The first comprehensive, historical exhibition to examine the international foundations and legacy of feminist art, WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution focuses on the crucial period 1965–80, during which the majority of feminist activism and artmaking occurred internationally. The exhibition includes the work of 120 artists from the United States, Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Comprising work in a broad range of media—including painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, and performance art—the exhibition is organized around themes based on media, geography, formal concerns, collective aesthetic, and political impulses. Curated for The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, by Connie Butler, The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA), the exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.
Mlle Bourgeoise Noire first won her title in 1955. After 25 years of maintaining a lady-like silence, in 1980 she began invading art openings to give people a piece of her mind.
She wore a gown and cape made of 180 pairs of white gloves, 360 gloves in all. Here is a brief version of MBN’s “backstory,” taken from the signage for the Wadsworth Atheneum installation of the performance:
The first time MBN invaded an art opening was at Just Above Midtown/Downtown, the black avant-garde gallery, in June 1980. JAM had just inaugurated a new space in Tribeca. The invasion was her response to the tame, well-behaved abstract art that had recently appeared in the “Afro American Abstraction” show at PS 1, an exhibit to which JAM had contributed a majority of artists.
The “occasional poem” she shouted at the JAM opening was:
THAT’S ENOUGH!
No more boot-licking…
No more ass-kissing…
No more buttering-up…
No more pos…turing
of super-ass..imilates…
BLACK ART MUST TAKE MORE RISKS!!!
Her next invasion was of the New Museum, at the opening of the “Persona” show in September 1981. The exhibit included nine artists using personas in their work. Mlle Bourgeoise Noire called it “The Nine White Personae Show.” When invited to give the outreach lectures to schoolkids for the show, she’d replied, “Let’s talk after the opening.”
The poem shouted on the occasion of the New Museum’s Persona opening was:
WAIT
wait in your alternate/alternate spaces
spitted on fish hooks of hope
be polite wait to be discovered
be proud be independent
tongues cauterized at
openings no one attends
stay in your place
after all, art is
only for art’s sake
THAT’S ENOUGH don’t you know
sleeping beauty needs
more than a kiss to awake
now is the time for an INVASION!
After the opening, she was dis-invited from giving the outreach lectures to schoolkids.
Click Thumbnails to view “MLLE BOURGEOISE NOIRE GOES TO THE NEW MUSEUM”
Join us for two walkthroughs of WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution. Using a non-traditional format, a multi-generational gathering of artists, writers, curators, and feminist-minded folk will engage in a roving discussion of the exhibition. Moderated by Jennifer Doyle and Catherine Lord. Sensible shoes recommended.
UPDATE:
A note from Jennifer Doyle:
Walks Through the Revolution: Two distinct gallery walkthroughs that honor how feminist art belongs to each of us. We hope to structure an event that creates the space to acknowledge the diverse histories both of the artists who made the work, and those who have been inspired by it.
During each walk-through, we expect to make between six and eight stops – at each stop we will ask artists in the audience to speak about the work on display. We’ll open up the floor to questions and comments from other audience, and, over the course of each walkthrough, develop a conversation about the exhibit and the current wave of interest in feminist art-making. The morning and afternoon walkthroughs cover completely different portions of the exhibit.
These are not comprehensive tours of the exhibition (see MOCA’s calendar for other gallery tours) – these are instead wanderings that mirror the thoughts and questions of the collective.
Below are some of the artists and writers who have promised to attend the walkthroughs:
Terry Wolverton, Eileen Myles, Linda Bessemer, Mary Kelly, Monica Mayer, Marta Minujin, Louise Fishman, Ming Yuen S. Ma, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Lynn Hershman, Suzi Lake, Lorraine O’Grady, ORLAN, Magdelena Abakanowicz, Margaret Harrison, Nizan Shaked, Mary Bauermeister, Leah Lacy (Jay de Feo estate), Sylvia Sleigh, Mary Beth Edelson, Yvonne Rainer, Harmony Hammond, Faith Wilding, Carolee Schneemann, Suzanne Lacy, Kimberley Meyer
Other people we know will be in attendance include:
Alma Lopez, Chon Noriega, Lisa Steele, Kirsten du Four, Alison Hoffman, Erika Suderburg, Emily Roysdon, Michelle Dizon, Rachel Kushner, Lisa Bloom, Sue Ellen Case, Susan Foster, Julia Meltzer, June Wayne, Barbara Hammer
Lorraine O’Grady addresses the audience at Walks Through the Revolution, March 4, 2007.
