Published in the November 1974 issue of Artforum, the photograph of a naked Lynda Benglis brandishing a dildo will forever be remembered as the image of an era. Women artists, at long last, were stepping out of the shadows of their male counterparts — and Benglis was their self-appointed poster girl. Even more radical were her sculptures, lurid pours of pigmented polyurethane, expended foams, and glittery assemblages that stood in stark contrast to the austere minimalist and conceptualist aesthetic of the late 1960s and 1970s. Over the next four decades, Benglis has experimented again and again with sculptural materials, incorporating chicken wire, plaster, gold leaves, neon, and fabrics into her ever-morphing practice. ARTINFO caught up with the artist as she stepped out of the plane to attend the opening of her first survey in Britain, spanning Thomas Dane Gallery's two spaces in London St James's.

Some of your works from the late 1960s and 1970s have acquired an almost legendary status, but I'd like to start with the present. What are you working on at the moment?

About 15 years ago, I came to Santa Fe, and after a few years, I decided to buy a property in the desert. It's 45 minutes drive in between Albert Cooke and Santa Fe on the old turquoise trail — a scenic trail going through a small coal-mining place. It has become a playground and a kind of glorified hippie-like place. It's very charming, with a carnival atmosphere all the time. I built a compound, that's what I've been involved with, doing work there. It's a place for mediation and new ideas. Being involved with the landscape, trying to think about what is an object of landscape, and what is an icon of landscape are concerns.

I began imitating landscape images in the desert, north of there, in the Four Corners area where they have these kinds of forms. It's very much like the things that I was doing with polyurethane earlier, but these were small clay pieces. The first few were landscapes and then I had a skull. It just happened. They were very abstract and very powerful. They came from the body. Working on these, I was able to go back to other pieces that I had done. When I was a kid, I saw the Grand Canyon and I went there again with my sister much later. That's when I began to think of the "pours" as relating to rocks, rock formations, and the energy of the earth.

You seem to be much more reactive to your environment than in your earlier work.

I think it's true. The other work was internalized, and then I began to think more in terms of how we not only feel things, but how we see things. How we see an image, how we feel the image, the texture is the image. The perception of art really involves a lot of sensory reactions, not just imitation. I'm questioning all these factors.  

Do you feel that you relationship to the material has changed over the years?

Recently, I decided to get back to the torso forms, with paper, now stretching the paper. It's like a drum, it's like parchment, it's like skin and I've always been interested in the form-skin relationship. That's how I describe painting. What is a painting? A painting is an image that has a skin, or a skin that has an image. It's both!

I've started drawing on the top of the parchment-like paper, which was then pulled. I also began painting on back and front, phosphorus and blackout, and even experimenting with the coal dust from the mineshaft. A friend of mine ground up a piece of coal, we made pigment out of it with egg yolk, a dash of vinegar and so forth, and it was the most velvety kind of black. It was so interesting to make something kind of velvety phosphorescent, and velvety black. The kinds of things that I’m interested in were always the same, maybe I'm refining certain areas.

Your work in the late 60s stands against the then prevailing minimalism. How conscious of that were you at the time? Was it a gesture against minimalism or did you just follow your own route?

I think both. I felt that with the minimalists, right away, they were out on a limb, and that there was no return. They thought of really closed systems. Then they — particularly Sol LeWitt — excused themselves and took interest in other art and other ideas that they would refer to. But someone like Carl Andre did not. He was very puritan and had just decided to do what he was doing. I was friends with them both. I also went to see Eva Hesse and asked her about the feminist movement — and about that I felt like I was riding a wave. Not that I did wave literally, but I wanted to get the form, the material off the wall. I wanted the material to have a presence, like the explosion of a painting, or the flowing of a painting. And I wanted this presence to be physical and illusionistic. That's what happened. I've always thought of these older pieces as frozen, liquid images.

You mention feminism. You were at the forefront of a wave critiquing the art world's machismo — later picked up by people like the Gorilla Girls. How do you look at the art world now? Do you think it has changed?

You know, it's something I don't dwell upon. I've never had that kind of anger. I know it's wrong to try to categorize anything. But I had a sense of rebellion and stepping on [Richard] Serra's toes was important to me. I literally stepped on his toes once at a party in New York. I must have been stoned. First of all, he had announced to the world that he and Nancy Graves were breaking up. That evening, he was with his new girlfriend, Joan Jonas, and she walked in behind him. She's a very shy person, but she's also a very strong minded person, and a very good artist. For some reason, it infuriated me that they didn't come in together. So I went "boom," like that, and stepped on his toes. He marched off, then spun around and was really going to tear me up. He said: "why? Why did you do that?" So I said: "you know, I'm from the south, and that's the way we flirt!" And he said: "I'd do something about it, but I'm with Joan tonight!"

Judith Tannenbaum titled an essay on your work "Clandestine performer." Do you see performance as part of your working process?

I think performance is a part of life, for sure. When I was doing the "pours," and the pieces off the wall Robert Pincus-Witten said: "you work is too theatrical" and I answered: "what's wrong with theatre?" And when Bill Fagaly asked me who I would like to write about my work, I said would like a theatre person. One of them was Rex Reed, and the other was Tennessee Williams because I wasn't able to see his movies when I was a little girl. I remember the children saying: "that's a grown-up movie," you can't see it. I was very curious about what he would be like. I really wanted to meet him.

And you did? What happened?

Yes, it was awful for both of us. You see him in pictures and he had a moustache and he was very kind of a Southern gentleman. He flew in from Los Angeles, and was coming to meet me. He stayed at the Hotel Elysée, which was this seedy little place in the 1960s. I came in, he met me and he started telling me all his woes. He said: "I had to leave this movie about New Orleans to meet you." And we started talking about our lives.

What did he write about you? Do you feel that having him writing about your work brought some kind of insight?

He found them, these long knotted pieces, like nerve-endings. Nobody had ever written that before.

Do you regret anything?

I had the opportunity to ride in a helicopter over Woodstock, but I didn't do it. The fellow that asked me to do it was lawyer for Woodstock, and an old lover from Brazil. At the time, he was in working in Washington, the Bank of America was loaning money to Brazil to develop the jungles. And that repulses me. The guy I knew ten years before wouldn't have done that — and he had a wife. I didn't want to be "the girl," I just don't do things like that. Maybe I'm a little too traditional. They were not expecting million of people, of course. Sometimes I wish I had swallowed my stupid pride, but that was me! In fact, I don't, let's say I just regretted that I wasn't in the helicopter.

The Warhol thing was similar. Warhol wanted to do a movie of me and my Scottish then-boyfriend making love. I refused, and I was never sorry about that either. What I was able to do for myself was different, but it was the same idea: I realized that I didn't want to be anybody's object, to be looked upon. I just want to be myself.