120 x 190mm, 264 pages, Black & white printing, Perfect bound, Softcover, 2025

November 2024 marked 50 years since Lynda Benglis, 33 years old and a rising star in the New York art world, rocked the art establishment with the publication of her famed 1974 Artforum Advertisement. For this provocative work, she commandeered two pages in the front of the magazine with a glossy field of black space and an image of herself naked, wearing white sunglasses and holding a comically large double dildo between her thighs. Five of Artforum's editors denounced Benglis's artwork & two subsequently left the staff. Following the publication of Centrefold in Artforum Benglis says that Penthouse wanted to use the image, but instead she proposed 'a take-off on a traditional pieta, depicting a beautiful girl as the Madonna with a nude man on her lap'. They refused, 'we cannot do that, we cannot allow artists to make a centrefold.' Published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of that Centrefold, and shifting between 1970s New York and Los Angeles and the Corbyn years in Tower Hamlets, London, this Centrefold enacts an ambivalent 'full accounting' of Benglis's Artforum spread, as well as her gender 'mockeries' and Secrets series. Taking in nursery privatisation, artworld silencing and censorship, maintenance art, muddled Marxism, performances of motherhood, and masturbation, Louise O'Hare weighs up the various impacts and forms of disciplining at play in both column and dildo inches.

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