Art Review | 'Wack!'

The Art of Feminism as It First Took Shape

By HOLLAND COTTER

Published: March 9, 2007

LOS ANGELES, March 4 — If you’ve held your breath for 40 years waiting for something to happen, your feelings can’t help being mixed when it finally

does: “At last!” but also “Not enough.” That’s bound to be one reaction to “Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution” at the Museum of Contemporary Art here, the first major museum show of early feminist work.

One thing is certain: Feminist art, which emerged in the 1960s with the women’s movement, is the formative art of the last four decades. Scan the most innovative work, by both men and women, done during that time, and you’ll find feminism’s activist, expansionist, pluralistic trace. Without it identity-based art, crafts-derived art, performance art and much political art would not exist in the form it does, if it existed at all.

Much of what we call postmodern art has feminist art at its source.

Yet that source has been perversely hard to see. Big museums have treated art by women, whether expressly feminist or not, as box-office poison. On the market, feminism is a label to be avoided. When the painter Elizabeth Murray tried to assemble a show of art by women from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in 1995, she couldn’t find enough to fill a small gallery. MoMA has more work by women now, and she could do her show from in-house stock. But she still couldn’t write a history.

The Los Angeles exhibition, which has been in the works for at least a decade, does write a history, calling upon an international roster of 119 artists, most represented by work from the early 1970s. But because that history is endlessly complicated and comprehensive accounts of it few, this show is still a rough draft and its organizer, Cornelia Butler, chief curator of drawing at MoMA, will doubtless be fielding suggestions and complaints for months to come.

Doubters will ask whether the one- curator model is out of date for a globalist project of this kind. Others will question the mid-’60s-through-’70s time frame — why not longer, or shorter? — as well as why certain artists, including the many male artists informed by feminist thinking, are absent, and self-declared nonfeminists like Marina Abramovic are present.

The questions are sound, and we all have our please-add wish lists (Lenore Tawney and Rachel Rosenthal are on mine, along with many non-Western artists). Still, I hope Ms. Butler will accept thanks for pulling off the impossible with aplomb, and let the fallout be what it is: fodder for future drafts.

For me the “Wack!” of the title is a problem. It’s meant to echo the acronyms of various feminist groups — WAC (Women’s Art Coalition) and so on — that came and went over the years. But it plays too readily into an antic, bad-girl take on feminist art that diminishes it and makes it a joke.

On the other hand “art and the feminist revolution” is fine. Feminism was revolutionary. “Why have there been no great women artists?” asked the art historian Linda Nochlin in 1971. Because of a hierarchical social structure, built on privileged distinctions of gender, class and race that gave men, and only certain men, the time, education and material resources required to make “great” art, to become “geniuses.”

How to remedy this situation? Upend the structure, and invent a new kind of art based on a different definition of “great.” And that’s what feminists tried to do, though ingrained social values were hard to change.

The most visible early feminist artists were white, straight, middle class. Working-class women and women of color belonged to some other world, as did lesbians, Betty Friedan’s “lavender menace.”

Gradually but always incompletely, boundaries loosened up. In the early ’70s, with the Vietnam War in progress, women could see their oppression as part of a larger oppression. At the same time, in different forms, with different priorities, feminism, often assumed to be a Western phenomenon, was developing in truly radical ways in Africa, Asia, South America. There never was a Feminism; there were only feminisms.

How does any show lay out this multitrack panorama? One way to start is by abandoning linear chronology, which is what “Wack!” does, though this doesn’t mean it escapes accepted models of history. The presence of figures like Eleanor Antin, Louise Bourgeois, Mary Beth Edelson, Eva Hesse, Mary Kelly, Adrian Piper, Miriam Schapiro, Carolee Schneemann and Hannah Wilke adds up to a pantheon of textbook heroes — a market-ready canon of exactly the kind early feminism tried to disrupt. And certain foundational events are acknowledged. Faith Wilding is represented by a re-creation of the crocheted environment she originally created for the landmark Womanhouse in Los Angeles in 1972. Two of the artists who were with her there, Judy Chicago and Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, are also in the show, with Ms. Chicago’s mandalalike paintings representing a genitally centered, “essentialist” brand of feminism that many other artists rejected.

