole; it is one.’47 The ‘having it both

ways’ of Judd’s argument is not so much a flaw in his text, it could be argued, but

a condition or symptom of Bontecou’s work itself.

INS IDE -OUT

Encountering these works (plates 5.1, 5.2 and 5.5) close-up one finds a taut, matt,

dirty surface. The apparently polychrome, painterly surfaces of Bontecou’s patch-

work reliefs, at first glance suggestive of cubist paintings, or abstracted fields of

washed-out ambers and reds, are revealed to be mere illusion.48 Rather, the

promise of modernist abstract composition is revealed as a deception. Loss of

distance between the object and the viewer suggests a rather more viscerally

imposing encounter than when viewing the object from further away. In most

reproductions the twists of wire adhering the patchwork membrane to the



structure are barely visible, and the depth of the void which disrupts the flat

surface is virtually impossible to make out. Bontecou’s desire to ‘go for miles into

the surface’49 is revealed only when viewing the work obliquely, either intimately

close or askance.

The twists of wire and frayed edges of the stained and dirty fabric of these

reliefs suggest that what is on show is in fact the rear view of the object, revealing

the rather messy, dirty and supposedly hidden-from-view aspect of the piece,

as though a kind of exoskeletal structure. ‘Exoskeletal’ was Judd’s term for

describing the spatial effects of Dan Flavin’s light pieces, a term which, used in

relation to Bontecou’s reliefs, involves less a delineation of space drawn in light,

than a complication of its boundaries, welded in metal.50 Bontecou’s ‘exoskeletal’

framework invokes both the fixed, solid armature of an object or living thing

and its uncomfortable flip-side, of the interior structure splayed or convulsed

outward.

The central void is, then, for Bontecou, both container and contained. The

joins, fixtures, processes and materials that go into constructing the work have

been forced out into the viewer’s space. What one expects to see is a seamless,

smooth object, whose workings and processes of construction remain unseen and

unknown. To reveal the underside of the work invokes an uncomfortable sense

that what is seen is the work somehow in reverse. With its roughly finished edges,

stained and patchy surface and jutting-out central cavity, comes the attendant

expectation that there is an alternative view of the work, a view that is more

acceptable, that is, of a ‘finished’ surface.

Untitled from 1961 (plate 5.7) incorporates rope alongside the more familiar

materials of grimy burlap, welded steel armature and metal casing, its large void

barred in this instance with a double row of sharp bandsaw teeth. Standing alone

in close proximity to this imposing six-foot high work is unnerving, and the urge

to read the crater as bodily, evoking biting, chomping jaws, as a blind staring eye,

or sexual orifice is almost irresistible. There is a palpably libidinal charge to these

unflinching bodily correlates, hanging at head height to meet, greet, or possibly

eat us, that invokes a highly charged encounter in which one’s body and position

in front of the work seem to be under threat.51

Bontecou’s abstracted sculptural language allows her to point to that actual

object (it is a mouth), and beyond it, from the specificity of the literal to the

phantasy of the void as orifice, as bodily organ.52 Bontecou was not alone in this

exploration of the psychic resonances of abstract forms. In 1967 Lucy Lippard

coined the phrase the ‘abstract-erotic’ in her article ‘Eros Presumptive’ in which

she discussed the work of Oldenburg, Kusama, Hesse, Keith Sonnier and Lucas

Samaras alongside Bontecou as examples of the non-specific, yet erotically

charged object.53 Instead, however, of fixing the void within a logic of either the

‘abstract-erotic’ or specifically bodily, it is the void at the point of activation, as

staring socket or vacant, hollow, activated orifice and black absence, which lures

the viewer and mobilizes the encounter between the object and the spectator. The



mode of looking that Bontecou’s work sets up moves from ‘ordinary’ looking to a

libidinal gaze, imbued with psychic phantasies.

Whatever else might be at stake in interpreting Bontecou’s works, then, from

the notion of their embodying a kind of ‘feminine imagery’, as Judy Chicago

claimed in 1974,54 to their being three-dimensional counterparts to the muted,

collaged patches of colour found in synthetic cubism, as suggested by Elizabeth

5.7 Lee Bontecou, Untitled, 1961. Welded steel, canvas, wire and rope, 184.5 ! 167.6 ! 64.6 cm. New York:

Whitney Museum of American Art.



