Splicetoday

Pop Culture
Apr 08, 2015, 06:45AM

I Want to See the Packaging

A 2015 Interview magazine interview with Lynda Benglis vs. a 2001 A.V. Club interview KRS-ONE.

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KRS-ONE: You're really only about shooting guns, smoking blunts, and promiscuous sex.

Lynda Benglis: Oh yeah. But I also like to wrestle with forms.

KRS-ONE: I want to see the packaging.

Benglis: I love paper. It’s like skin.

KRS-ONE: (laughs) Without that, we have nothing.

***

Benglis: But I remember I saved up $500, and I blew it all on Day-Glo pigments, big, 500-pound vats.

KRS-ONE: That, to me, is beyond music. Nobody cares about that.

Benglis: Exactly. There you go. You've traveled a lot more than I have.

KRS-ONE: The IRS is always at my door, constantly.

***

Benglis: That's kind of a painter's thing, a surface thing.

KRS-ONE: Well, yeah, on the surface of it.

Benglis: In the beginning, I poured onto polyethylene and linoleum, and I had to get it out of my studio—I had a small studio on Baxter Street, down from the police station and across from a school playground. It was just an on-the-floor project.

KRS-ONE: I think people are going to be reaching for this now.

***

Benglis: Is there anything you've seen that you feel is really new? 

KRS-ONE: It’s not gonna last. It’s not gonna stay this way.

Benglis: It was being stored in a pile of rubble that wasn't intended to be thrown away. But it wasn't functioning as a fountain.

KRS-ONE: That’s not because of white people.

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