Partial undress in required to enter The Meeting, where a pile of shoes greets visitors, as Bennett has installed a white wall-to-wall shag carpet in the apartment’s living room to accompany what is presumably the gallerist’s furniture: a grey mid-century couch, a stack of art books, and a circular white coffee table on which The Joy of Sex is displayed for visitors to peruse—all so aptly suited not only to the era of the book’s publication but to the form and function of Bennett’s work. After taking off your own shoes and sliding across the soft carpet in socks, you’ll find yourself caught in the reflection of eight mirrors, each etched with a drawing inspired by the publication’s illustrations.
Given the content of the drawings, their re-presentation as mirrors—particularly the largest of the group which pictures a couple copulating on the floor in front of a full length mirror—recalls a view one might encounter in a bedroom outfitted with mirrored sliding closet doors. I used to think that such fixtures were the epitome of a tacky aspirational middle class, installed in apartment buildings with dirty beige carpeting and linoleum countertops for people deprived of good taste or self respect.
A mirror in this context seemed, to me, equivalent to Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation apartment building in Firminy where highly streamlined spaces for an efficient existence proved widely out of touch for the low income demographic that they were built for. Excess belongings, veritable garbage, piled up on the balconies when the individuals that inhabited this modernist building couldn’t afford or maintain the curated lifestyle and Platonic ideal that Le Corbusier believed would simplify their economic and domestic lives.
Mirrored doors, across from one’s bed, seemed to perpetuate the same false promise. Instead of picturing a refined existence, and an effortlessly, permanently sexy self, these doors would inevitably reflect back at the individual the overflowing stuff of their unmanicured existence—piles of clothes, unhoused makeup and toiletries, a stray condom wrapper—and the various bodily experiences that we deny experiencing, even to ourselves.
But I recently stayed in a beautiful apartment, admittedly beyond my means, that had mirrored closet doors across from the bed—and there is now nothing I enjoy more. Bennett’s work only serves to compound this realization. His drawings, like The Joy of Sex, outline various positions and are titled accordingly: frontal, hand work, matrimonial, breasts. While none are remotely surprising—I’m sure any and all teenagers have encountered far more explicit content—they are, simply put, satisfying: bestowing upon the viewer the opportunity to see into the private lives and behaviors of other people, to take stock of what was once societally believed to push the boundaries of “normal” fetishization.
On opposite walls a series of three and four sequences unfold across the mirrors, one picturing a man on top largely obscuring the woman beneath, and concluding, somewhat unexpectedly, given the rather, let’s say, tame nature of the positions, in bondage; and the other chronicling the woman’s “hand work.” Her eyes are at first closed, but in the final image as she rides her partner, his hands on her breasts, she makes eye contact not with him but with us, the onlooker. It is this moment, and this sequence, more than the others, that engenders a visceral experience.