A.T. Smith, it is through the engagement of the spectator, whom Bontecou wished

to ‘mentally scrape’, that the work is activated. The twists of sharp metal wire that

pierce and damage the fabric skin, fixing it to the edges of the cavity opening,

provide a stark warning to the viewer, as though a barbed-wire fence, a warning to

whoever might dare trespass inside. The small tears that have appeared in several

works as the fabric skin loses its elasticity over time demonstrate on the surface

the damage it may in turn inflict upon us, a threat stated even more viscerally in

those reliefs incorporating rows of jagged metal teeth. Any tactile, close-up inti-

macy with the work is abruptly curtailed by the series of spiky twists or sharp

teeth that will prove as damaging to our touch as they are to the surface they

already shred and tear, scratching and scraping our soft flesh. To scrape means to

scratch away, to remove or reveal an underside, that which is hidden. Finding a

literal counterpart in the construction of her own works then, whose ‘insides’ are

on display for all to see, Bontecou’s desire metaphorically to perform the same

operation on the viewer’s body, a subcutaneous scraping away of our selves,

resonates with aggression and violence.

ABSTRACT ION AND AGGRESS ION

The hostile encounter triggered through Judd’s use of such combative language

in his writing on Bontecou suggests that a war is being staged, both in terms of

the competing modes of description and language he employs and between the

position of the object as aggressor and the spectator. As Smith has demonstrated,

Bontecou’s interests in warfare stemmed both from growing up during the 1939–

45 war, when her mother worked in a factory wiring submarine transmitters, and

also later on as an adult in New York City listening to radio reports of violent

conflicts occurring in Africa.55 It is in a series of drawings made concurrently

with the objects that Bontecou most explicitly explored a thematic of violence

and war. In an untitled work of 1961 Bontecou deftly combines a bodily register

with the dehumanized image of a gas mask, a left-over remnant of the war,

persisting now as a chillingly pertinent signifier of warfare, of danger and

potential attack (plate 5.8). The blanked-out blind eyes of the mask in her drawing,

from which protrude veiny tubes, read as eerily inert bodily correlates to the

vacant voids of her three-dimensional pieces, evoking fragile, fleshy internal

bodily organs at the same time as they signal armour and protective carapace.

This hostile, frightening image of warfare is permeated with a sense of foreboding

violence as well as unmistakably invoking for the spectator the internal topo-

graphy of the human body. This hostility was felt keenly by the artist herself

who, when asked about the subject matter she depicted in her drawings, claimed

‘I can’t seem to get away from them. But I keep running!’56 The war being waged

here seems, importantly, to be not only on the object, or as part of its literal

subject matter, but also on the subjectivity and body of the viewer that it both

apes and threatens.



Judd’s intimate engagement with Bontecou’s objects, both formally, and,

more powerfully, in terms of their ‘erotic’ and ‘deathly’ connotations, would

seem fairly pedestrian were his comments restricted to her drawing practice,

in which a large number of semi-figurative renderings of gnashing teeth and

gaping mouths appear as gun heads and bodies under attack. However, although

the last page of the article does feature her drawing works, Judd restricts

his comments to Bontecou’s three-dimensional objects, engendering a highly

provocative reading of their abstracted forms. The object discussed at greater

length by Judd is an untitled relief from 1961, with a faceted surface of sections

breaking out of the frame at the top right of the image in what Judd describes as

a ‘crest’57 (plate 5.9). What is surprising in Judd’s account is the selection of

works that he discusses. Although he mentions the bandsaw-teeth barred

works, and cavities blocked with metal grilles, he is most enamoured by works

such as this Untitled. This makes the heavily loaded interpretation of the

objects all the more startling. Although he seemingly has in mind the other

more ‘militaristic’ works such as Untitled, also from 1961 (plate 5.10), with its

grommet-studded and metal-barred surface, he takes as his main focus the more

overtly abstract pieces.

5.8 Lee Bontecou, Untitled, 1961. Graphite on paper, 57.2 ! 72.4 cm. Collection of halley k

harrisburg and Michael Rosenfeld.



