Feminism: Why Now?
A revisitation of feminism is called for and answered in Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art’s WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution. Curated by Connie Butler, this ambitious exhibition is the first attempt by any museum to take a retrospective look back over a quarter century ago and survey the era of second-wave feminism as a historical moment. WACK! inaugurates the institutional historicization of women’s art made at the time of feminism as an international, varied, and tremendously influential body of production. Or perhaps one should say at the time of proliferating feminisms.
Importantly, the show does not neatly articulate a single, coherent, resolved definition of feminism. Rather, Butler seems to have gone to lengths to ensure that a plurality of positions and practitioners, sometimes working towards contradictory ends, can emerge in relation to feminism. We find in the hundreds of works presented in WACK! a collection of nuanced relationships to the feminist movement and its methodologies.
WACK! can be seen as an aggressive assault on the notion of fixed master narratives and canonical masterpieces in general. This activist thrust to Butler’s curatorial agenda, directed here towards rewriting an inadequate, underexposed, and largely unwritten history of women artists at the time of feminism, is written into the title’s hard-hitting WACK! It resists easy definition in its insistence on an uneven and diverse plurality within the field of art during the feminist movement. It seeks to preserve the differences in style and media between particular artists and the differences in social context and content.
WACK!’s most important contributions are the incredible number of artists it introduces to viewers, its alternative notion of history as an uneven narrative construct that is subject to change and always in a state of being (re)written, and the multiple connections it invites us to draw between the many groundbreaking practices of the 70s and contemporary art’s debt to them. Above all, WACK!’s value lies in the great many questions it raises. All of these contributions are distinctly feminist ones. By presenting itself as the first major historical survey of its kind, WACK! questions whether the feminist era is over, finished, and closed off temporally by the petrifying seal of its entry into the museum context, while at the same time proposing that the exhibition is a reinvigorating shot in the arm that reopens feminist art to further attention, recognition, and scholarship. There is a bittersweet and problematic moment in WACK!’s institutional embrace of a generation of women who were fiercely critical of institutionality in their life and work. One thinks back two years to the exceptional visibility of women artists and curators at the 2005 Venice Biennale, where Barbara Kruger won the prestigious Golden Lion Prize and the outspoken feminist curator Rosa Martinez staged Always a Little Further, an equal-representation exhibition with half its works by an international array of women artists, with the most notable inclusion of the Guerilla Girls’ incendiary anti-institution posters: their confrontational and controversial attacks on the patriarchal institution perhaps compromised by their much deserved moment of recognition and praise from it.
The current pervasive revisiting of feminism in the art world, spearheaded by WACK! raises the question why now? Why now, for example, is the Brooklyn Museum opening its new Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art? A center which provides a permanent home for Chicago’s The Dinner Party and which opened with the exhibition Global Feminisms, of contemporary art by women, curated by the center’s founding director Maura Reilly and renowned art historian Linda Nochlin. These two major, virtually simultaneous, events on both coasts of the U.S. are propped up by a mushrooming of smaller exhibitions, countless lectures and symposia, catalogues, books, and even magazine issues devoted to feminism. The current wave suggests a contemporary hunger for content-driven criticality in the art world at a time when the speed of the market’s boundless expansion and consumption seems to cannibalize content as it prematurely devours all objects and ever-younger artists. Content is all too often reduced and stylized into ‘a look’, a market trope, a strategy. Cooption is taken for granted. Perhaps, then, it should be no surprise that there is widespread nostalgia for a past moment of possible radicality. Regardless, feminism’s radical legacy and spirit of revolution and protest should have especially heightened appeal right now for Americans finding themselves many years deep into a troubled and unpopular war.
I leave WACK! galvanized both by what is present and what might be absent and still to come, pondering what may be my final question: What will follow this art world fascination with feminism? If, as seems to be the case, WACK! is an exhibition marking the historically delineated death of the feminist revolution of the 1970s, then the question naturally arises, how are we going to mourn the death of the second-wave? For all the discussion of the younger third-wave or of so-called ‘post-feminism’, there is also an air of melancholia hanging heavy about the nostalgics of Los Angeles. Maybe it’s a tinge of post-partum depression. Is all the current feminism mania merely a flash in pan, making up for decades of neglect in one fell swoop, or is it the beginning of something more substantial - a prolonged, thoughtful, and sustained reevaluation? One can only hope for the latter.
Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
