Color Wheel is a series in which we identify a trending color in art, and post a daily image that illustrates its popularity. This week’s color is yellow.
Lynda Benglis has transformed Cheim & Read into a forest of cat-sized ceramic sculptures. What’s really nice about Benglis’s new little bits is that they rarely look like recognizable objects. Sure, this yellow one on the left sometimes looked like a squashed cigarette butt or a peeling banana—but the more I tried to describe what this sculpture and the others actually look liked, the sillier the descriptions became.
“It’s like a soft-cigarette-and-a-silver-banana-and-a-flower-stem-and-a-candy-wrapper sculpture,” I told a friend.
Ridiculous. Just saying that aloud made me step back and think there’s a time and place to leave well-enough alone. So maybe if an artwork can’t be described in fewer than say, five words, then it’s okay to stop explaining—there’s bound to be other ways to talk about art than what it looks like.
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