Senga Nengudi emerged one of the most intensive artist in the 1970’s because her works brought together the performance art and the abstract sculpture. Today, she still constructs poetic environments out of air conditioning units, sand, bubble wrap, panty house and other material used every day. In her hands, the materials have a symbolic meaning that relates to the vulnerability and resilience of human beings that forces both psychological and social to shape their world’s experiences. The essay will highlight distinct tones and styles used in Senga Nengudi works.
At the left of the photograph, Nengudi was squatting behind while being enrobed in a black cloth where her arms were touching the ground. The response of the material showed how the leg tautens into a gossamer thread and an assemblage partly attached to the gallery wall and part of it loosely hanging by the weight of the sand that is resembled in the human in form. The inner legs, on the other hand, form a torso. The gesture portrayed by the artist has a spiritual feeling that is imbued with generative force and creative possibilities which are like the descendants in the spirit of the Michelangelo’s Sistine God.
The career of Senga Nengudi formed the ‘head back and high’ art subject to an eye-opening show on May 27th at the Baltimore Museum of Art. The picture was knotted, twisted and stretched with sand into the floor. Being the latest exhibition in the gallery, the artist chose inexpensive, familiar materials that had symbolic resonance to create an intimate environment. The art was meant to observe the works and interact with the installation of the audience and performers to consider the factors that influence the human experiences based on how they move around the world. The features of the art involve a video and photography documenting about 40 years of collaborating performances.
The art also explores the themes ranging from claiming the public space to examine the dynamics and action of the intimate relationship of people. Importantly, Nengudi’s sculpture was not meant to be just an object but was instead seen as interactive. The ‘Head back and high’ art is an evident piece that showed how three photographers took part in the network of hose to test the field of physical possibilities. In one sense, the portion of work seems delimited, constricted and bound to her emotions. Similarly, while she feels free to explore the contours of the arts, Nengudi did this outside the frame by offering encouragements and verbal directives by stepping into the ground by his hands.
Nengudi’s work has a sense of political aspect which is undoubtedly called feminist both in the iconography and its materials. While the flesh-colored tone in their bulbous, and the sand-filled the forms, it evokes what the artist tries to describe through the elasticity of the body. For instance, from the tight, tender materials that begins by sagging, the body is seen to undergo a lot of push and pull until it gives up. The ‘head back and high’ art also utilizes the commonly found nylon stockings in different tones as a form of psychological and physical prosthesis. This is seen in the materials as they are stretched to their limits knotted, twisted, and weighed down with drooping sand, dangled or rather seen climbing on the walls. The person in the middle of the elastic materials resembles how the long stretched material may lead to expansion.
Work Cited
“Head Back & High: Senga Nengudi, Performance Objects (1976–2015).” Nengudi Details | Baltimore Museum of Art, artbma.org/exhibitions/nengudi. Accessed 2 Apr. 2018.
