A body of work that maximizes provocation

Taken from below — about hip level — the image highlights Benglis’s tensed left arm and the enormous, skin-colored, vein-riddled dildo that juts out from her crotch.

Benglis, who had already explored the idea of presenting images of herself directly to the public in magazines, proposed that she pay for the centerfold herself. Artforum’s editor declined, on the grounds that the magazine wouldn’t sell its editorial space. So Benglis bought advertising space, and the photograph was published at the front of the issue, just before the contents page.

A furor ensued. Five of the magazine’s editors, among them Rosalind Krauss and Lawrence Alloway, objected to the photo’s publication. They wrote a letter that was published in the next issue of the magazine explaining why.

The image was extremely vulgar, they said (rather stating the obvious). It was “a shabby mockery of the aims’’ of women’s liberation, they added (a claim not quite so easy to prove). And — slumping back into their mode of Marxist hair-splitting — they said its publication made the magazine an accomplice in the exploitation of the artist’s relationship with both the public and the writers who engage with her work.

Benglis, I’m here to assure you, did other extraordinary things. A terrific survey of her work at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art suggests that she has, in fact, been one of the most compelling, fearless, jubilant, and underrated American artists of the past 40 years.

But the Artforum scandal pretty much guaranteed that no discussion of her work would thenceforth ensue without first addressing “that photo.’’

It was, undoubtedly, a spectacular provocation. The year, don’t forget, was 1974; four years after the publication of Germaine Greer’s “The Female Eunuch,’’ feminism’s second wave was cresting.