It was not until two years later that a response to the emergence of the

abstractly sexual was again addressed seriously, in Lucy Lippard’s article accom-

panying the show she curated entitled Eccentric Abstraction.58 In Eccentric Abstraction

Lippard examined the work of Bontecou alongside that of Samaras, H.C. Wester-

mann and Hesse, amongst others. Lippard refused to accept that the works she

discussed can be fixed in terms of a sexualized reading, claiming that sexual

metaphor is superseded in works by artists such as Hesse, Westermann, Samaras,

Lindsey Decker and Frank Lincoln Viner, with a ‘formal understatement’59 that

stresses the ‘non-verbal response’.60 She goes on to cite Bontecou’s ‘gaping

reliefs’61 as an example of how the ‘evocative element’62 may become ‘subju-

gated’63 to ‘unexpected formal ends’.64 Lippard claims that in these resolutely

abstract works of art, ‘[m]etaphor is freed from subjective bonds. Ideally, a bag

5.9 Lee Bontecou, Untitled, 1961. Welded steel, canvas and wire, 203.6 ! 226 ! 88 cm.

New York: Museum of Modern Art. Digital image r 2005 The Museum of Modern Art/Scala,

Florence.



remains a bag and does not become a uterus, a tube is a tube and not a phallic

symbol, a semi-sphere is just that and not a breast.’65 These artists, Lippard

writes, want their work to be freed up, to refuse stable readings and interpreta-

tions, preferring ‘their forms to be felt, or sensed, instead of read or inter-

preted’.66 One year later, in ‘Eros Presumptive’, written at that moment in the

5.10

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1960s at which she was allying her writing on those so-called ‘eccentric abstrac-

tion’ artists such as Eva Hesse, Jean Linder and Keith Sonnier with the theoretical

tropes of minimalism, Lippard claimed:

Younger artists today, however, no longer depend on symbols, dream images, and the ‘recon-

ciliation of distant realities’; they minimize the allusive factor in an attempt to fuse formal and

evocative elements. Ideally, form and content are an obsolete dualism.67

Although echoing to a large extent the language of specificity for which Judd

was arguing two years earlier, Lippard instead substitutes a mode of addressing

abstract form through erotic allusion. Lippard is using Judd’s rhetoric, at the same

time allowing it to incorporate the visceral, bodily and erotic metaphors that such

objects may entail. To an extent, then, Lippard’s claims in this article may be

understood as addressing those very problems that have been raised in regard to

Judd’s account of Lee Bontecou’s structures, and his claim that her works possess

both specificity of form and metaphoric imagery – or ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’

imagery, as he terms it.68 By 1975, however, Lippard had retracted those earlier

claims which privileged abstract form over representational function. Lippard

claimed that she felt obliged, as part of the male, intellectually oriented minimal

art scene, to incorporate these objects within a minimalist rhetoric, something she

was systematically to refute by the early 1970s, when she claimed that,

[T]he time has come to call a semisphere a breast if we know damn well that’s what it suggests,

instead of repressing the association and negating an area of experience that has been dormant

except in the work of a small number of artists [. . .] To see a semisphere as a breast does not

mean it cannot be seen as a semisphere and as endless other things as well.69

INCORPORAT ION AND THE F EMME CASTRATR ICE

It seems that for both Judd and Lippard, what is at stake in Bontecou’s reliefs is the

phantasmatic return of the body. What is so startling about this return is the

fundamentally violent, aggressive and feminized turn this body takes, particularly

in Judd’s text. This troping of the female figure as an aggressive and violent threat

has been formulated by Barbara Creed through the term the ‘monstrous-

feminine’.70 Creed challenges the viewofmost horror film theory, which always casts

woman in the role of victim. She argues that the origins of the ‘monstrous’ stems

not from the male body but from the female, maternal one. Creed reformulates

claims that focus on woman or the mother as castrated, instead claiming that she

functions just as powerfully ‘monstrous’, if not more so, as castrator. Creed claims

that when Freud and Lacan cast woman as castrated or as ‘lack’ in their psycho-

analytic models, they are in fact repressing the figure of the femme castratrice.71

Of course, this move to see woman as aggressor rather than victim is deeply

problematic, and is an issue Creed acknowledges, as she tracks instances of

the strong, wronged woman in films becoming psychotic, crazed and irrational.



