Feminist Art Goes Back Under the Lens

As we head into a month full of exhibitions devoted to feminist art — including the opening of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, and a major exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles — a reasonable question might be: Why now? Why, 30 years after the heyday of the feminist art movement, are we putting this work under the lens?There are two answers: One is a timely confluence of efforts by several curators and philanthropists. The other, artists and scholars say, is that while feminist art’s influence is everywhere — from the recently established Department of Media at the Museum of Modern Art to the profusion of work in ephemeral or craft materials, to the interest of artists in the body and identity issues — this influence has rarely been explicitly acknowledged. If the upcoming events and exhibitions accomplish anything, it will be to put that influence front-and-center.“I think this is a kind of comingout period for a lot of artists,” the art historian Linda Nochlin said. “A lot of women’s art has been accepted, but an awareness of the feminist edge [has lagged behind]. For instance, our leading sculptor, male or female, in the United States today is by all odds Louise Bourgeois. And she is a feminist,” Ms. Nochlin continued, “but a lot of people buy her work, praise her work without paying attention to the strong feminist component of it.”Besides the opening of the Center for Feminist Art, with Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party” as its centerpiece, on March 23, and of “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution” at MOCA, this Sunday, a whole range of other events from now through 2009 are being coordinated through the Feminist Art Project at Rutgers University.The curator of the MOCA exhibition, Connie Butler, who is now a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, has been working on the exhibition in some form for eight years, since she was last living in New York and noticed that, while her generation was very curious about the feminist art of the 1970s, they did not have close knowledge of the work. At the same time, but separately, the philanthropist Elizabeth Sackler was looking for a permanent home for “The Dinner Party.” She eventually decided to offer it to the Brooklyn Museum, as part of a wing of feminist art that she would fund.This year’s activities began with a two-day symposium in late January at MoMA, “The Feminist Future: Theory and Practice in the Visual Arts,” which was also the result of a philanthropist’s interest. Sarah Peter came to Glenn Lowry several years ago with an offer to make a gift to the museum to support female artists.The women curators at MoMA proposed putting together a book, now in production, of works by women in MoMA’s collection. Later, they organized the symposium, which featured the likes of Ms. Nochlin, the critic Lucy Lippard, and the Guerrilla Girls.Ms. Peter said she didn’t know exactly where her philanthropy would lead, but it could potentially support the purchase and gift to MoMA of works by women artists. (MoMA has been criticized by feminists, including Ms. Chicago, for not having many works by women in its collection.)The feminist art movement of the 1970s was diffuse and diverse. There was a West Coast movement, in which Ms. Chicago was a major figure, and an East Coast movement. There were feminist essentialists, who celebrated women as goddesses, and others who criticized gender as a social construct.“The feminist art movement is sort of like Gothic art,” the author of a just-published biography of Ms. Chicago, Gail Levin, said. “It’s something we look back and name, but it wasn’t a unified movement.” Nor has the movement been fully acknowledged in the academy or in institutional contexts, Ms. Butler said. The most common response from the artists in the “WACK!” exhibition, she said, has been, “‘Wow, this work has never been seen together!'”Younger artists have a more complex relationship to feminism, as the inaugural exhibition at the Center for Feminist Art, “Global Feminisms,” demonstrates. The exhibition, curated by Ms. Nochlin and the curator of the Center for Feminist Art, Maura Reilly, looks at contemporary feminist art practice from around the world.“The whole term ‘feminism’ has expanded and redefined and opened up to account for new manifestations,” Ms. Nochlin said. “It’s not like a fixed dogma. It’s a very flexible, open, and contextual kind of practice.”Elaine Kaufmann, a member of the Brainstormers feminist collective, said she was surprised, when the group formed in 2005 to protest the poor representation of women artists in P.S. 1’s “Greater New York” exhibition, at how many of her grad school classmates declined to participate. Identifying yourself as a feminist, Ms. Kaufmann said, is “not seen as marketable.”On a panel of women artists of different generations last year, the young, Israeli-born video and performance artist Tamy Ben-Tor said she did not identify as a feminist. According to Mira Schor, who wrote an essay about the event for the online journal she co-edits, M/E/A/N/I/N/G, Ms. Ben-Tor said of feminism: “It’s fine if it serves the weak, but I don’t feel affiliated with it.” (Ms. Ben-Tor’s dealer, Zach Feuer, said she was unavailable for comment.)At the MoMA symposium, the performance artist Marina Abramovic told the audience that she did not want to be seen as a feminist artist, or even as a female artist. Growing up in the former Yugoslavia, she said in an interview, she was not introduced to feminism, because it wasn’t necessary. Women and men were equals under the communist regime; her mother was a major in the army and the director of a museum.“I never had a feeling that I was not treated equal, or my work didn’t have the same status of something made by a man,” Ms. Abramovic said. When she came to the West, the feminist label seemed like a ghetto. “The really good artists who have something to say, sooner or later they’ve been included in all the major shows,” she said. “And when I see the feminist shows, I always think — and I’m sorry to say it — that the work is not good,” she continued. “Art is good or bad; it doesn’t matter who is making it. Feminist politics, that’s much more interesting, but art is not democratic in that way.”Yet the advocates of feminist art argue that it has had enormous influence on the art of the last several decades — “probably the strongest impact of any movement on all art since the ’70s, male and female,” Ms. Nochlin said. “The emphasis on the body; on gender; on identity or the fluidity and mobility of identity, very much enabled by video, which is a one of the media that women have been particularly active in; the rejection of one-line thinking in art production, that there is any one teleological goal that art is tending toward. All this openness and variety, and various kinds of expression and self-examination and gender critique, is very much part of the women’s movement and has been picked up very broadly.”For More Information, Go Tohttp://writing.upenn.edu/epc/meaning

Feminist Art Goes Back Under the Lens

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