1
SUZANNE BENTON’S RETROSPECTIVE: FACE AND FIGURE:
HIDDEN, REVEALED, AND TRANSFORMED
By Gloria F. Orenstein, Professor
Comparative Literature and Gender Studies
Univ. of Southern California
Los Angeles, Ca.
Dear Gloria,
I think the essay is terrific, but I can’t publish more than 2000 words at the utmost, and that’s with adding four more pages. I’ll need one page to also include the Rescue painting that you so beautifully discuss. I suggest that you keep a copy of this original and maybe we can use it at another time, but for this small catalog, we’ll have to trim down to 2000 words max. I’ve gone over the text, making comments, corrections of fact, and trust that you can take on the honing challenge, while keeping to important content while trimming relentlously.
Check over what I’ve done below – have miraculously cut about 500 words. It’s now down to 2638 (including title info) – and I think without undoing your intentions. So, I leave you with 638 to trim/codify and with my total confidence that you’ll do a great job!
Sending love and looking forward to your follow-up draft,
Suzanne
Suzanne Benton’s vast artistic oeuvre is a veritable cornucopia of original recastings of personae and narratives inspired by mythic, biblical, literary and art historical sources as well as by oral tales, and multi-cultural images gathered on her journeys and residencies in Africa, Asia, and Europe. Her pioneering innovations in the arts ranging from sculpture, painting, and printmaking to storytelling, masked drama, poetry and dance exemplify the consummate creative force that was unleashed in women artists as feminist analyses and reinterpretations critiqued our received canons and chronicles, transforming the legacy of our inherited stories, both written and visual, from HISTORY to HERSTORY. Suzanne Benton’s life and work create a vibrant mythos for her era, a period poised on the brink of radical feminist transformation.
Suzanne Benton was an Art major at Queens College in the pre-feminist fifties, and this exhibition makes it clear today that the fine, spirited education she received there, emboldened her to embrace the many challenges that faced aspiring women artists of her time. Suzanne valiantly dared to step forward, and join the pioneer women activists of the feminist movement who were initiating changes that would pave the way towards the liberated life-choices that now exist for women of the new millennium. Suzanne began by organizing feminist art events for N.O.W. in the U.S. Soon thereafter she took her ideas around the world to conferences, workshops, residencies, exhibitions, performances, retreats, seminars and celebrations. She has worked in over twenty-nine countries, sharing and exchanging stories with women and men at universities, at U.N. meetings, and on the grassroots level.
At a time when women were perceived to be too frail to learn mechanics and technical skills, Suzanne took up welded sculpture, working with metals and the intense heat of the torch. Literally forging new forms in her crucible, Benton has created an art that is a veritable feminist alchemy. Her metal sculptures and welded masks fuse together disparate elements, creating shapes that represent women transformed by more aspirational role models, women expressing their previously censored outrage and pain, and women empowered to explore radical new solutions to ancient violent and inhumane practices. Her masks of steel and bronze become the protective armor of the many faces of The New Eves, lifestories Suzanne enacted in her masked storytelling performances around the world.
As we explore the works in her retrospective exhibition FACE AND FIGURE we note the autobiographical element that is characteristic of pioneering feminist artwork and literature of the sixties, for it was then that we began to discover how a more authentic social history could be written based upon women’s actual lifestories. In the fifties, when abstract expressionism was the prevailing aesthetic, Suzanne Benton was working with the female nude as well as with images of children, inscribing the subjectivity of a woman artist’s life into a representational art, infused with abstract geometries, yet always foregrounding the subject matter of women’s psychic journeys in worlds from which their perspectives had been excluded.
