REVIEWS WACK!
WACK!
ART AND THE FEMINIST REVOLUTION
THE GEFFEN CONTEMPORARY AT MOCA, LOS ANGELES
4 MARCH – 16 JULY
Political and personal, abstract and fi gurative, conceptual,
representational, cinematic, performative and unrepentantly
vaginal, WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution attempts to
capture the mixed and often contradictory character of the visceral
and intellectual explosion of feminist art during the 1960s and 70s.
In her catalogue essay, curator Cornelia Butler wishes ‘to make the
case that feminism’s impact on art in the 1970s constitutes the most
infl uential “movement” of any during the postwar period’. Which, to
my mind, begs the question, has the case been made?
Walking through the exhibition, which includes work from
some 120 artists and collectives, I’m confronted with a diversity of
practices, from the politically savvy to the formally inventive, each
themed section attempting to draw sometimes tenuous connections
and lineages, especially as some of the important male inspirations
and links are left out of the conversation. Despite these and other
blind spots, evidence abounds for Butler’s case.
Knowing that this exhibition rightfully attempts to craft a
historical document, it’s still refreshing that Butler discarded any
attempt at chronological narrative and approached the work and
its era through some of its most salient issues and groundbreaking
experiments. From Adrian Piper’s gender performance in Concrete
Infi nity Documentation Piece (1970) to the exploration of narrativised
space in Cindy Sherman’s early Untitled Film Stills (1977–80), these
experimental works opened up new vectors for inspiration and
further investigations.
Despite attempts at thematic groupings, the show’s rare
coherence is itself a prime aspect of feminist art’s practice of
inclusion over exclusion, of open conversation rather than closed
of_f monologue. Work by historical stalwarts and textbook heroes
Mary Kelly, Carolee Schneemann and Judy Chicago are shown
alongside their under-regarded American contemporaries, as well
as work from a neglected international contingency. Buenos Aires-
based artist Marta Minujin’s Soft Gallery (1973/2007), created with
collaborator Richard Squires, straps together more than 200 mattresses to make a room that’s a site for both sexual interludes above: Judy Chicago,
and dreaming. Minujin’s gallery further becomes a space of social interaction, with museum-goers plunking down next to one Through the Flower, 1973,
another on the beds to watch videos on a small TV. The notable inclusion of Indian-born artists Zarina Hashmi and Nasreen sprayed acrylic on canvas,152 x 152 cm. Photo:
Mohamedi, Japanese fi lmmaker Mako Idemitsu, photographer Sanja Ivekovic and New Zealand painter Jacqueline Fahey Donald Woodman. © the artist / Artists
proves that if feminism’s importance has long been undervalued, then its international component has been even more so. Rights Society (ARS),
The best art in the exhibition uses gender, the body and politics as more than slogans, although there are pieces that New York. Courtesy Elizabeth A. Sackler,
inevitably fall into bland sloganeering, a problem dealt with in Hannah Wilke’s Marxism and Art: Beware of Fascist Feminism New York
(1977). Forming ambivalent aesthetic spaces, the most potent issues of a historical moment are handled with humour, pathos facing page: Faith Wilding,
and panache. Martha Rosler’s collage series Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain (1966–72) reconstructs images that Crocheted Environment
become both playful af_f_i rmations of women’s sexuality and overwhelming evidence of the popular portrayal of female passivity. (Womb Room), 1972 (recreated 1995),
Lynda Benglis is equally electrifying with work from both the Process art excoriations of abstract expressionist machismo in the mixed media/fi bres, 274 x 274 x 274 cm.
multicoloured fl oor painting Odalisque (Hey Hey Frankenthaler) (1969) to the famous Artforum advertisement (November Installation at
1974) with Benglis, oiled and nude, manhandling an oversize dildo. The body became a place of contradiction and prescribed Womanhouse, Los Angeles.Courtesy the artist
meanings, and like Wilke, Benglis acts as an agent provocateur, a feminist who questions with her conceptual practice the
shape and claims of the ‘movement’.
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