Eat me, say the black teeth in an untitled 1961 work by the American sculptor Lee Bontecou. In the work, a black metal thing grins at you from a round hole surrounded by canvas, metal and rope. Bontecou, the artist who gave the black hole in art a whole new meaning, died last Tuesday in Florida, at the age of 91.
When Bontecou (1931) broke through in the New York art world in the late 1950s, her idiosyncratic work was admired, but critics also found it difficult to place. What did this female artist want with those filthy, sooted, discarded canvases that she’d stitched together or stretched over steel? Those sewn pieces suggested a kind of void on which a lot of meanings could be unleashed. Feminists concluded that Bontecou had imagined the vagina in an aggressive, industrialized male society with that black hole. They placed her in the second wave of feminism, with Bontecou as the portrayer of femininity that bites off or is neglected and yet holds its own, with the vagina as a metaphor and core.
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Nonsense, explained Bontecou, who had nothing to do with such characterizations. On the contrary, she was convinced that you couldn’t tell from a work whether it was made by a man or a woman. Those who wanted to interpret the holes had better turn to the black holes in space. In an interview in the 1970s, in which she looked back on her enormous success in the 1960s when she made wall-filling constructions from various materials, she explained that she found space an exciting concept. “Nothing was known about black holes, only that they were huge, unassailable and dangerous units. I was very excited when little Sputniks flew through space with those black holes.”
The discovery of the black hole
Bontecou discovered how to make black holes when she was in Rome in 1957 and 1958, on a scholarship she had received after completing her education in New York and Maine. While there she focused on terracotta birds, she discovered how, while welding and shutting off the oxygen from a welding torch, you could make huge holes, those of the deepest black. Bontecou . called the works that followed worldscapes. She also incorporated war materials such as helmets and gas masks into her wall sculptures, including one in 1964 in New York’s Lincoln Center. She confronted the viewer with the atrocities that man was capable of. Art as a machine or space model.
In the meantime, she had solo as well as group shows with Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and Frank Stella at New York’s Leo Castelli Gallery.
The success surrounding the work also had a downside. That happened when Bontecou exhibited work at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1971 that no longer had the hardness of the well-known work, but that looked more delicate and less abstract (there were suddenly fish and flowers made of plastic). The reception was mixed. The New York Times dismissed the work as “unsatisfactory.”
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Bontecou concentrated on teaching, disappeared from the New York art scene and seemed out of sight. Until she got sick. What to do with all that work, she later explained in interviews? She agreed to a retrospective of her work came in 2003, in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. In 2010 the MoMa in New York again presented a major retrospective exhibition with the revealing title All Freedom in Every Sense. An excellent summary of her work that seemed so infinite, full of black holes, some parts of which seemed to be about to fly into space at any moment.
Also read this review: Space traveler Bontecou