Bodies, bodies, bodies

Laura Bannister

Senga Nengudi (American, born 1943), Performance Piece, 1978 (detail), Silver gelatin prints, triptych, © Senga Nengudi, 2023, Courtesy of Sprüth Magers and Thomas Erben Gallery, Photo by Harmon Outlaw.

In Senga Nengudi’s R.S.V.P Fall (1976), two pairs of brown pantyhose are splayed across a wall, their condition intimating bodily violence—whether caused by a person or circumstance, or the slow ravages of time. Each set of legs has been torn from its waistband. Two segments of long nylon stocking are pulled taut, ends pierced to the wall with silver pins. The central part of the composition resembles a tattered g-string and rump: a Y-shape giving way to looping outlines of buttocks (though they might also be breasts, or some other fleshy appendage). Looser, thinning strips of nylon are knotted together and frayed, like a worn-out body pushed to extremes. Elsewhere, a small sandbag is stuffed where a foot might be, causing the pliable fabric to stretch and swing. “From tender, tight beginnings to sagging,”  Nengudi wrote in 1977, “the body can only stand so much push and pull, until it gives way.”

Senga Nengudi (American, born 1943), R.S.V.P Reverie “Scribe”, 2014, Nylon mesh, sand and found metals, © Senga Nengudi, 2023, Courtesy of Todd Levin, New York, Photo by Timo Ohler.

Nengudi, who was born in Chicago and now lives in Colorado Springs, began her allusive R.S.V.P series in 1975, following the birth of her son. She was looking for materials that could mimic her body’s maternal changes—the swelling belly and breasts, the growing womb. Pantyhose, she found, were ideal. Decades later, and after she’d started remaking the series, she’d tell the New York Times that R.S.V.P was also connected to the sexual abuse she experienced as a child, and kept a secret from her mother. Just as easily as her nylon alludes to the body in metamorphosis, it conveys a resilient, contorting psyche, wrenched in all directions.

Even in photographs, Nengudi’s R.S.V.P compositions convey urgency and movement. They have a jack-in-the-box buoyancy, as though just sprung from an open purse. Crotches are splayed. Legs zigzag between walls and flooring. Foreign objects interject—among them, scrappy metals, ropes, and refrigerator parts. (Even the series name is a call to action: an invitation to reach out and touch.) Often, the configurations are activated with sound and gestural performance, underscoring their resistance to fixed forms or closure. Maren Hassinger—a fellow African-American sculptor who trained in dance—is a longtime collaborator. In seemingly improvised movements (immortalized in YouTube clips) Hassinger frees nylon strips from the gallery walls, bending and criss-crossing them in a kind of trance. She wraps flopping legs around her thighs and chest, echoing the sensation of actually wearing ill-fitting pantyhose, an itching body sock of thermoplastic that can seem at odds with your own skin.

Sarah Lucas (British, born 1962), Titty Bunny, 2018, Tights, fluff, wire, chair, 44⅞ x 20⅞ x 26⅜ in (114 x 53 x 67 cm), © Sarah Lucas. Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photo: Robert Glowacki.

“Initially, I would get nylons from friends and other people who would send them to me, as well as myself,” Nengudi recently told me. “I always wanted used pantyhose because I felt there was a residual energy. They’d been worn by other women, ideally retaining some of the stress they might have experienced. If you’re [wearing] pantyhose it’s usually a special situation: a job interview, a dance, a first date.” Now, the artist prefers store-bought Hanes hosiery, opting for small sizes where there’s a balance of stretch and resistance. Hanes are more durable, she explains, with a broader palette of skin tones, though she still sources occasional sheers from friends, and wears-in new pairs herself.

As with Eva Hesse’s latex works, Nengudi’s low-denier, arte povera sculptures will be difficult to preserve. If brushed by sharp objects, ladders bloom like climbing vines. In landfills, pantyhose disintegrates into its constituent fibers over 30 to 40 years, but Nengudi notes that a 70s piece installed in her home remains in good condition. “I tried a number of things [to preserve the] pantyhose in the beginning: dipping them in resin, dipping them in glue,” she said. “But I would lose the organicness, and I do love the immediacy. It’s hard to get that sense of body if you try to make it in stone.” 

Pantyhose cannot help but carry traces of bodies. Their form is yoked to the self and loaded with associations: cheap, disposable, glamorous, eroticized, punk, transgressive, smoothed over, conforming. For queer and feminist artists abstracting the body—or unsettling its clichéd representations—it helps that the product’s gauziness and palette denotes human skin: think of the bulging, oozing gossamer of Louise Bourgeois; the Bunnies of Sarah Lucas, jammed with kapok stuffing and arranged on office chairs like anarchic one-liners; or Wangechi Mutu’s paintings featuring dismembered pantyhose legs. In her writing on Mutu, critic Bettina Papenburg quotes Mikhail Bakhtin on the grotesque body, which “is not separated from the rest of the world. It is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, it outgrows itself, transgressing its own limits.” It’s a fitting way to look at Nengudi, too: an artist who, as a woman and mother, lives in an elastic body, one subject to breathtaking changes and the expectations of patriarchal desire. It complies and evades, is delicate and herculean. Sometimes, it is nylon.

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Laura Bannister is a writer and editor based in New York. She writes about art, visual oddities and the aesthetics of mass culture in America. Her work has appeared in over a dozen publications including Vogue, Architectural Digest, New York Magazine, The Paris Review and Frieze. For half a decade, she was the founding editor of Museum, a contemporary art and fashion magazine. She is the editor of Museum Books, whose sold-out debut, Out in the World with Gaetano Pesce, was released in 2021. For this issue, she interviewed the artist Senga Nengudi.