On Earth with Senga Nengudi

The artist Senga Nengudi was not expecting my call. ‘I completely forgot!’ she apologized when I introduced myself over the line. It was the beginning of a busy day at her home in Colorado and late afternoon on my end in Geneva. Despite being taken unawares, Nengudi soon slipped comfortably into a detailed explanation of her artistic concerns. I had called to speak with her about ‘Topologies’, her retrospective exhibition of more than 70 works first shown in 2019 at Lenbachhaus, Munich, before touring to Museu de Arte de São Paulo in 2020 and finally to Denver Art Museum, where it is currently wrapping. I was curious to ask about what the end of such a major exhibition – particularly one in her home state – meant to her. 

‘Topologies’ manages to evade the air of solemnity retrospectives often exude. This is perhaps due to the fact that Nengudi understands much of her sculpture as literally decaying. Like the bodies they require for activation, her materials – knotted, tied, crisscrossed pantyhose; coloured water sealed in vinyl sacks; nylon-mesh masks and costumes – continue to stretch and grow older. ‘I’m interested in aging, and what that does to the body,’ she tells me. ‘From tender-type beginnings to sagging ends.’ In her most iconic series of works, ‘R.S.V.P. (Répondez s’il vous plaît)’, initiated between 1975 and 1977 while the artist was working with the Studio Z collective in Los Angeles, then later reworked as ‘R.S.V.P. Reverie’ in the early-to-mid 2010s, Nengudi makes abject bodies of ‘flexible, sensual’ pantyhose and sand. ‘It has to do with the passing of time,’ the artist says of the latter material. ‘There are certain things that will remain here’ – on Earth, she means – ‘no matter how much time, no matter how many wars or babies.’ Sand is stuffed into nylon tights. Knotted, twisted and stretched to their limits, these pregnant forms are strung up onto white walls. The transparent, fleshy gussets bulge and groan while their ‘limbs’ splay out like spiders’ legs. When you look at documentary images and videos of Maren Hassinger – Nengudi’s long-time collaborator and friend – activating the sculpture by way of physical intervention, the precarity of these compositions is made even more apparent.

Nengudi’s objects are by no means intended to last forever. In fact, the pursuit of eternity is of little interest to her. The maternally coded, tactile and ephemeral nature of her works is something she firmly embraces. It’s a ‘commitment to impermanence’, as she describes it, which she sees as another form of social resistance. This stance, she tells me, was not only motivated by her participation in the New York and Los Angeles scenes during the civil rights and Black arts movements of the 1960s and ’70s, but also by her extensive research into different modes of creative production across the globe. ‘I’m trying to get to the essence of these cultures’ resilience,’ she says, citing the mandalas of coloured sand by Tibetan Buddhists, Yoruba wood carving and Native American sandpainting – practices in which the preservation of the finished work is neither guaranteed nor pertinent.

Nengudi’s predilection for impermanence begs the question: why should her works be presented in an institutional – albeit global – context, if they cannot be activated as she and Hassinger intended? Whereas once performers wore and moved      within these sculptures as costumes and masks, now they hang like vestigial ghosts – citations of absence as much as anything physical and real. The relational conditions under which these artworks reside in institutional contexts do not allow for them to be touched at all – a far cry from the first presentation of ‘R.S.V.P.’, when gallerygoers were invited to poke, prod and shape the vinyl bags. When I asked Nengudi how she reconciles herself with this contradiction, she simply laughed. ‘I can’t reconcile with it. I really can’t.’ I reminded her of a 2018 conversation with Osei Bonsu, published in this magazine, where she confessed that she ‘deeply [believes] that the best kind of art is public art’. ‘Yes, and I still do,’ she replied.

For the retrospective to permit a truly interactive experience of her work, the artist told me, the format would have to be public-facing, perhaps with the inclusion of ‘tactile rooms’. It’s not hard to imagine passersby tugging liberally at the delicate structures, causing the fragile nylons to split at the seams and piles of sand to spill on the floor. An exhibition like this would most likely close after a matter of only weeks, even days. The destruction of Nengudi’s sculptural works is not a prerequisite of their activation but, if presented in such a free-for-all way, their demise would become an inevitability. 

Senga Nengudi ‘Topologies’ runs at Denver Art Museum until April 11, 2021. 

^{Main image: Senga Nengudi, Performance Piece (detail, centre panel), 1977, gelatine silver print, three panels: 104 × 83 cm. Performer: Maren Hassinger. Courtesy: © Senga Nengudi, Harom Outlaw, Städitsche Galerie I'm lenbachhaus und Kustbau München, KiCo Collection.}