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.

Artists in the Exhibition

IMAGE: Berwick Street Film Collective, still from Nightcleaners, 1970-1975, Film, Courtesy of LUX

originally posted February 23, 2007

The WACKsite is a collaborative environment for consciousness-raising and discussion. Members of the general public, artists, and authors can participate in this discourse by posting responses to artworks and themes in the exhibition, and by sharing their reactions to the exhibition’s supporting programs.

Check back regularly for new content from the exhibition, for up-to-date event information, and for posts from exhibiting artists and at-large contributors.

UPDATE 7.25.07:

WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution
edited by Cornelia Butler and Lisa Gabrielle Mark
Co-published by The MIT Press

In the 1970s, women changed the way art was made and talked about forever. WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution is a long-awaited international survey that chronicles the impact of the feminist revolution on art made between 1965 and 1980, featuring groundbreaking works by artists such as Chantal Akerman, Lynda Benglis, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Valie Export, Mary Heilman, Sanja Ivekovic, Ana Mendieta, and Annette Messager, who came of age during that period — as well as others such as Louise Bourgeois, Judy Chicago, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Lucy Lippard, Alice Neel, and Yoko Ono, whose careers were well established.

The book opens with a rich, full-color plate section in which works by over 120 artists are grouped into themes, including Abstraction, Body as Medium, Family Stories, Gender Performance, Knowledge as Power, and Making Art History. Highlights include the figurative paintings of Joan Semmel; the performance and film collaborations of Sally Potter and Rose English; the untitled film stills of Cindy Sherman; and the large-scale, craft-based sculptures of Magdalena Abakanowicz. Written entries on each artist offer key biographical and descriptive information, while accompanying essays by leading critics, art historians, and scholars offer a fresh look at feminist art practice from a cross-cultural perspective. Topics such as the relationship between American and European feminism, feminism and New York abstraction, women’s art under the Pinochet dictatorship, and mapping a global feminism provide a broad social context for the artworks themselves.

Working in a diverse range of media, including painting, sculpture, installation, performance, photography, film, and video, the artists in WACK! made feminism one of the most important influences on art of the late twentieth century.

Essays by: Cornelia Butler, Judith Russi Kirshner, Catherine Lord, Marsha Meskimmon, Richard Meyer, Helen Molesworth, Peggy Phelan, Nelly Richard, Valerie Smith, Abigail Solomon Godeau, and Jenni Sorkin

Entries by: Esther Adler, Cornelia Butler, Elizabeth Hamilton, Jane Hyun, Susan Jenkins, Lisa Gabrielle Mark, Rebecca Morse, Corrina Peipon, Alexandra Schwartz, Jenni Sorkin, Linda Theung, and Dawson Weber

Check back soon to purchase a WACK! catalogue from the MOCA store.

originally posted February 23, 2007

Feminism Uncovered
Richard Meyer on the WACK! Catalogue
at ARTFORUM.com

originally posted July 16, 2007

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Carolee Schneeman, Interior Scroll , 1974, paper scroll in Plexiglass box, scroll: 33x2x1 in. box: 37x6x6 in., collection of Peter Norton and Eileen Harris Norton, Santa Monica, California; Scroll 1: “Women Here and Now”, East Hampton, New York, 29 August, 1975, black and white photographs, 11×14 in. each, courtesy of the artist; Scroll 2: Telluride Film Festival, Telluride, Colorado, 4 September, 1977, black and white photographs, 11×14 in. each, courtesy of the artist; installation photo by Brian Forrest

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Suzy Lake, A Genuine Simulation of…, 1973-1974, dry-mounted chromogenic prints, 63x51in., Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, an afilliate of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottowa; gift of Jared Sable, Toronto, 1993; installation photo by Brian Forrest

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Judith F. Baca , Uprising of the Mujeres , 1979, acrylic on wood, 96x288x1½ in., courtesy of Patricia Correia Gallery, Santa Monica California, and SPARC; installation photo by Brian Forrest

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originally posted March 30, 2007

© Lorraine O’Grady, 2007

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:

On the Silver Jubilee of her coronation in Cayenne, the capital of Guyane, MLLE BOURGEOISE NOIRE (Internationale), who could still fit into her coronation gown and cape of 360 white gloves, celebrated by invading the New York art world. During her anniversary tournée, she attended several openings unannounced: while all eyes were on her, she smiled, distributed four dozen white chrysanthemums and removed her cape. With the whip-that-made-plantations-move, she applied 100 lashes to her bare back, then shouted out an occasional poem.