Two important early pieces in Suzanne’s artistic development are the painting RESCUE (1963) and the monumental sculpture BELOVED (1974). RESCUE was painted before Janet, her third child was born, and while her beloved daughter, Lisa, was dying, tragically, at the age of three, of Tay-Sachs disease. Not knowing whether Janet would be born free of this disease, RESCUE portrays the mother and child in deep meditative embrace. The mother’s visage, like that of the Madonna, expresses a profound sadness. Yet, surprisingly, in the center of the painting, emerging as if from beyond the veil, is a mythic image of the Minoan Goddess, a figure of hope. This spectral Goddess figure seems to prefigure the dimension of mystery that Suzanne would later explore in her works that link women’s spiritual empowerment to the mythologies of the ancient world and of the pre-patriarchal Goddess civilization. The Goddesses who appear in Suzanne’s art in diverse media, such as the mask of the Japanese Sun Goddess, Amaterasu, have ever since become symbols of spiritual rebirth.
A new direction announced itself in her work as the statuesque figure of the welded sculpture, BELOVED, began to tower monumentally over her domain. This work marks the predominance of welded metal sculpture in her creative evolution. In this brave work we see the different faces and facets of the marriage and childbearing years emerging from within geometric structural recesses as our gaze peruses the crevices of the piece. Some faces are visible only from behind; others from the front and sides. Suzanne thinks of this as her memorial piece to the end of her marriage and of that stage of her life.
Later, another series of sculptures would also contain hidden images recalling the earlier faces that were tucked into the crevices of BELOVED. These are Benton’s Secret Future Works, where both images and messages are locked into a sculpture that is to be opened at a fixed date in the future. Suzanne appears in the photo in this catalogue with her Secret Treasure Box, SPIRIT OF HOPE (2002) to be opened in the year 2013. An image of the Earth Goddess or Mountain Mother is the Spirit of Hope, and her words recalling the patriarchal father God’s : “I am that I am”, proclaim : “I am THE SPIRIT”. A padlock lies between her breasts, securing the hidden messages locked within until the future, when the tree (of HOPE) that sprouts from her mountain peak will have come to its full flowering. These Secret Future Boxes are infused with a shamanic knowledge that our deepest desires (ritually placed and sealed within the box) are always and transmuted into sacred reality by the great, albeit invisible, mysterious forces at work in the universe.
In 1974, when Suzanne was working on the sculpture BELOVED, she reflected upon having read the works of Simone de Beauvoir and Helene Deutch and having heard an important radio interview with Anais Nin. Influenced by their analyses of women’s condition, Benton resolved that her work had to be about honoring a woman’s life while bearing witness to its many complexities. Benton would transmute the long silence of women into visual voices by breathing life into the steel forms through storytelling and drama. RESCUE and BELOVED are markers in the creative evolution of her work, which would develop along the paths illuminated by these two pivotal pieces—that of the empowered images of women, especially from Goddess myths and archetypes, and that of the steel women of strength, whose masked faces lend their visages of power to unmask women’s previously concealed intelligence and bravura.
In her poetic re-vision of LILITH and in her MASK OF LILITH, a 37 inch sculpture worn for her ritual performance, Benton gives Lilith, the rebellious first wife of Adam, a lifestory of liberation. Her LILITH mask has the strength of steel, but is infused with air, space, light, and sprouts tendrils that extend upwards, creating the rhythms and energies of the wind as she moves beneath the mask through theatrical space. In Benton’s version, which, to the poet’s “I”/eye, is an awakening from a dream, Lilith has left Eden, for it was too cramped in the garden, and although hounded by the angels she has found her new home by the Red Sea. Her world is filled with laughter, her voice is clear, and as Benton writes, emphasizing her initiation of a new liberatory myth, “She never ate the apple. She never died.” [1] In Benton’s poem and mask, contemporary women taking on the persona of the new Lilith, dare to choose freedom over servitude, and in so doing, find happiness, and immortality.