Some thoughts on yesterday’s event from co-organizer Jennifer Doyle:
From the moment that Catherine Lord and I proposed a group-led gallery tour of the exhibition, we imagined it as a bum-rushing of the stage – we thought that this kind of event would be a great counter-balance to traditional programming, and that it might function – at least momentarily – as an antidote to the hierarchical structure of the museum itself. We wanted to create a feminist mood – one which welcomed people into the space of the exhibit not as consumers, but as participants.
Feminist art-making and feminist art criticism invent new and different ways of doing things – like other socially engaged movements (for example, labor organizing, and the Civil Rights Movement) they generate alternative modes of knowledge-production centered not around a unified, monolithic knowing subject, but around a noisy collective.
As is characteristic of such things, we struggled at the start with logistics – MOCA staff thoughtfully rented an audio system that would accommodate a larger than traditional audio tour, but the system itself was plagued with problems and was, really, too rigid to suit our purposes. Plus, nearly two hundred people turned up for the 11:00am walk-through! We eventually dispensed with most of the electronic gadgetry, and stuck to old-fashioned amplified shouting. Perfect.
For many of us who by constitution just are feminists, no matter what we do, we struggle with being heard. The fact of the matter is, much of the time, people don’t hear what women have to say, and especially don’t want the feminist intervention. Feminism is hard. And it can be “negative” – pointing out who isn’t here, who has been excluded, what isn’t being talked about, who suffers under the system and who profits by that suffering. And feminist artists, well – most of the time, people don’t know where to put them. (A theme in conversation: how many prominent feminist artists in the show struggle financially – as important as their work is, it isn’t “collectableâ€.)
We wanted to do this event in this way so that we could experience listening, and being listened to. (Oh, the irony that it was sometimes hard to hear the speakers!) We wanted to see women artists who are often otherwise, within official spaces of art history, treated as though they were invisible.
This kind of gallery tour is possible around any exhibit. Critically engaged, communally driven dialogues with art can be staged around all art – the advantage of such programming is that it teaches us not only about the art on display, it teaches us about the wisdom and intelligence of the people living and working in the arts community here in Southern California, the folks all around us who have their own stories to tell about what makes it into the museum, and what doesn’t.
Thank you to everyone who turned up. Thank you for sticking with the tours as we worked out the audio. And big thanks to the speakers, and to the listeners!
Jennifer Doyle
Check back in the coming weeks for more photos, audio, and video from Walks Through the Revolution.
Artist Sylvia Sleigh speaks on the reception of her painting The Turkish Bathat WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution. March 4th, 2007, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles.
WACK! catalogue essayist Jenni Sorkin discusses the work of Tee Corinne at WACK! Art and The Feminist Revolution. Recorded at Walks Through the Revolution on March 4th, 2007, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles.
Order your own copy of the Cunt Coloring Bookhere.
Hartford Wash: Washing, Tracks, Maintenance:Outside, 1973 performance at Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT, part of Maintenance Art Performance Series, 1973-74
Mierle Laderman Ukeles discussed her work in conjunction with WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution On Thursday, June 7, at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA.
After child-birth in 1968, Ukeles became a mother/maintenance worker and fell out of the picture of the avant-garde. In a rage, she wrote the Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969, applied equally to the home, all kinds of service work, the urban environment, and the sustenance of the earth itself. She viewed the Manifesto as “a world vision and a call for revolution for the workers of survival who could, if organized, reshape the world.â€
The following text is taken from the WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution gallery guide. To download the entire document, click here.
During the late 1960s and early ’70s, feminism fundamentally changed contemporary art practice, critiquing its assumptions and radically altering its structures and methodologies. WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution is predicated on the notion that gender was and remains fundamental to the organization of culture, and that a contemporary understanding of the feminist in art must necessarily look to the late 1960s and ‘70s. While the American feminist art movement coalesced in the late 1960s in the United States and is embedded within the exhibition, this international survey of 120 artists, activists, filmmakers, writers, teachers, and thinkers necessarily moves beyond the now-canonical list of American feminist artists to include women of other geographies, formal approaches, socio-political alliances, and critical and theoretical positions. This exhibition argues for simultaneous feminisms internationally that together and retrospectively can be viewed as the most influential movement in postwar contemporary art. (more…)
Artist Mary Bauermeister speaks on her life as an artist in post-war Germany. Recorded at WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution on March 4th, 2007 at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles.
WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution closes next Monday, July 16th!
Don’t miss your last chance to experience the first international, historical exhibition to examine the foundations and legacy of feminist art produced from 1965–1980.
Major support is also provided by Susan Bay Nimoy and Leonard Nimoy with the members of the WACK! Women’s Consortium.
This exhibition is presented as part of the Millennium on View program. The Millennium Biltmore Hotel is MOCA’s Official Hotel Sponsor. 89.9 KCRW is the Official Media Sponsor of MOCA. Generous in-kind support is provided by MySpace.
