WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, PS 1, MoMA, , 20 April 2008

So this was the Big One. Had been hearing about, reading about, this exhibit since early last spring, while I was across the pond and it was happening at various distant venues: Los Angeles, Washington, DC. Didn’t feel impelled to rush down to Washington to see it last fall because I knew it was heading for New York, for me an easier destination. I had wanted to take my Contemporary Women Artists class to see it as a group, but given the current difficulties in making arrangements for group trips, my past knowledge of how undersubscribed these jaunts tend to be, anyway, and my current general cantakerousness, that was not to be. Nonetheless I could not help but see the show through the lens of that class, and to wish that my students had been there with me to see for themselves. I ended up spending over three hours there, abandoned at the end by both of my co-viewers when it turned out that, just as I was about to leave, I realized that I had skipped an entire section: one that contained portions of Mary Kelly’s “Post-Partum Document,” early paintings by Faith Ringgold, films by Rebecca Horn, among other key works. Couldn’t skip that – so I lingered.

I have to admit that I had a certain problem with the space. I’m not sure how the exhibit read in its other venues, where it was allegedly arranged thematically, as opposed to chronologically. Here, as said in the PS 1 Special Edition Newspaper, “because of the unique architectural features of the PS 1 . . . the exhibition will be less of a narrative and more about individual artists.” The “unique architectural features” are that PS 1 still retains the basic shape and format of its origin, a New York City public school. The other exhibit I can remember seeing here, huge sculptures by Magdalena Abakanowicz, made from salvaged tree trunks, must have been in the old gym. (Was her vaginal red Abakan in the New York version of the show? I don’t recall seeing it, so if I missed it, that surely underscores my issues with the disjointedness of the space)

In WACK! the works were displayed in what were former classrooms, although several are connected internally, forming self-contained galleries. Nonetheless, the myriad of doors and corridors, plus the arrangement over two floors, made the experience somewhat scattered. At some points it even felt like a hodge-podge, i.e. an undigested jumble. I’m usually resistant to over-explanation in a museum and feel that people should look at and experience the work, rather than the wall text. But in this case the dearth of commentary and direction was somewhat disconcerting. On second thought, it does strike me that lack of linearity could work well to embody the ethos of the period. There was LOTS going on, but it wasn’t necessarily following a straight, developmental path. There was no ONE feminism or feminist art. Also, as we so often say when trying to call Women’s Studies meetings to order, getting unruly feminists to obey is like herding cats……However, as I browse through the catalogue, I see that the logic therein expressed almost completely eluded me in New York.

The art on the other hand was fabulous. No poker-face, I kept ooh-ing and aah-ing and exclaiming “WOW” as I made my way through the labyrinth (ho! yet another apt metaphor). I kept bemoaning that I had structured my seminar all wrong, and that I’d wished I’d seen the show Before. What I meant is that, even though I have realized for quite a while that the alleged “first generation” (“essentialist”) and “second generation” (“post-modern”) feminist artists were working virtually at the same time, in presenting the material and the Big Questions to my students I started with Judy Chicago and the issues around Womanhouse and vaginal iconology, and didn’t get to talking about the artists who used post-modernist strategies till the latter part of the course. I think I would do it differently next time (were there to be a next time), in order to show how incredibly artistically radical many of these artists were, as well as being politically radical. That is, many reviews of the exhibit say that the work still looks fresh and that much of what has followed can be traced to that time and some of these artists. I was really struck by how true that is.

The first gallery I entered contained an entire wall of Louise Fishman’s “Angry” paintings (1973), some of which I had seen reproduced singly in books, and wondered at the time, “so?” Each of these 26” x 40” panels contains the word “Angry” and a female name, often identifiable as a woman artist or writer, many specifically as lesbian, surrounded by expressive slashes and squiggles of paint. This was definitely one of those instances when actual physical contact with the work of art was far more expressive than a photographic reproduction could hope to be. First, seeing so many panels exhibited together had a dramatic impact. That wall of color and line vividly expressed the pent-up anger and frustration of the numerous women who were named. Then, one was enjoined to look at the panels individually and compare: Angry Louise (her first image, brown green, graphite) Angry Harmony (Hammond, the two words balancing each other on separate halves joint with binding “x’s as in Hammond’s sculpture) Angry Djuna (Barnes, slanted green strokes above the word angry). If one accepts Craig Owens’s definition as text being integral to post-modernism, then this work surely fits that description, since it is built with text. On the other hand, I think of Chicago’s 39 plates in The Dinner Party (perhaps most effectively categorized as an installation, by the way). Part of their impact is in their quantity – she presents the “essences” of many forgotten women, as here the pent up anger of many women is embodied, named, and given voice.