Linking the insubordination of Biblical and mythic heroines to the revolutionary acts of women from politics and the arts are her many series of Monoprints. Benton has enshrined portraits ranging from The Venus of Willendorf (25,000 b.c.e.) to Queen Elizabeth, poet Emily Dickinson (the only existing photo of her), writer Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mourning Dove Humishuma, and Mary Rudd Allen (influenced the matriculation of African Americans and women in the Oberlin curriculum) in her personal catalogue or women’s history museum. Made with Chine Colle (literally translated as “Chinese paper Glued”), a collage technique on handmade paper, she works with images collected in her art working world journeys transposes and embeds them in colorful, abstract, geometries of layers of painted and inked papers that become embossed, collaged and printed around the images of the celebrated foremothers. These monoprints with Chine colle seem to move our eyes through layers of time as we search for the origins of women’s strength. Suzanne’s selection of historic Kinswomen also exhibits the stunning results of her original research into the archives of our multicultural past.
On the 75th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, Benton’s historic monoprints featuring 19th century women writers and feminist activists were exhibited at Women’s Rights National Historic Park in Seneca Falls, N.Y. In THE SIGNING, a work from this series, a central image depicts Vice President Thomas K. Marshall signing the Women’s Suffrage Amendment, June 4, 1919. Images of suffragists and supporters of the amendment are embedded in the structural surrounds of THE SIGNING, welding the history of women’s political activism to that of this victorious moment of historic, political transformation. Images of Indian women and children in this monoprint remind us that when the suffragists visited the Indians on their lands and reservations, they saw the power of native American women, and were inspired by it.
Wherever she has traveled, Suzanne Benton has worked closely with young people in storytelling and maskmaking workshops. She sees these youths as the progenitors of our future world and as the recipients of the, often painful, heritage we have transmitted to them.
Her Portrait Boxes honor the children and students she has worked with inIndia, Bosnia, Spain,Ireland and at Harvard University. Unique to this new genre of Portrait Box is the second portrait on the inside of the box. Suzanne has explained to me that the inner portrait is created after the sitting. The life-drawn portrait appears on the exterior of the box, and the inner portrait is the memory left in the artist’s inner vision of the impact of her encounter with the model. This technique suggests the way in which the visionary artist trains herself to keep the psychic imprint alive in her mind. Benton sees her subjects as potential historical agents of change and she immortalizes them in these works.
The Portrait Boxes are exhibited hanging like mobiles. They lilt and sway in the air, moved by the atmospheric forces that surround them while continuously beaming their radiance upon us, like lanterns. Their penetrating gazes fix our attention as they flow into our field of vision. Then the inner portrait catches our eye, an after-image, like a psychic Rayogram, imprinted not by the light of the sun, but by the light of prescience and trans-historic memory.
In the late nineties and early twenty-first century, Benton returned to painting. A recent work, DRAGON’S DOOR (2002 ), was enigmatic to me until I visited the artist at her Ridgefield, Connecticut home and studio. There I was reminded of the fact that she has been practicing Yoga daily for almost forty years.
The Dragon’s Door in the painting, a door leading to the dimension of light, is made of copper run through and pressed over material applied to the canvas. It is topped by a red pyramid. Along the road to the door that leads to the mysterious dimension beyond, birds are flying towards the light. I now see this painting as symbolic of the teachings of Yoga.
The multi-media works in Suzanne Benton’s retrospective can be understood as signposts in the life journey of a pioneering feminist artist-activist from her student years at Queens College in the fifties to the full maturity of her work today, one half century later. We are privileged to accompany the artist on the path of her aesthetic and spiritual evolution, and to witness the joyous rebirth that comes to the visionary PATHFINDER at the fulfillment of her life-long quest for illumination. As we move with Suzanne Benton through her life and her work, we recognize that we have learned to perceive the hidden dimensions of our reality more fully as we acknowledge the existence of our long feminist political and spiritual history. Ultimately, as the metaphors take on a life of their own, we learn to understand the importance of a creative, regenerative Presence, diligently and gracefully deploying the Mask for revelation and transformation.
[1] Benton, Suzanne “Lilith”. EARTH’S DAUGHTERS. Ed. Burleigh Muten. (Boston and London: Shambala), p. 88.