National Museum of Women in the Arts
1250 New York Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20005-3970
September 21 to December 16, 2007
If you could create a museum exhibition of over 300 works of art, spanning the years of 1965 to 1980 by 118 artists from five continents, including painting, sculpture, photography, video, film, performance, installation and documentation of conceptual projects-how would you organize it? What cultural milieu present over a decade ago would guide your selection of such a diverse array of art and artists? In an unprecedented manner, the exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, a traveling exhibit now at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. does all of the above using art made overwhelmingly by women. Take note of the carefully worded title; this is not just a show of women artists and not just a show of feminist art. To quote from multiple museum brochures and other exhibit paraphernalia it is “the first comprehensive exhibition to explore the formation, development and impact of feminism in postwar contemporary art” and it does it on a global scale ("wackatnmwa.org").
Works from this era done in what we still think of as traditional mediums are presented alongside concept and content laden, collectively fostered, authority challenging, un-saleable work; all are players in this theater of feminism, presented against a backdrop of civil rights, peace and other prominent political agendas of the time. Brazilian artist, Lygia Clark’s Cabeça colectiva (Collective Head) represents the revolutionary nature of the break with tradition and the redefining of Modernism. Collective Head is a simple suspended structure of balsa wood and netting, in which the author invites the community of passersby to build the work of art by leaving a token object in its structure. Given the forbidden territory of touching or interacting with art that is still a necessary part of most art venue visits, this piece commands special reverence. Just one thorough and curious visitor accepting the museum’s clearly encouraged and sanctioned invitation of Clark, deliberately poking at the work as they decide where to nestle their memento, activates the “Head” in a new and exciting way for anyone else in the room that is watching. At first this art work is jarring in its shaggy visage and desire to be touched. Rather than just being looked upon like so much of art, it ends up bearing an eternal quality of making, collecting and community that overcomes the works ultimate temporarily through a deliberate invitation to experience.
In this show, much of the work draws attention to just being looked upon as a problem, challenge or gross oversimplification. In a remarkable and sensitive work by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha called Passages Paysages three TV monitors play a finely choreographed show of grainy, tonal images of places, objects, paintings and people. Each set of images has a different audio meant to be heard simultaneously, so all the audio is amplified into the gallery. Floating words, written and spoken in English, French and Korean in both a male and female voice, along with the pictures forms a narrative, even without a real beginning or a climax. Susan Jenkins refers to Cha's "investigations into the relationships between language, memory and culture” in the Artist Biographies section of the exhibition catalog (222). In the mesmerizing ten or so minutes it takes to fully experience "Passages", it is made clear that the complexity of this art is not just a simple matter of ‘seeing’ connections, but of combined internal, descriptive, meditative, focusing quality of the sound (which includes a musical motif) alongside the metered litany of ever rotating still photos, all adding up to an experience that like speaking and remembering, is far from simple and transcends feminism in its investigation of human perception.
But as might be expected from a show with Feminism in its title, the work in this show most often challenges the specifically male oriented vision that monopolized representations of women in art and the explosion of postwar mass media. Ironically, hundreds of the strongest, most challenging, bravest artistic efforts to disassemble or demolish this vision cannot be seen at first glance in "WACK!". Lurking behind an untold number of dangling headphones, numeric push buttons and DVD menus idling on TV monitors an untold number of transferred films, videos, audios, slide shows and performance documentations capture innumerable brazen images that challenge objectification along with countless other beliefs and conventions. You might never see Ulrike Rosenbach's Don't Believe I'm an Amazon, you must toggle a push button and put on headphones to hear the thwacking to understand. This piece depicts a filmed close up of the artist's face superimposed on a reproduction of a painting of the face of Gothic Style Madonna, at which the artist proceeds to shoot arrows from a bow, as if the halo was an archery target for her own face. While targeting chauvinistic, simplified depiction of women as virgin martyrs or fallen angels in society, this work also takes aim at the roles of religion, violence and self immolation in the parsing out of images of women with remarkable depth that belies its simple format.
To experience WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution in 2007 feels far from the vacuum of the bell jar that feminism got stuffed into as the 1980’s progressed. The proximity of the work of more well known women artists making paintings, sculptures or working in other more classical craft techniques next to more revolutionary, confrontational projects shows visually and viscerally better than any words could ever tell, how important and all encompassing the dialogue that feminism engendered during this period was. Walking from a room of colorful portrait paintings (by Mary Beth Edelson, Alice Neel and Sylvia Sleigh), into a room documenting Carolee Schneemann, standing raised above her audience as naked as the day she was born, unfurling from her birth canal a “feminist manifesto” like a living and speaking AP wire machine, most effectively drives home one of the key premises of this exhibition. Even without extensive knowledge of the artists, the era, or any attachment to an identity as a feminist, it is easy to appreciate that the ideas and impulses behind all of the art included in this show was critical to elevating the most intimate, unconventional, redefining ideas in art after the mid-century mark. As we enter a new century, it remains to be seen if the profound ideas and instincts that continue to inform us culturally can be as popularly applied as the revolutionary beginnings and attributes that are documented in this show.
Karen Joan Topping
10/30/07
Works Cited
Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. Passages Paysages. University of California Berkley.
Clark, Lygia. Cabeça colectiva (Collective Head). Colecao Familia Clark/MAM- RJ.
Jenkins, Susan. "Theresa Hak Kyung Cha." WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution. Ed. Lisa Gabrielle Mark. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2007. 222.
Rosenbach, Ulrike. Don’t believe I'm an Amazon. Courtesy of the Artist.
Schneeman, Carolee. Interior Scroll. Collection of Peter Norton and Eileen Harris Norton.
Schneeman, Carolee.Scroll 1: “Women Here and Now Festival”, East Hampton, New York, August 29, 1975. Courtesy of the Artist. August 29, 1975.
WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution National Museum of Women in the Arts. 27 Oct. 2007
