What is your most memorable experience of a feminist/ women's art exhibition in the past 10 years and why? Did it challenge or change your understanding of feminism?
(Please name the title of the show, the venue, and the
date.
Please feel free to write about shows you may have curated yourself.)
If any readers would like to contribute a response, please email: k.deepwell@ukonline.co.uk
Answers below from: Anne Kirker; Linda Montano; Lorna Green; Susan Platt
Anne Kirker (curator, Australia)
The most memorable feminist art exhibition I visited in the past decade was the two-part Bad Girls and Bad Girls West held in New York and Los Angeles in 1994. As a fairly serious-minded curator and author of the book New Zealand Women Artists: A survey of 150 years (updated in 1993), I wish that I had been braver about bringing humour into the text, and generally being shamelessly outrageous. I bought the Bad Girls T-shirt and wore it until it “died” and then devoured Jo Anna Isaak's book Feminism & Contemporary Art :The revolutionary power of women's laughter (1996).
Linda Montano (artist, USA)
Last month, Pauline Oliveros, the composer, presented The Lunar Opera at Lincoln Center Outdoors for a day. Why was it a feminist , memorable event? You have to have been there really. It was so circular and continuous and multi-focused and collaborative and visual and sonic and magnaminous and full bodied and outrageously incorrect in it's process and comment on the paradigm of doing the right thing that the place will never be the same. Part of its brillance was the back-to-back interweaving of Tibetan Monks in full traditional chanting mode exchanging energy and the “stage” with same costumed improvisers making sounds that celebrate the One Source. It was excellent and brave and Pauline has always managed to address the solution and not the “problem” of difference. Check her website.
Lorna Green (artist, UK)
In June 1992 I took part, along with 70 women artists at a month’s notice, in MISS-ING at Augustrasse 4, curated by Beatrice Stammer and Gabriele Horn, of the Staatliche Kunsthalle Berlin, within 37 Raume - exhibitions by 37 curators throughout Berlin. MISS-ING was linked to Documenta 9 as a way to counteract the lack of women it had included - 25 women artists and 165 male artists. The exhibition took place in the Scheunenviertel, once the flourishing Jewish Quarter with its famous domed synagogue and close the the Nazi headquarters, both in Oranienburgerstrasse, and by then a developing artists area. We were asked to consider the history of the area in the brief described as a ‘former Jewish district which today may be run down and falling apart but which, in the long run, will belong to the government district of an emerging capital with modern architecture.’ My sculpture, Hope, made of bricks, whole and smashed, and cactus forms of the prickly pear or sabra was sprayed with gold metallic paint to symbolise the hope for peace and prosperity in the future. The exhibition which included Helen Chadwick from Great Britain, Nancy Spero and Yoko Ono from the USA, Valie Export from Austria, Helen Escobedo from Mexico and Ana Lupas from Romania was an incredible experience. And it realised the commitment of women prepared to become involved at such short notice in this protest! I wrote a full account of this: ‘Another Documenta’ Womens Art Journal No 48 Sept/Oct 1992, p.24.
Susan Platt (critic/academic, USA)
Inside the Visible. Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. January 30 to May 12, 1996
This show was by far the most imaginative construction of feminism that I have seen in the last ten years. Its non linear organization, its provocative mix of artists, its emphasis on artists like Charlotte Salomon, Veira da Silva, Natalie Hervieux, Gego, Ellen Gallagher and other departures from the predictable, all made the show both visually and intellectually provocative. Its international emphasis was a welcome change from the usual American and British obsession with their own histories and the same old artists.
Copyright © : n.paradoxa, September 2000
N.Paradoxa : Issue No. 13, 2000