To cast woman as castrator rather than castrated, whilst neatly inserting ‘woman’

back into the psychoanalytic domain from which she has previously been

remaindered as ‘lack’, raises difficult questions in relation to the patriarchal

framework of psychosis and aggression within which she is then placed. As

Mignon Nixon has pointed out in an important article on women’s artistic

practice, aggressivity and violence are not the sole preserve of ‘woman’, but,

rather, ‘aggression – and especially efforts to suppress it – rather than sexual

development, is the pivotal site of psychic struggle.’72 As Nixon points out in

relation to a Kleinian-based framework of infantile drives, aggression and the

logic of the part-object, aggressivity and a desire to attack, swallow, bite and

incorporate function at the level of all subjectivities. Klein’s most dramatic

divergence from Freudian theory, Nixon writes, ‘is her refusal of the primacy of

castration.’73 Rather than the father or mother figure being the subjects under

attack in the infant’s earliest stages of psychic development, it is instead those

part-objects which inhabit the infant’s environment that are subjected to

aggression. It is not an exclusively female construction, but a necessary stage of

pre-Oedipal development. It is on the site of the pre-Oedipal, that is, neither fixed

masculine or feminine, that the reliefs of Bontecou are also situated.

Eclipsing readings of the orifice as vagina dentata, or open mouth, is another

equally psychically charged orifice: the eye. As psychoanalyst Otto Fenichel so

succinctly put it, in psychoanalytic language, ‘to look at5 to devour.’74 Fenichel

probes the aggressive, incorporative role of the libidinized eye in psychic life,

citing fairy tales, Greek myths and folklore accounts which imbue the eye

with magical, or aggressive qualities. From the Basilisk’s glance that turns you to

stone, to the enormous eyes of Red Riding Hood’s grandmother that she

noted before being swallowed whole, even to Freud’s own library, where, in

Hoffman’s The Sandman, children are threatened with sand being thrown into

their eyes to make them sleep, the eye has haunted literature as a potentially

threatening orifice.75 Those ocular phantasies embodied within the scopophilic

gaze of the viewing subject become complicated when that ‘eye’ or orifice is, in

the case of Bontecou’s reliefs, vacant, or ‘blind’. Just as the role of the castrator in

Creed’s terms may be assumed by both male and female subjects, so too for

Fenichel, the symbolism of the eye within psychoanalysis is not fixed and

gendered, but open to slippage, for ‘the eye symbolizes not only the penis, but a

vagina (and a mouth).’76

Imagining the void here as a libidinized orifice gives rise to a shifting site of

sadistic psychic fantasy ranging from the vagina dentata, to the orally devouring

mouth, to the aggressive and scopophilic drive of the gaze which exceeds mere

‘looking’. If, as Fenichel claims, the first point of identification of the eye is with

the penis, following his own insistence on slippage, it may also be the vagina and

a mouth. However, rather than cast that switch in terms of a reversal, it may be

more profitable to think of it in terms of a removal of those terms. Between those

works by Bontecou featuring barred cavities, with their rows of bandsaw teeth,



and those punctuated with open, vacant holes, a shift occurs, between rejection

and invitation. However, the lure of the open void poses just as strong a threat to

one’s liminal bounds as the barred gnashing teeth; for utter incorporation by the

void involves an equally visceral act of dissolution.

‘ HUGE , INTANG IB L E DANGEROUS , ENT I T I E S ’ 7 7

Standing in front of Bontecou’s reliefs enforces the sheer physicality of a void that

asserts itself both at the expense of the spectator and of the previously safe space

of sculpture itself, as a thing to be absorbed and looked at. Like the tin can that

glints up from the water surface, back at the young Lacan sitting on a fishing

boat, the realization that things in the world might look back at us demands a

radical negotiation of one’s subject position in a world of seeing and being seen.

The void looks back, returning the viewer’s gaze, and drawing attention to the

insides of the object, that ‘depth of field’ which, as Lacan points out, ‘is in no way

mastered by me.’78 Instead, the object that ‘looks’ back ‘grasps me, solicits me at

every moment.’79 It captures me at the point of light, which traps the subject

and, in the case of Bontecou’s reliefs, plays out a fundamentally violent desta-

bilizing or effacement of the subject.

