May 1–3: Screening of Lynda Benglis, The Amazing Bow Wow, 1976

Stream the 30-minute video work here throughout the weekend
May 1 — May 3 at midnight ET

Lynda Benglis, The Amazing Bow Wow, 1976 (still), 4:3 video, color, sound, 31:07 min. © 2020 Lynda Benglis. Courtesy Video Data Bank, School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

The only video by Lynda Benglis with a discernible plot, The Amazing Bow Wow, 1976, follows the adventures of a talking, hermaphroditic dog given to Rexina and Babu by a carnival barker. A farce of the Oedipal complex, the 30-minute piece comments on the moral position of artists in society, and the ways in which artists are exploited as oddities and attractions by the media.

In a 2015 interview with Border Crossings Magazine, Benglis spoke about the work: “I had gotten a $7500 grant from Upstate New York and did The Amazing Bow Wow. I was Rexina and Stanton Kaye was Babu. I wrote this script which we fleshed out for acting. An immensely talented student of mine named Rena Small played the dog. Her boyfriend, who later became her husband, did our costumes. Stanton had given me this wooden toy Dalmatian and I conceived of the idea of a talking, singing and dancing dog who was a hermaphrodite. The idea was that the artist is a dog and we were stupid people who hated one another. He thought the dog was a he and I thought it was a she, and it was hard to do because it brought to the surface everything that people are, and are afraid of. It’s a peculiar little tape.”

The 30-minute video can be streamed on this page throughout the weekend, from Friday, May 1 to midnight on Sunday, May 3.

Courtesy of Video Data Bank at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, vdb.org