24 September 2007
Exhibition Shows International Impact of Women’s Movement on Art
Includes work from Europe, Australia, India, Japan, China, Latin America
Washington -- An exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) in Washington shows the impact of the feminist movement on art by women worldwide from 1965 to 1980, bringing together for the first time works that often are cited in art history textbooks but, in many cases, have not been on public view since their original exhibition.
WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution includes work by artists in the United States, Western and Central Europe, Australia, Canada, India, Japan, China and South and Central America. It is the first comprehensive exhibition to explore the formation, development and impact of feminism in contemporary art from 1965 to 1980. It is also the largest exhibition in the museum’s 20-year history.
Many works gathered at the exhibition challenge the conventional “male gaze” representations of women in the arts and advertising of the mid-1960s. For example, a New York artist, Joan Semmel, depicts lovers from a distinctly female point of view, which was considered revolutionary four decades ago.
Among its 300 works by 118 artists -- including painting, sculpture, photography, film, video and performance art -- are Kristen Justesen’s Sculpture II (1968), in which the artist displays a photo of herself nude appearing to crouch in a cardboard box, and Judy Chicago’s Pasadena Lifesaver Red #5 (1970). Photos, video and a dress highlight the early work of black American performance artist Lorraine O'Grady, who would attend exhibition openings as a character she had created, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, dressed in a gown and white gloves and reciting poems attacking the insularity of the art world.
One of the first things the visitor sees in the exhibition is Elaine Sturtevant’s Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, an eight-minute video projected on the wall.
Another video shows the famous performance by Yoko Ono of Cut Piece, in which audience members cut away her clothing. The viewer also can see Art Must be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful, Serbian artist Marina Abramović’s video of herself combing her hair. Indeed, it would take at least a week to watch all the videos in the exhibition.
“Some artists included in WACK! do not consider their work to be feminist, often because they see their art as more personal than political,” says Kathryn Wat, the curator of modern and contemporary art at NMWA in an article on the exhibition. “Yet the most intimate expressions can have the greatest political and cultural impact.”
Many of the works on display involve self-representation, as in Annegret Soltau’s Selbst (Self), which shows 14 photographs in which the artist first binds her head with black thread and then cuts herself free.
The exhibition offers a “Feminist Timeline” that cites such events as the first admission of women to Harvard Law School (1950), the introduction of the Barbie Doll (1959), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the first birth control pills (1960), the publication of Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique (1963) and the passage of the U.S. Civil Rights Act (1964). Other movements of the 1960s and 1970s, such as the protests against the Vietnam War and demonstrations in favor of gay rights and civil rights, also figure in many works.
The show does not attempt to impose a definition of what it meant to be a feminist during those years, but the representation of women in popular culture and the exploitative ways in which women’s bodies were presented in the media are important themes. In defining feminism, Wat cites art scholar Peggy Phelan, who said feminism’s most basic tenet is that gender is a key category used to organize culture and that the organizing process usually favors men over women.
The show’s name -- WACK! -- does not have a single reference, says curator Connie Butler, who is also the chief curator of drawing at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Butler made up the name to recall the acronyms of many activist groups and political communities in the 1960s and 1970s that focused on women's issues.
Originally organized by the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the exhibition lasts through December 16 at the National Museum of Women in the Arts and then travels to the Museum of Modern Art/PS1 in New York and the Vancouver (Canada) Art Gallery.
NMWA is the only art museum in the world dedicated solely to the works of women artists. (See “National Museum of Women in the Arts Celebrates 20 Years.”)
More information about the exhibition is available on the museum’s Web site, which also has discussions of many of the works by the individual artists.
For more articles on the influence of artists in society, see The Arts.
Artist Judy Chicago discusses her painting Through the Flower