Here, to the show’s credit, they all mingle on equal footing with dozens of less familiar artists, some of them unknown even to seasoned museumgoers. Among then are the Indian-born Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-90) and Zarina Hashmi; Sanja Ivekovic, a conceptual photographer based in Croatia; the social activist Mónica Mayer from Mexico City; the British performance artist Rose English; and the German filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger, whose cinematic spectacles are like proto-Matthew Barney. The overall installation, which twists through the hangarlike Geffen Center, has an arresting start in Magdalena Abakanowicz’s 1969 “Abakan Red.” A suspended fiber sculpture dyed a rich vermilion, it suggests a monumental vagina. On a wall behind it, Nancy Spero’s “Torture of Women” (1976), a set of five horizontal scrolls filled with graffitilike drawings, reads like a hallucinated record of human pain. So, right away, two intertwined themes, the body and politics, are in play.

They turn up in figure painting, of which there’s a fair amount: from Judith F. Baca’s surging mural of migrant workers, to Margaret Harrison’s superhero shemales, to Joan Semmel’s elephantine copulating nudes. An animated film self-portrait by the Austrian artist Maria Lassnig is of particular interest: she dehumanizes and rehumanizes herself repeatedly before our eyes. So are six feverishly executed “Angry Paintings” produced by Louise Fishman in 1973, partly in response to her conflicted feeling about feminism as a movement.

With the first names of specific women — Marilyn Monroe, the artist Yvonne Rainer, the dealer Paula Cooper — scrawled in large, slashing strokes on paper, the paintings have a distressed look well suited to their expressive content. Much of the show’s sculpture — Senga Nengudi’s nylon stockings weighted with sand, Harmony Hammond’s ladder-shaped grids wrapped in bandagelike strips of cloth — is similarly unconventional.

Some of the most radical work of all, though, is in video and in the related medium of performance. And no combination of the two is more mesmerizing than “Mitchell’s Death” (1978) by Linda M. Montano, in which the artist, her face bristling with acupuncture needles, delivers an account of her husband’s violent end in the rhythms of Gregorian chant.

Another video is hard to shake in a different way. In the 1975 “Free, White and 21,” Howardena Pindell plays the roles of a black woman talking about art-world racism and a white woman accusing her of paranoia. A glance at the show suggests how on the money Ms Pindell’s polemic was.

Along with Ms. Nengudi, Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, the filmmaker Camille Billops and the wonderful conceptualist Lorraine O’Grady are the only African-American artists who have work in the show, with the collective called “Where We At” Black Women Artists present only in photographs.

The collective, which stayed together from 1971 to 1997, had a fascinating history, though you learn nothing about that in an exhibition that is frustratingly bare of wall labels. (A cellphone tour offered by the museum covers only certain entries, and is short on hard information.)

_______________________________________________________________

For more information on WACK!, readers should visit the Museum of Contemporary Art of Los Angeles website at http://www.moca.org/wack/. Of particular interest might be the short video of Martha Rosler answering questions about the controversial cover of the catalogue (see the picture of it at amazon.com). The catalogue itself has many color and B&W reproductions, short bios on individual artists, and the following essays: "Chronology through Cartography: Mapping 1970s Feminist Art Globally," by Marsha Meskimmon; "The Woman who Never Was: Self-Representation, Photography, and First-Wave Feminist Art," by Abigail Solomon-Godeau; "The Returns of Touch: Feminist Performances, 1960-80," by Peggy Phelan; "Hard Targets: Male Bodies, Feminist Art, and the Force of Censorship in the 1970s," by Richard Meyer; "Voices and Images of Italian Feminism," by Judith Russi Kirshner; "Abundant Evidence: Black Women Artists of the 1960s and 70s," by Valeri Smith; "Fugitive Identities and Dissenting Code-Systems: Women Artists During the Military Dictatorship in Chile," by Nelly Richard; "Painting with Ambivalence," by Helen Molesworth; "Their Memory is Playing Tricks on Her: Notes Toward a Calligraphy of Rage," by Catherine Lord; and "The Feminist Nomad: The All-Women Group Show," by Jenni Sorkin. The catalogue concludes with a chronology of selected all-women group exhibitions from 1943-1983, and a checklist of the exhibition. Sadly, there is no convenient bibliography, but each of the essays has footnotes for those wishing to do further reading. The exhibition will travel to the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington in September, to P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center on Long Island in February 2008, and to Vancouver Art Gallery in October 2008. Karen Bearor