In my class we spent a lot of time discussing performance and its use by women artists as a means of shifting the paradigm. Just the week before, one of my students had presented an excellent analysis of Martha Rosler’s “Semiotics of the Kitchen” (1975) in which Rosler is filmed in her kitchen, wearing an apron, holding up common utensils and clearly enunciating their names in alphabetical order. For the most part she presents them in a sang-froid, deadpan manner, but as she goes along there’s an edge of hysteria that creeps into her performance so that by the end she’s thrusting a knife at the viewer, dumping food on the floor, and using knife slashes to spell out the last three letters of the alphabet. Although my student analyzed this work as exemplifying post-modern theory, it’s interesting how the subject relates to Womanhouse, and its kitchens. The important gendered meaning of “Kitchen Things” (phrase from feminist ur-text “Trifles”). The way in which for many women domesticity is a trap, as in “ the problem that has no name” (Friedan), the plight of the allegedly happy housewife of the 50s – so that Rosler’s anger and frustration seethes below the seemingly benign surface – until it bubbles over, as it were.

Another video to which I gave full attention was Howardena Pindell’s “Free, White, and 21,” (1980) which I believe I had seen before in an exhibit at Brandeis in the 1990s. This is also a classic – for one thing, like so many performances by women, it deals with issues relating to the body (here as in skin color), and in class we studied an entire unit on Performing the Body, which could have been made up with videos from this exhibit. But Pindell’s work is primarily concerned with the racial body, and with the denial and invalidation the discrimination she experienced as an African-American in this culture. The video takes place as a dialogue between her unadorned “black” self and her self in white face: as her African-American self recounts a series of traumatic life incidents in which she encountered racial discrimination, a white-faced version, replete with blonde wig, dismisses these incidents by saying in a condescending voice, “you must be paranoid… I don’t know anyone who’s ever had those things happen to them.” A big part of the impact is achieved by showing the putting on and taking off of the white face – there’s a visceral response to the skin-like nature of the latex that forces the viewer to think about skin, its color, and the impact of its color in a racist society.

I think the biggest understanding that I gained from this exhibit, perhaps as a consequence of these works having been placed in historical context, is that just as the political stance expressed in some of the works was revolutionary, so to was the artistic practice through which it was expressed. I’ve always looked at feminist art between 1970 and 1985 from the perspective of its political intention, which explains for example, why I structured my course so that first we read Nochlin’s 1971 article discussing the omission of women from the canon and calling for a paradigm shift, moving on to Berger’s discussion of the tyranny of the gaze, and finally to Tickner’s article in which she posits four strategies for reclaiming the “colonized territory of the female body.”

In the 1970s women artists, or at least political ones, deliberately worked through their art, to redress their omitted and objectified status. However, this exhibit emphasizes how incredibly forward-looking that art was -- as art. Much of it is conceptual. There were a number of installations and site specific works. Non-high art media and found objects were used copiously, embodying a “filiation” from Duchamp. Many artists engaged in a plethora of different types of performances. It’s these aspects that have led many critics to characterize the work as fresh, new, “important” – because as it turns out, these elements have characterized the direction which “mainstream” artistic developments seems to have followed since the seventies. In other words, the challenges to the canon and to the methods of art making presented by artists who were acting from a feminist agenda are consistent with and perhaps even influential on, the challenges made by other artists, female and male, who might not have been making them in the name of feminism. I guess that’s the big surprise. For those who approach the work from a more mainstream perspective (as in “hey, these feminist crackpots actually were artistically savvy”) or for those like me who say, hey these feminist pioneers were actually artistic pioneers, as well. Because, the important thing for an artist is to work it out in her (or his) art. And this exhibition establishes and history has shown, that in fact these artists have done just that.