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”

originally posted April 5, 2007

Notes for MOCA gallery talk
March 22, 2007

© Lorraine O’Grady

Now that I have a captive audience….

First, I want to thank Connie Butler, for her ability to SEE, to see that there was, and has always been more to art and to the feminist revolution than could be contained in the now canonical but limited Anglo-American-centric version of feminist history.

I also want to thank Marsha Meskimmon for her WACK! catalogue article, “Chronology through Cartography: Mapping 1970s Feminist Art Globally,” which opens the article section and provides the subsequent theoretical spine of the show. Personally, I think everyone should memorize this article so we can just move on. It’s a brilliant piece, and one from which I’ve gained many fresh insights into the historic fate of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire.

In my Walkthrough comments I’d complained that work like mine and Senga Nengudi’s had suffered from being misperceived through the imposition of a white feminist vocabulary that did not know it’s own name, a feminism which considered itself normative… equally valid for all women… and which did not recognize that it was in fact “white middle-class feminism” and that that was its name. A feminism that privileged gender over class and race and for which “revolution” often seemed to mean primarily “sexual liberation.”

But Marsha Meskimmon’s article has helped me understand more deeply what was really going on. Meskimmon quotes Doreen Massey as arguing:

“Most evidently, the standard version of the story of modernity—as a narrative of progress emanating from Europe—represents a discursive victory of time over space. That is to say that differences which are truly spatial, are interpreted as being differences in temporal development—differences in the stage of progress reached. Spatial differences are reconvened as temporal sequence.”

Meskimmon adds: “The histories of feminist art practice are dogged by a similar, if more subtly tuned, dependency on temporal models masquerading as spatial awareness.”

She describes the chronological version of 1970s feminist art as implying “a cartography focused upon the United States and emanating outward from it—first toward the United Kingdom, as an ‘Anglo-American axis,’ then through Europe (white America’s cultural ‘home’) and [finally] touching upon the wider context of the Americas, Africa, and Asia…. [in] an implicit assumption that the ‘feminist revolution’ will come to us all, eventually.”

In this way, Meskimmon says, the chronological “timeline inevitably justifies mainstream interpretations of feminist art by reading differences in terms of progress narratives. Where works differ significantly from the norm, they do not call the definitions of the center into question, but instead are cast as less advanced and ‘derivative’ or marginalized into invisibility as inexplicable unrelated phenomena—perhaps just not ‘feminist’ or not ‘art.’”

When I read that last sentence, I went “Yeessss! THAT must have been what happened!”

There was this photo of a woman screaming; reproduced so often it had become an empty signifier. Almost no one got what she was doing. Why is she so agitated? She’s obviously performing… she’s wearing a costume… but what is that banner about? A body performance… but not about sex… who cares?

Still, most people probably didn’t even ask those questions. They just turned the page and moved on. Even feminist critics… as well as both white and black intellectuals trained and conditioned in mainstream feminist theories… were remarkably un-curious about work such as mine and Nengudi’s. I’m sure the same is true for many other artists in the show who have been “off the map” while old patriarchal “temporal models” masqueraded as new feminist “spatial paradigms.”

But a new generation of curators like Butler, and critics like Meskimmon, give us guarded hope that things can change, that canons can be broken and… fingers crossed… not be re-made.

originally posted March 27, 2007

A conversation with Jennifer Doyle (UC Riverside), Judith Halberstam (USC), Phyllis J. Jackson (Pomona College), Amelia Jones (University of Machester), and Yong Soon Min (UCI). Moderated and organized by Jennifer Doyle and Judith Halberstam.

“A public conversation about the limits of feminism, and the ways in which many of us – out of a commitment to (for example) anti-racist, Marxist, anti-homophobic projects, out of a commitment to thinking outside the box of US Imperialism, push our work beyond the official and unofficial boundaries of feminist cultures.