This article will conclude with another account of a subject suddenly thrown

into disarray, this time not by light, but by darkness. Offered, somewhat sur-

prisingly, by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose Phenomenology of Perception was

published in English in 1962, this account is from a text most typically associated

with minimalism, because of its engaged study of how we, as embodied subjects,

encounter and negotiate objects in the world.80 In one section, Merleau-Ponty

outlined, in a description of the way in which subjects experience objects in the

dark, a frightening encounter in which one’s spatially bound situation unravels,

and in which the distance between the subject and the object of their perception

is put under pressure. Merleau-Ponty presents an intriguing account of the

physical boundaries between objects and subjects. In this section of his Phenom-

enology of Perception Merleau-Ponty imagines the unbinding of those spatially

articulated experiences he discusses elsewhere. Merleau-Ponty is thinking about

the bodily experience encountered at night, when standing in absolute nocturnal

darkness. He invokes the notion of the blinded subject being devoured by space,

as distance between subject and ‘clear and articulate’81 object is, he writes,

‘abolished’.82 Night is not an object that stands before the subject, he goes on, but

instead it ‘enwraps me and infiltrates through all my senses [. . .] almost

destroying my personal identity.’83 Space is not a setting, an ether in which

things float, but a connective device which, in the light of day, allows one to

differentiate personal boundaries from those of others. This disarticulation of

one’s boundaries that occurs in the encounter with blackness describes the

spectator’s experience in front of Bontecou’s reliefs. If, as Merleau-Ponty claimed,

‘the outline of my body is a frontier which ordinary spatial relations do not

cross’,84 then the threat of transgressing, or abolishing those boundaries



becomes both physical and psychic.

Bontecou’s objects demand that the spectator approach with caution. They

are oppressive objects, with their own peculiar smell, emitting a strange aura, in

which the temperature inside the cavity feels several degrees cooler than the air

outside. For all their decaying fabrics and torn surfaces, Bontecou’s objects retain

a strikingly vital element. The apparently smooth, tawny brown and rusty reds of

the surface reveal themselves upon closer examination to be spiky, rusty and

smelly objects. The dank air is felt as though a shallow breath on the face, the

head-height void seems poised for action, whether to wink, blink, yawn, bite or

grin. It seeks one’s attention, one’s body as counterpart; it captures the subject;

and the absorbing draw of the velvet-black crater seduces one utterly. It demands

bodily participation, a nervy complicity. The threat to one’s space is tangible, and

the implicit suggestion that it might spill out and over, incorporating the space of

the room within its epidermal covering, or split its seams and burst out of its skin,

is unsettling, presenting a threat to one’s own body and entrapped position in

front of it.

This encounter between object and subject engenders a situation in which

one’s subject position is re-defined, or lost. What if the space between subject and

object becomes, as Merleau-Ponty describes one’s bodily experience in the dark,

‘pure depth without foreground or background, without surfaces and without

any distance separating it from me?’85 When the voids in Bontecou’s work are

understood in terms of a voracity – of vision, of desire, as lack – that identification

becomes rather more viscerally physical and potentially damaging. Instead of an

analogue, the object becomes one’s aggressor, the impending source of one’s

undoing of a sense of self.

If, during the 1960s, sculptural practice can be crudely schematized in terms

of the move from specificity of objecthood to the subsequent dematerialization of

the object, Bontecou’s works articulate the consequences for the viewing

encounter and attendant anxieties that such a shift demands. The spectator

becomes incorporated into the object, ensnared by it, through standing too close

to the void, in all its material facture and metaphoric status as ‘absent’, ‘not-

there’. The spectator may be swallowed whole, or devoured in small, scratchy,

bodily fragments. A phantasmatic shredding of one’s boundaries is threatened, as

the barred teeth and hundreds of dusty spikes of wire trace one’s outline,

scratching into flesh. The subject disappears in the presence of that object of

which they are made a part, or at least, complicit party to. The dematerialization

of the object of art during the 1960s is here reconfigured as a war being waged on

the space of sculpture with rather more far-reaching concerns than a shift in

medium or site. Bontecou’s work demonstrates that the war on sculpture extends

also to a war waged on the very space of subjectivity.



