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Encased in Plexiglass, the paper scroll that Carolee
Schneeman pulled from her vagina in 1974 is crumbly and brown. While
it's sobering to see such a powerful performance reduced to an artifact,
the scroll also functions like a relic: proof that 30-plus years
ago Schneeman and others redefined what it meant to be a woman and
an artist.
Schneeman is one of 119 artists and artists' groups
featured in "WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution" at
the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Spanning the years
1965 - 1980 and including work from 21 countries, the massive survey
was organized by MOCA and curated by Connie Butler, chief curator
of drawings at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Before moving
to New York in 2005, Butler was assistant curator at MOCA, where
she oversaw the Works on Paper Study Center.
In "WACK!" she carefully toes the line between
reinforcing the centrality of well-known feminist artists and opening
up the discussion to accommodate work from other places and perspectives.
The result is an exhibit that appears unruly, but turns out to be
more cohesive than expected.
This impression is due in large part to the exhibit's
unusual installation. Instead of being arranged chronologically
or in strict thematic rooms, the works are presented in a tangle
of angular, interlocking spaces. While the layout makes way-finding
difficult, it also allows seemingly dissimilar works to play off
one another in unexpected ways. What emerges is not so much a picture
of a cohesive movement, but a network of common thought.
Magdalena Abakanowicz's massive, hanging, vulva-shaped
textile "Abakan Red" from 1969 finds unexpected resonance
with the close-ups of female mouths in the 1973 video "In-Out
(Antropofagia)" by Italian artist Anna Maria Maiolino. Both
allude to the identification of the feminine with receptive orifices,
finding in it a source of power rather than submission. Abakanowicz
accomplishes this effect with monumental scale; Maiolino with a
sequence of images that builds from passivity to a menacing, metaphorical
vagina dentate.
Shigeko Kubota explores the excess associated with
women's bodily functions in "Vagina Painting," a 1965
performance in which she created an abstract painting by expelling
paint from her vagina. Nearby is Lynda Benglis' "Odalisque
(Hey, Hey, Frankenthaler)" from 1969, an ugly, congealed stream
of multi-colored latex strewn across the floor. Both works reclaim
the masculinized realm of painting by comparing it to female bodily
excretions. The obvious target is Jackson Pollack (and in Benglis'
case the token female abstract painter Helen Frankenthaler), whose
floor-based drip paintings are considered the pinnacle of abstract
expressionism. Kubota and Benglis both expose the inequities that
deem some "excretions" high art and others a female mess.
What's most striking about "WACK!" is that
despite its age, much of the work still looks raw, even startling.
Colette Whiten's sculpture "Structure #7" (1972) looks
like nothing less than a medieval torture table for two, complete
with gags and leg stocks -- its implications of bondage and subjugation
are heavy-handed but communicate an urgency and directness unusual
today. The blunt image of a bloodied, exposed woman bent over a
table, Ana Mendieta's "Rape Scene" (1973) is still disturbing.
And the seriousness with which Cosey Fanni Tutti undertook her forays
into pornographic modeling -- there are three walls and four display
cases devoted to her "Magazine Actions" posing for commercial
porn magazines -- make latter-day flirtations with pornographic
imagery seem tame.
It's not surprising that the work focuses so much
on bodies, and that those bodies are overwhelmingly white and middle
class. Issues of race, class, and sexuality, which have always been
entwined with feminism, haven't always received their due in mainstream
appraisals of the movement. "WACK!" is no different in
this regard, although it does make some attempt to broaden the discussion
by including works like the Edenic, lesbian erotic films of Barbara
Hammer, or Lorraine O'Grady's performances as "Mlle Bourgeouis
Noire" (1981). In these appearances, O'Grady, who is black,
attended society events dressed in a gown pieced together out of
white gloves, brandishing a cat-o-nine-tails. By juxtaposing refinement
and brutal domination, she injected the performance of femininity
with race and class struggles.
Hannah Wilke's screenprint "Marxism and Art:
Beware of Fascist Feminism" from 1977 reflects on the dangers
of construing the movement as monolithic. Featuring the title slogan
and an image of Wilke, topless, sporting a men's necktie, it uses
the language of the agit-prop poster to deliver a warning about
the limitations of polarizing positions. This contradiction perfectly
embodies the dilemma posed by "WACK!" How can feminism
receive mainstream recognition as an important cultural force and
avoid stultifying balkanization? If we lived in a world where gender
equality had been achieved, "WACK!" would be a collection
of artifacts. Instead, it is a reminder that there is still more
work to be done.
This review originally appeared
in the July 2007 issue of art
ltd. Reprinted with permission.
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