Two Nods to Feminism, Long Snubbed by Curators
Feminism is Freedom
Two Nods to Feminism, Long Snubbed by Curators
By HOLLAND COTTER
Most of the interesting American artists of the last 30 years are as
interesting as they are in part because of the feminist art movement
of the early 1970's. It changed everything.
It gave a new content to painting, sculpture and photography. It
pushed performance, video and installation art to the fore. It smashed
the barrier between high art and low art, and it put folk art,
outsider art, non-Western art, not to mention so-called women's art
(sewing, quilting, crafts of all kinds) center stage. What art in the
next 30 years will look like I don't know, but feminist influences
will be at its source.
All this should be obvious, but it needs to keep being resaid. Of the
liberation movements for which the late 20th century will be
remembered, few have been as disparaged as feminism, and that scorn
extends to the women's art movement. Even presumably well-intentioned
art-worldlings seem incapable of talking about it without
condescension, as if it were some indiscreet adolescent episode best
forgotten.
This attitude helps explain why no major museum has put together a
comprehensive exhibition of the women's movement. We have career
retrospectives of every market-approved minor "master" who comes down
the pike, and group shows of hot young up-and-comers who in many cases
owe their existence to the women's movement. But an all-out
institutional consideration of how early feminist art took shape, who
made it and why? Dream on.
So it's worth taking note that two modest surveys of such art are on
view, one at an alternative space in Manhattan called White Columns,
the other at the Guild Hall Museum in East Hampton on Long Island.
Even with some overlap of artists, they're very different shows. And
although between them they hold a fair amount of material, they only
graze the surface of their huge subject.
The first thing to know about the women's art movement is the scope of
its ambition. Basically its aim was to turn the existing social order
upside down; to wipe out an entire cultural databank of corrupt images
and replace it with new ones. In the late 1960's and early 70's many
female artists didn't have studios, let alone galleries and careers.
What they did have, in addition to talent and drive, was histories,
bodies and feelings, and these became the stuff of their art.
In some ways this was a magical time (as revolutionary moments can be)
when people were thinking idealistically and acting audaciously. And
in an American era of collectives, countercultures and consciousness
raising, the women's movement went through changes, from political
feminism to cultural feminism to many other feminisms built on racial,
sexual and spiritual platforms.
A sense of this spirit, however tamed and cleaned up, can be found in
"Personal and Political: The Women's Art Movement, 1969-1975" at Guild
Hall. Organized by Simon Taylor and Natalie Ng, the show concentrates
on what is usually identified as the first generation of feminist
artists and includes a large amount of painting, a medium now not
usually associated with feminist art.
But certain formative figures like Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro,
who organized the Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of
the Arts in 1972, were abstract painters looking for ways to cut loose
from a male-dominated field without abandoning painting itself. For
Ms. Schapiro this meant exploring non-Western decorative design, while
Ms. Chicago combined mandalalike patterns and words to address the
female body and psyche.
Painting by women took many directions. And the show points to some of
them in anatomical close-ups by Eunice Golden and Joan Semmel,
portraits by Alice Neel and Sylvia Sleigh, and language-based work of
Louise Fishman and Nancy Spero. Betty Tompkins's formidable Photo
Realist images of heterosexual intercourse, now on view at Mitchell
Algus Gallery in Chelsea, could easily be included here. And given
this diversity, the old cliché about the first wave of feminist art
being "essentialist" and fixed on anatomical images seems like
nonsense.
A smaller section of the show is given to performance and video, media
that brought feminist thinking into the art world mainstream. Certain
performances, like those by Carolee Schneemann, were done for live
audiences. Others were created as documents, as in the case of Eleanor
Antin's record of a weight-loss regime in the form of
anthropology-style photographs, and a sound piece by Adrian Piper
about social class and female solidarity, an issue that, along with
race, the women's movement badly neglected.
As to video, Guild Hall's program is a help-yourself affair. The tapes
are there; you play what you want. Without exception, they're worth
watching. Hannah Wilke and Martha Wilson do riffs on physical
self-transformation. Lynda Benglis explores the expanding art of
female erotics. Hermine Freed and Martha Rosler tap deep resources of
parody. Ms. Rosler's "Semiotics of the Kitchen," in which she plays a
robotic killer-housewife, is one of the funniest and scariest videos
of the period.
This film is also in "Gloria: Another Look at Feminist Art in the
1970's" at White Columns, which focuses on media and performance
works. In an exhibition essay the curators, Catherine Morris and
Ingrid Schaffner, explain that they made this choice because they
sensed that for young artists today "looking back 30 years, ostensibly
at one's parents, the issues and icons of feminist art may seem remote
— or worse, ridiculous."
However wry a view they take of this situation, what they've produced
could still be considered an example of historical editing motivated
by embarrassment at the past. And I suspect that many young artists
would find the work of Ms. Semmel or Harmony Hammond or Faith
Ringgold, all at Guild Hall, intensely intriguing and possibly
inspiring. That said, "Gloria" is on its own terms a good show, and an
apt counterweight to the one on Long Island.
Among other things, it gives a far more candid sense of how physically
confrontational early feminist work could be. For her "Interior
Scroll" performances, Ms. Schneemann pulled a text-covered paper
scroll from her vagina and read the words aloud; one such scroll is in
the show. Ms. Benglis is represented by a bronze cast of the dildo she
brandished in a notorious 1974 Artforum advertisement. The
Austrian-born Valie Export is seen on a poster in pants with a
cut-away crotch, her customary attire for guerrilla-style public
performances.
The presence of other artists who did other kinds of art, like Nancy
Grossman, Joan Jonas and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, is a reminder of how
many rich, seasoned careers still await full attention. Contributions
from the 1970's by Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman
foretell some ways the feminist torch was carried forward in the
theory-savvy 1980's and 90's.
And what about today? As Ms. Morris and Ms. Schaffner observe, a few
fashionable young figures have been promoted in old-style feminist
terms of women taking control of their own image. But in their case
the argument too often sounds forced, too transparently an effort at
star-making spin. At the same time, at least one area in which radical
versions of feminism are still alive is barely touched on in either
show.
I'm talking about work by lesbian artists, the "lavender menace" that
Betty Friedan said would ruin the credibility of the feminist
movement. These artists — young, old, undefinably diverse — have
sustained something like the movement's original, paradigm-shifting
impulse into the present, as is suggested by even a brief glance
through Ms. Hammond's indispensable book, "Lesbian Art in America: A
Contemporary History" (Rizzoli, 2000).
Clearly here's a subject that needs a full-fledged museum survey of
its own. So does the topic of the countless male artists, gay and
straight, whose work has been influenced, if not directly shaped, by
three decades of feminist art. I trust that alert young curators,
critics and art historians are already on the case. And maybe, in the
process of getting history told right, they can reconnect feminism to
its revolutionary roots.
Copyright The New York Times Company
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Michael Snyder
>
New Chive ID! New Chive ID!
Am I first? ;-)
wd
"Michael Snyder" <msn...@redhat.com> wrote in message
news:3DB47763...@redhat.com...
> Feminism is Freedom wrote:
> >
>
> New Chive ID! New Chive ID!
> Am I first? ;-)
sure looks like you are!
PETER BUONO
> >
>
> New Chive ID! New Chive ID!
> Am I first? ;-)
Only 'cause they changed my hours at work. ;-D