Notes

I would like to thank Briony Fer for her help and support during the preparation

of this article, both as a PhD dissertation supervisor and latterly as a colleague at

University College London. Many thanks also to Mignon Nixon, Alex Potts and

Elizabeth A.T. Smith. Thank you to the Henry Moore Foundation who awarded me

a Fellowship during which time I completed this article. Aspects of this paper

were presented at the 2003 Association of Art Historians Conference, London, and

at the 2004 annual meeting of the College Art Association, Seattle, and I would

like to thank the convenors and participants at both these sessions. Finally, my

thanks to Lee Bontecou for her support and correspondence. Thank you also to

Frank Del Deo at Knoedler & Company for kind permission to reproduce the

works by Bontecou.

1 Donald Judd, ‘Lee Bontecou’ [1965] reprinted in

Donald Judd: The Complete Writings 1959–1975,

Halifax and New York, 1975, 178–80, 179.

2 Lee Bontecou, as quoted in Mona Hadler, ‘Lee

Bontecou’s ‘‘Warnings’’’, Art Journal, 53:4, Winter

1994, 56–61, 59.

3 Judd, ‘Lee Bontecou’, Collected Writings, 179.

4 See Mona Hadler, ‘Lee Bontecou’s ‘‘Warnings’’’,

Art Journal; Mona Hadler, ‘Lee Bontecou-Heart of

a Conquering Darkness’, Source: Notes in the History

of Art, 7: 1, Fall 1992, 38–44; and Mona Hadler,

‘Lee Bontecou’s Worldscapes’ in Lee Bontecou:

A Retrospective, Chicago, 2003, 202–211, 209.

Alongside the writing of Mona Hadler, Bontecou

has also consistently expressed appreciation for

the way in which Dore Ashton has written about

her work, in ways which acknowledge the social

and political context of Bontecou’s work along-

side the more metaphoric associations they

also suggest. See Dore Ashton, ‘Unconventional

Techniques in Sculpture’, Studio International, 169:

January 1965, 22–5; Ashton, ‘Illusion and

Fantasy: Lee Bontecou’, Metro Young, 19: 1962, 29;

Ashton, Modern American Sculpture, New York,

1968; and, more recently, Ashton’s article on

Bontecou in Raritan, 24:4, Spring 2005, 1–12.

5 Hadler, ‘Lee Bontecou’s Worldscapes’ in Lee

Bontecou: A Retrospective, 209.

6 Carter Ratcliff, Lee Bontecou, Chicago, 1972,

unpaginated.

7 Ratcliff, Lee Bontecou.

8 John Ashbery, ‘Fires that Burn in the Heart of the

Void’, New York Herald Tribune, Paris, 20 April

1965, 5.

9 Udo Kultermann, The New Sculpture: Environments

and Assemblages, New York and London, 1967, 101.

10 Robert Pincus-Witten, Postminimalism into Post-

maximalism: American Art 1966–1986, Ann Arbor,

MI, 1987, 91.

11 The recent exhibition catalogue Lee Bontecou: A

Retrospective, containing essays by Hadler, Eliza-

beth A.T. Smith, Robert Storr and Donna da

Salvo, does much to resituate Bontecou’s work

within the wider context of contemporary

sculptural practice in the 1960s, away from those

reductive readings that focus solely on the

peculiarity of her work as explicitly sexualized

or bodily.

12 Christopher Knight, ‘Bontecou ‘‘Sculpture’’:

Hybrid Eruptions’, Los Angeles Times, Monday, 5

April 1993.

13 Eva Hesse, as quoted in Lucy Lippard, Eva Hesse,

New York, 1992, 56.

14 Hesse, as quoted in Lippard, Eva Hesse, 56. What

struck Hesse about this work was the way in

which it engaged space, claiming ‘it has a kind of

depth I don’t always achieve.’ (56)

15 Bontecou, as quoted in Hadler, ‘Lee Bontecou-

Heart of Conquering Darkness’, Source, 44.

16 Bontecou, as quoted in Hadler, ‘Lee Bontecou-

Heart of a Conquering Darkness’, 44. Rather than

read her imagery as ‘feminine’, Hadler asks, if

there is not something empowering about the

aggressive woman, the sexually violent counter-

part to the militaristic violence of men in war. Is

Bontecou, with her soot-covered laundry belts

and aggressive imagery, not expressing ‘a new

concept of women’s work?’ (44) This supposed

empowering of women through a language of

aggressivity and ‘angry sexuality’ (43) does little

to reverse the problem of reading Bontecou’s

work in terms of a feminized, violently sexual set

of images.