This roundtable conversation will therefore explore the wave of renewed interest in feminist art with a critical eye, and ask questions like the following: Where is feminist critical thought and art-making now? What happened to the cutting edge of radical feminism and its intensities? What happened to the anti-racist & anti-homophobic interventions of feminists like Audre Lorde?

This event is more of a conversation than a traditional panel, and we anticipate an active & engaged audience.”

-Jennifer Doyle

This program is presented by the Center for Feminist Research in conjunction with WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution.

Info 213/740-1739
FREE

originally posted March 28, 2007

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

Join us!

INFO 213/621-1745 or education@moca.org
FREE with museum admission

originally posted February 23, 2007

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 “collectable”.)

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.

originally posted March 05, 2007

Artist Sylvia Sleigh speaks on the reception of her painting The Turkish Bath at WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution. March 4th, 2007, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles.

originally posted March 22, 2007

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Judy Chicago, Through the Flower, 1973, sprayed acrylic on canvas, 61 x 61 x 1 7/8 in., courtesy of Elizabeth A. Sackler, New York; and Pasadena Lifesaver Red #5, 1970, sprayed acrylic on acrylic, courtesy of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., gift of Elyse and Stanley Grinstein

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Senga Nengudi, I, 1977, nylon mesh and sand, courtesy of the artist and Thomas Erben Gallery, New York

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Lynn Hershman, installation view,

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originally posted March 14, 2007

An invitation from Faith Wilding to participate in a re-imagining of her celebrated 1972 performance piece Waiting from 11am to 5pm on Sunday, March 11, 2007 at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA:

Dear Friends: Welcome to Wait-with, a re-doing of Waiting originally performed at Womanhouse in Los Angeles, California in 1972. In this new performance, the work of waiting is no longer a solitary act of private despair, but a practice in-common, a creative engagement-with difference, affirmation, change.

In this new year, I have initiated a daily practice of active waiting-with- a holy waiting. Every day I meditate on waiting as a productive space between actions, waiting as a space of refuge and becoming, waiting as an active refusal to dominate, to possess, to force production, to consume. Waiting suffuses my body as breath, movement, listening, song, touch, act and word.

Please accept this invitation to Wait-with me wherever you are in the world. You are welcome to respond in any way you with to this invitation, and to extend it to your network of friends. I will be performing a day of Wait-with in the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles, on March 11, 11am-5pm, 2007, in the context of the exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution. I welcome your embodied participation with me there.

In expectation, in friendship,

-Faith Wilding

originally posted March 08, 2007

Public + Artist Project
By Suzanne Lacy

The Public + Artist Project invites artists to enhance and deepen visitor experience in conjunction with an exhibition.

Throughout WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, exhibition artist Suzanne Lacy is creating a Public + Artist Project that builds on the feminist art legacy of activism around women’s issues and fostering communication between women to improve their social conditions. The project is built on the feminist art premise that the private lives of women had formerly unrecognized public consequence, an idea that remains current.

Stories of Work and Survival involves the recreation of Lacy’s historic performances while presenting a contemporary look at experiences of survival, resilience, and hope of fifteen diverse groups of Los Angeles working women. Leaders of these groups, drawn from different work environments and neighborhoods are participating in a Women’s Leadership through Art seminar by Dr. Janna Shadduck-Hernandez of UCLA’s Center for Labor.

Over the course of six days in April, meetings of these groups will take place here in the reading room of MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary. Questions pursued include: “What challenges your survival or ability to thrive?” “How can making personal stories publicly known serve to empower those telling them?”

Museum visitors are encouraged to witness these conversations as group members will be available after each for informal conversation.

Beginning May 5, the actual recorded conversations will be available to museum visitors in the Reading Room.

On Saturday, June 16, the performance concludes with a massive dinner outside MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary Museum, where over 350 project participants, students, and organizers will meet to celebrate.

Keep checking back for updates on Stories of Work and Survival, or email education@moca.org for more information.

Photos by Ofunne Obiamiwe

originally posted April 20, 2007

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 Book here.

originally posted April 17, 2007

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.”

