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: Amelia Jones; Louise Parsons; Barbara Hammer and Lisa Bloom.
Amelia Jones (art historian, USA)
My “most memorable experience of a feminist/women's art exhibition in the past 10 years” would have to be my own somewhat harrowing but ultimately rewarding experience of organizing the perhaps overly ambitious show Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago's Dinner Party in Feminist Art History for the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum in 1996. I do not, however, consider this show the “best” or most successful one, as I clarify below.
This experience of organizing Sexual Politics both challenged and changed my understanding of feminism in that I received such hostile responses from many feminists before and after the show opened and catalogue was published. While I would have welcomed judicious criticism of the show itself, which was certainly flawed, these responses were generally (in the case where I heard from people before the show opened) from women who had not spoken to me or seen the checklist or, after the show had opened, had not seen the exhibition itself. In other words, the hostility was free-ranging and apparently had more to do with old histories (old antagonisms with Chicago herself, primarily) and rumor than with the ideas I was attempting to explore.
The most disappointing part of this for me was the tendency to try to silence me: I was overtly told in several public fora that one was not allowed or supposed to take Chicago’s work seriously, in any way. This negative evaluation (which apparently was by 1996 to be taken as fixed in stone) had already been decided, I was admonished, by the series of essays in the 1970s that panned her work as essentialist. To make a long story short, this experience disillusioned me vis-a-vis feminism, pointing to its limitations as a shared discourse of liberation and equality and the tendency (even, or perhaps especially?) for feminists to resort to the same rhetorical weapons of silencing and exclusion that I had thought we were joined in fighting against. We're only human after all. But we could be a little more self-aware!
Needless to say, there have been a lot of other great feminist shows: Division of Labor (Bronx Museum, 1995); Sense and Sensibility (MoMA, 1993?); and lots of one-person shows of feminist/women artists (Carolee Schneemann, Hannah Wilke, Annette Messager, Adrian Piper, Yayoi Kusama, Eleanor Antin, Hannah Hoch, etc., etc.). I wasn't so thrilled by Inside the Visible (I saw it at Boston's ICA in 1996), to which my show was often unfavorably compared. I felt it lacked any historical context (Rosler conflated with Cahun?) and failed to take a firm stand on feminism; its intellectual coyness (all that rhetoric about “visibility” and “in, of, and from the feminine”) I found disingenuous, though it was surely that coyness which made it so popular across various audiences. To be sure, it was more “successful” than my show in that it struck a positive chord within established feminist art history and criticism. But I have to say I’m proud that I took a stand and did the historical work to reopen the question of “essentialism,” as unpopular as that move might have been at the time. The catalogue of Sexual Politics I think has been quite influential and that pleases me a great deal.
Louise Parsons (Lecturer, School of Art, Bradford College,UK)
GIRL The New Gallery, Walsall, curated by Angela Kingston, Wimbledon School of Art, May-June, 2000.
“I'm sitting on my bed, I'm four or five; my stepmother has made me
take an afternoon nap. Instead, disobedient, I get some sharp,
grown-up scissors and start to cut out my Rosemary Clooney paper doll.
But the scissors slip...” (Mikey Cuddily, extract from artist’s
statement Girl catalogue).
All the works on display in the Girl exhibition at the New Walsall Art Gallery remind me that art and storytelling can, in the blink of an eye, transport the reader into a world where the past exists in the present tense. Paintings, sculpture, installations, video and photography produced by twenty women were exhibited alongside rhymes, songs and observations from girls attending Butts Primary School in Walsall. From the coveted treasure of bangles and beads to disquieting arrangements of rat skins, girlhood is mapped as daring, sensual, sexual, irreverent, dark, disquieting, blissful, funny, dreamy, sad, cruel, harsh, menacing and frightening. In these stories the geography of girlhood and the prospect of womanhood are explored by women who are now in their 30s, 40s and 50s and, as such, they contribute towards an already established body of contemporary poems, novels, biographies and films that invite women to re-experience childhood as part of a collective legitimate discourse. This exhibition demonstrates the extent to which contemporary women artists are indebted to and are further developing the discursive frames of reference set in place by previous generations of women artists, writers and activists, particularly in relation to the development of a politics of difference.
Barbara Hammer (film and video artist, USA)
I think the last show I saw at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City, March 30 - July 2, 2000, was pretty challenging for a lot of people. It was called Picturing the Modern Amazon and was curated by Joanna Frueh, Laurie Fierstein, and Judith Stein. This exhibition which also resulted in a hard cover catalogue with essays of 176 pages focused on HYPER MUSCULAR WOMEN. I do not mean women who work out in gyms; I mean women whose goal in life is muscular development.
This show had historic components showing back to 800 AD icons found in Ireland of super muscular women, as well, as a historic comic book section. Why was this important? Because as feminists we are still “lookists” and not many of us can accept a terrifically built body that goes way beyond the norms considered acceptable for our gender. Who is to say what we should look like? These women take that decision into their own hands and spend their lifetime shaping their bodies the way they want, not the way society, husbands, lovers, girlfriends want. Even some of my most feminist of friends was shaking her head: I can understand a lot, but not this. Did it challenge or change your understanding of feminism? Well, no. I was a contributor to the show with 7 digital photographs called the Charlene Atlas Series. I took that old comic book drawing of the skinny guy at the beach who loses his girlfriend to the strapping muscle man and changed gender. The skinny gal takes Charlene Atlas classes and no longer does anyone get away with flipping sand in her face. Now, the girlfriend is content and the two walk off hand in hand.
Lisa Bloom (lecturer/writer, USA)
Dealing publically with the changing generational concerns and passions amongst feminist artists, art critics and art historians has been a difficult task both in the U.S and Japan, two places where I have been active as a feminist art critic and university professor. This is in part due to different ways that feminist artists, critic, and historians in the late 1990s have been ghettoized and marginalized. In the U.S. it has taken the following form: venues for feminist exhibitions, and feminist and queer writings on the arts have narrowed in many ways due to the withdrawal of state and federal sponsorship of the arts, and as a consequence of the Culture Wars coming out of the late 1980s beginning with queer activist art related to the HIV pandemic. Universities for better or worse have turned into refuges of sorts for working women artists and critics, even more than before in the U.S. What little support art schools have had for feminist projects has now dwindled. The narrowing of these contexts has sometimes imposed a defensive posture and rhetoric that has further isolated women from each other and has left little room outside of a few protected university contexts for lively public discussions, exhibitions and debates.
I became interested in examining a set of exhibitions which serve as opportunities to reassess feminist art of the 1970s and 1980s from the perspective of the present moment. This will be the topic of the panel I have organised at the College Art Association Conference that takes place in Chicago in late February of 2001, titled "Re-Viewing 1970s and 1980s Feminist Art Practices in the 1990s: Three Major Exhibitions on Judy Chicago, Eleanor Antin, and Martha Rosler". The speakers are myself, Alison Rowley, Lucy Soutter, Catherine Caesar, Ruth Wallen and Alexander Alberro. The session will examine the construction and reception of three major exhibitions in the US on feminist artists as examples: Eleanor Antin (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California 1999), Judy Chicago (Armand Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California, 1996), and Martha Rosler (New Museum and ICP, New York, 2000) to examine what opportunities these exhibits have created given the present US cultural climate.
Copyright © : n.paradoxa, September 2000
N.Paradoxa : Issue No. 13, 2000