17 Bontecou, as quoted in Eleanor Munro, Originals:American Women Artists, New York, 1979, 378.

18 Bontecou, Originals, 384.

19 Bontecou, as quoted in ‘Loft-Waif’, Time, 1February 1963, 59.

20 Robert Morris, ‘Notes on Sculpture, Part 1’ [1966],in Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings ofRobert Morris, Cambridge, MA, 1993, 4.

21 Judd, ‘Specific Objects’, [1965], Collected Writing,181.

22 See Rosalind Krauss, Passages of Modern Sculpture,Cambridge, MA, 1977, chap. one: ‘Narrative Time:the question of the Gates of Hell’, 7–39.

23 See Michael Auping, John Chamberlain: Reliefs1960–1982, Sarasota, FL, 1983, in particular theinterview with Chamberlain, 9–13. See alsoPhyllis Tuchman, ‘An Interview with John Cham-berlain’, Artforum, February 1972, 39–43, andBarbara Rose, ‘On Chamberlain’s Interview’ inthe same issue, 44–5. For recent writing onRauschenberg, see Brandon Joseph, ed., RobertRauschenberg, Cambridge, MA, 2002 and BrandonJoseph, Random Order, Cambridge, MA, 2003.

24 See ‘Artist’s Statement’ in Lee Bontecou: A Retro-spective.

25 Bontecou, in a letter to the author, June 2002.

26 See Jill Carrick, ‘Phallic Victories? Niki de Saint-Phalle’s Tirs’, Art History, 26:5, (2003), 700–730 onSaint-Phalle’s shooting pieces.

27 See Yve-Alain Bois, ‘Fontana’s Base Materialism’,in Art In America, 77: 4, April 1989, 278–9. RobertStorr discusses the work of Burri in relationto Bontecou’s early burlap works in his ‘Seekand Hide’, in Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective, 2003,182–194, although Bontecou consistently deniedany connection with Burri and Fontana in herwork.

28 Lucio Fontana, from an interview in 1963, asquoted in Sarah Whitfield, Lucio Fontana, London,1999, 148.

29 See Briony Fer, ‘Bordering on Blank: Eva Hesseand Minimalism’ and Mignon Nixon, ‘Ring-around Arosie: 2 in 1’, in Mignon Nixon, ed., EvaHesse, Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2002, 59–85, 195–218, for two compelling accounts of theway abstract sculpture might be imagined interms of the body in relation to the work of EvaHesse.


31 Fontana, from an interview in 1963, as quoted inSarah Whitfield, Lucio Fontana, 148.

32 See Briony Fer on Piero Manzoni in The InfiniteLine: Re-Making Art After Modernism, New Havenand London, 2004, 27–45.

33 Judd, ‘Lee Bontecou at Leo Castelli’, Arts Maga-zine, 35: December 1960, 56.


35 Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination, New Havenand London, 2000, 274.

36 Potts, The Sculptural Imagination, 278.


38 Bontecou, ‘Two Conversations’, Print Collector’sNewsletter, 2:2, May–June 1971, 25–8, 26.

39 Bontecou, as quoted in Hadler, ‘Lee Bontecou’s‘‘Warnings’’’, Art Journal, 59.





44 This is addressed in greater detail in Jo Applin,‘The Encrypted Object: The Secret World ofSixties Art’, unpublished PhD dissertation,University of London, 2003.




48 Elizabeth A.T. Smith draws attention to theformal similarity between Bontecou’s surfacesand synthetic cubism in her article ‘AbstractSinister’, Art in America, 9: September 1993, 82–7.

49 Bontecou, as quoted in Hadler, ‘Lee Bontecou–Heart of a Conquering Darkness’, Source, 41.

50 Judd wrote that Flavin’s work allows the interiorspace of the gallery to be ‘articulated by light’that delineated not so much the structure of thework, but of the work’s ‘interior’, that is, theymark out the space of the work rather than thespace of the room as it fills and lights the room,making what Judd describes as ‘an interiorexoskeleton’ rather than an ‘interior structure’.Judd, ‘Aspects of Flavin’s Work’, 1969, in CollectedWritings, 199–200. For the most comprehensiveaccount of Flavin’s career to date, see essays byMichael Govan, Tiffany Bell, Brydon E. Smith inDan Flavin: a Retrospective, exh. cat., WashingtonDC, 2004. For an alternative account of Flavin’suse of light, see Fer, in The Infinite Line, 64–83.