Read the complete text below:

______________________________________________________

M A N I F E S T O

FOR MAINTENANCE ART 1969!

Proposal for an exhibition “CARE”

MIERLE LADERMAN UKELES

______________________________________________________

I. IDEAS

A.The Death Instinct and the Life Instinct:

The Death Instinct: separation; individuality; Avant-Garde par excellence; to follow one’s own path to death—do your own thing; dynamic change.The Life Instinct: unification; the eternal return; the perpetuation and MAINTENANCE of the species; survival systems and operations; equilibrium.

B. Two basic systems: Development and Maintenance.

The sourball of every revolution: after the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?

Development: pure individual creation; the new; change; progress; advance; excitement; flight or fleeing.

Maintenance: keep the dust off the pure individual creation; preserve the new; sustain the change; protect progress; defend and prolong the advance; renew the excitement; repeat the flight; show your work—show it again keep the contemporaryartmuseum groovy keep the home fires burning

Development systems are partial feedback systems with major room for change.
Maintenance systems are direct feedback systems with little room for alteration.

C. Maintenance is a drag; it takes all the fucking time (lit.)

The mind boggles and chafes at the boredom.

The culture confers lousy status on maintenance jobs = minimum wages, housewives = no pay.

clean you desk, wash the dishes, clean the floor, wash your clothes, wash your toes, change the baby’s diaper, finish the report, correct the typos, mend the fence, keep the customer happy, throw out the stinking garbage, watch out don’t put things in your nose, what shall I wear, I have no sox, pay your bills, don’t litter, save string, wash your hair, change the sheets, go to the store, I’m out of perfume, say it again—he doesn’t understand, seal it again—it leaks, go to work, this art is dusty, clear the table, call him again, flush the toilet, stay young.

D. Art:

Everything I say is Art is Art. Everything I do is Art is Art. “We have no Art, we try to do everything well.” (Balinese saying).

Avant-garde art, which claims utter development, is infected by strains of maintenance ideas, maintenance activities, and maintenance materials.

Conceptual & Process art, especially, claim pure development and change, yet employ almost purely maintenance processes.

E.

The exhibition of Maintenance Art, “CARE,” would zero in on pure maintenance, exhibit it as contemporary art, and yield, by utter opposition, clarity of issues.

II. THE MAINTENANCE ART EXHIBITION:“CARE”

Three parts: Personal, General, and Earth Maintenance.

A. Part One: Personal

I am an artist. I am a woman. I am a wife. I am a mother. (Random order).

I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving, etc. Also, (up to now separately I “do” Art. Now, I will simply do these maintenance everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art. I will live in the museum and I customarily do at home with my husband and my baby, for the duration of the exhibition. (Right? or if you don’t want me around at night I would come in every day) and do all these things as public Art activities: I will sweep and wax the floors, dust everything, wash the walls (i.e. “floor paintings, dust works, soap- sculpture, wall-paintings”) cook, invite people to eat, make agglomerations and dispositions of all functional refuse.

The exhibition area might look “empty” of art, but it will be maintained in full public view.

MY WORKING WILL BE THE WORK

B. Part Two: General

Everyone does a hell of a lot of noodling maintenance work. The general part of the exhibition would consist of interviews of two kinds.

1. Previous individual interviews, typed and exhibited.

Interviewees come from, say, 50 different classes and kinds of occupations that run a gamut from maintenance “man,” maid, sanitation “man,” mail “man,” union “man,” construction worker, librarian, grocerystore “man,” nurse, doctor, teacher, museum director, baseball player, sales”man,” child, criminal, bank president, mayor, moviestar, artist, etc., about:

”-what you think maintenance is;
-how you feel about spending whatever parts of your life you spend on maintenance activities;
-what is the relationship between maintenance and freedom;
-what is the relationship between maintenance and life’s dreams.

2. Interview Room—for spectators at the Exhibition:

A room of desks and chairs where professional (?) interviewers will interview the spectators at the exhibition along same questions as typed interviews. The responses should be personal.

These interviews are taped and replayed throughout the exhibition area.

