REVIEWS BOOKS
GLOBAL FEMINISMS:
NEW DIRECTIONS IN
CONTEMPORARY ART
Edited by Maura Reilly & Linda Nochlin
Merrell, £29.95/$54.95 (hardcover)
In March the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for
Feminist Art, the first of its kind in the US,
opened at the Brooklyn Museum – a would-
be celebratory moment that mostly inspired ‘I can’t imagine ever wanting to be white’. The
head-scratching. Why there, why now? Why shows offended everyone, but the return to the
WACK! too, LACMA’s feminist exhibition? status quo (the ‘Whitey’ Biennial, as the Guerrilla
These questions persist in Global Feminisms, Girls term it) was quick. Part of the goal of Global
the catalogue to the Sackler Center’s inaugural Feminisms is to pick up the story of artists from
exhibition, which expands the remit of feminism Latin America, Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe.
(note that telling plural of the title) but ultimately The essays on these regions are well
struggles to develop any significance out of the researched, but they don’t overcome the broader
work assembled, beyond its original principles for problem – the lack of a grassroots, extra-artworld
inclusion: that it is made by women and addresses reason for their exhibition. Divorced from any
the experience of being a woman. current feminist spirit in society at large – women
Organised by Sackler curator Maura Reilly aren’t burning their burkas in Afghanistan or bras
and art historian Linda Nochlin, Global Feminisms in Houston; they’re buying headbands at Topshop
is a sequel to the Brooklyn Museum’s important – activist art simply looks literal. While some
1976 exhibition Women Artists: 1550–1950, co- of the work here is good, much is repetitious,
curated by Nochlin, which fleshed out the art- tending towards uncomplicated, body-orientated
historical canon with works of often unknown explorations of the abject, identity and gender.
women artists over the preceding 400 years. The selection of essays often fails to justify their
That show’s deep historical focus is here replaced selection of artists, relying instead on segues
by a broad geographical sweep: limited to work of the blandly differential sort – ‘By contrast…’,
made since 1990, Global Feminisms reflects the ‘On the other hand…’ It’s perhaps most apparent
widening of feminism in response to criticism in Nochlin’s essay, if only by virtue of her avoiding
that, as Reilly writes, until the 1980s the discipline all those pitfalls. Nochlin expertly brings work
dealt only with the problems of white women, into an art-historical context, analysing and
working on the ‘false assumption… that all women contrasting the different formal and conceptual
share identical struggles, or that oppression is strategies that make feminist art’s approaches to,
relative’. If the 1980s threw the bowling ball down for example, identity and painterly abstraction
the lane, 1990, where Global Feminisms begins, is novel and exciting. She ends on the assertion that
the year the pins collapsed. Artists from subaltern determines the arc of much recent commentary
countries and minority artists in the West filled a on feminism shows; the ambivalent beginning
number of controversial group exhibitions: Cuban and slow swoop upward towards admiration,
performance artist Carmelita Tropicana graced in the acknowledgement that feminism has
the poster of the Decade Show: Frameworks of achieved much, and that there is no better time
Identity in the 1980s (1990, various venues) in to be a woman artist. But now what? To quibble
New York; Daniel Joseph Martinez passed out with and critique surveys such as these is a hard-
badges at the 1993 Whitney Biennial that read won privilege – but one that should be exercised
nonetheless. Melissa Gronlund
one.linthree.linnine.lin ARTREVIEW
p138-141 Books AR Jul07.indd 139 6/6/07 03:08:59
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