51 The work of psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, whichpositions destruction and (phantasmatic)violence as crucial stages of psychic develop-ment, is pertinent here to a reading of Bonte-cou’s work, and is addressed in greater detail inJo Applin, ‘The Encrypted Object’. Mignon Nixonhas done most to explore a Kleinian model ofsubjectivity in relation to women’s sculpturalpractice. See Nixon, Fantastic Reality: Louise Bour-geois and a Story of Modern Art, Cambridge, Mass.,2005. See also Kirsten Swenson’s article onaspects of violence and warfare in Bontecou’swork: ‘Like War Equipment with Teeth’, LeeBontecou’s Steel-and-Canvas Reliefs’, AmericanArt, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Fall2003, 72–81.

52 See Mignon Nixon, ‘Posing the Phallus’, inOctober, 92, Spring, 2000, 99–127 for a Kleinian



reading of the part-object in postwar Amer-ican sculptural practice. In this article Nixondescribes the way in which objects (for example,Eva Hesse’s Ringaround Arosie from 1965) may setoff ‘a spiral of identifications in which the bodyis both drawn close and lost track of – becom[ing]ever more profoundly phantasmatic’ (118).

53 Lucy Lippard ‘Eros Presumptive’ [1967], reprintedin Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: a criticalanthology, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 209–222.

54 Lucy Lippard, ‘Judy Chicago talking to Lucy R.Lippard’, Artforum, 13:7, September 1974, 60–5, 64.The full response to Lippard’s question ‘Whatabout your emphasis on [. . .] ‘‘female imagery’’,which was wildly controversial, to put it mildly?’was ‘I meant that some of us [women artists] hadmade art dealing with our sexual experiences aswomen. I looked at O’Keefe and Bontecou andHepworth and I don’t care what anybody says, Iidentified with that work. I knew from my ownwork what those women were doing’.

55 See Elizabeth A.T. Smith, ‘All Freedom in EverySense’, in Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective, 174.

56 Bontecou, ‘Two Conversations’, Print CollectorsNewsletter, 25.


58 Lucy Lippard, ‘Eccentric Abstraction’, Art Inter-national, 10:9, November 1966, 28–40.

59 Lippard, ‘Eccentric Abstraction’, 39.








67 Lippard, ‘Eros Presumptive’, in Minimal Art, 212.


69 Lucy Lippard, ‘The Women’s Art Movement-WhatNext?’, in The Pink Glass Swan: Selected feminist

essays on art, New York, 1995, 83. Briony Ferdiscusses this point in her article ‘Objects BeyondObjecthood’, Oxford Art Journal, 22:2, 1999, 25–36.

70 Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Film,Feminism, Psychoanalysis, London, 1993.

71 See, in particular, Creed, The Monstrous Feminine,Part II, ‘Medusa’s Head: Psychoanalytic Theoryand the Femme Castratrice’ in which the avengingfigure of the wronged woman is addressed as aterrifying yet fascinating presence within theslash horror film genre. Creed argues, againstFreudian theories of sexual difference, that inthese films woman appears as castrator notcastrated.

72 Nixon, ‘Bad Enough Mother’, October, 71: Winter1995, 71–92, 79.

73 Nixon ‘Bad Enough Mother’, October, 78.

74 Otto Fenichel, ‘The Scopophilic Instinct andIdentification’ [1935], in Hanna Fenichel andDavid Rapaport, eds, The Collected Papers of OttoFenichel, London, 1954, 373–97, 373.

75 See Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, [1919], in Artand Literature, vol. 14, Penguin Freud Library, ed.Albert Dickson, trans. James Strachey, London,1990, 335–77.

76 Fenichel, Collected Papers, 390.

77 Bontecou in a letter to the author, 2002.

78 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts ofPsychoanalysis, London, 1998, 96.

79 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, 96.

80 See Potts, The Sculptural Imagination, chap. 6, foran important account of the ‘phenomenologicalturn’ in sculptural practice during the 1960s.

81 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Percep-tion [1962], trans. Colin Smith, London, 2002,330.

82 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 330.






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