C. Part Three: Earth Maintenance

Everyday, containers of the following kinds of refuse will be delivered to the Museum:

-the contents of one sanitation truck;

-a container of polluted air;

-a container of polluted Hudson River;

-a container of ravaged land.

Once at the exhibition, each container will be serviced:

purified, de-polluted, rehabilitated, recycled, and conserved by various technical (and / or pseudo-technical) procedures either by myself or scientists.

These servicing procedures are repeated throughout the duration of the exhibition.

originally posted June 13, 2007

Fourteen groups of women from a wide range of work environments and neighborhoods in Los Angeles engage in conversations that address the question, “What challenges your survival or ability to thrive?”

Warrior Nurses- GABRIELA Network| download | 72min, 66mb

Professional Office Workers | download | 65min, 60mb

Bike Messengers | download | 66min, 61mb

Mama’s Tamaleras | download | 75min, 69mb

Public School Teachers | download | 59min, 64mb

Alexandria House | download | 62min, 58mb

Home Health Care Workers | download | 52min, 56mb

Los Angeles Police Officers | download | 57 min, 61mb

Household Workers | download | 72min, 66mb

Native Indian Women | download | 121min, 111mb

East LA Artisans | download | 73min, 68mb

Iranian Refugees | download | 58min, 66.5mb

(not pictured)

Center for the Pacific Asian Family | download | 72min, 66mb

Oaxacan Activists | download | 45min, 42mb

with
Nonchi Whang, design
S.E. Barnet, sound
Kelly Akashi, photography
Elizabeth Lovins, knitting

originally posted June 07, 2007

Kirsten Justesen, Sculpture II, 1969

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.

The exclamatory title of the exhibition is intended to recall the bold idealism that characterized the feminist movement during its second wave, as well as the acronyms of activist groups that protested institutions of all kinds beginning in the late 1960s. For many of the artists in WACK!, feminism often coexisted with political engagement on other fronts such as race, class, and sexual orientation that, at times, superseded feminism as the dominant discourse within which they preferred to situate their work. Many artists’ imagery is explicitly feminist in its foregrounding of the body, personal narrative, and biography. While some artists embraced a conceptual idiom, others explored family histories and narratives of subjugation; still others worked abstractly and obliquely exploring themes of gender. For artists working in cultural contexts where there was no language of feminism or feminist art, their work can retrospectively be read in feminist terms.

The themes that structure the exhibition and publication were imagined in various ways. Some function historically while others are formally inspired, some according to the ways that women artists organized in order to maximize the impact of the statements they were trying to make. This brochure is intended as a guide, providing one narrative through the exhibition and a tool for organizing the artwork you will see and experience.

Goddess is one of the most pervasive articulations of the feminine; artists working from vastly different cultural referents have been empowered by ideas of earth, mother, and Amazon and inspired by their iconography. Magdalena Abakanowicz’s woven Abakan Red (1969) confronts the viewer with its mass and raw presence.The performances of ORLAN as well as the video performances and installations of Ulrike Rosenbach deploy representations of Amazon and Venus, and Ana Mendieta’s Siluetas investigate the mythic status of the female body in its incarnations as virgin, Madonna, and whore. Katharina Sieverding’s film Transformer (1973/74) interrogates the viewer’s subconscious ideas about the power of the embodied woman. And Niki de Saint Phalle’s sculpture Hon, realized only once at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 1966, epitomizes the goddess rendered larger than life, containing within her the institution of the museum. Lorraine O’Grady’s performances in the early 1980s as Mademoiselle Bourgeoise Noire, dressed in a gown made of gloves, disrupted openings at galleries and museums to call attention to issues of race and gender within the art world.

Gender Performance groups works of film, photography, video, and performance in which artists deconstruct the cultural construction of gender as a category of identity. Rose English’s performances appropriate equestrian regalia to investigate the hegemonic allocation of power. In elaborate performances with choreographer and filmmaker Sally Potter, the two artists expanded performance theater to include complex non-linear narratives of gender, power, and a gothic sense of drama. Sanja Iveković, Suzy Lake, and Cindy Sherman engage in the transformation or rereading of their own identities through mediated images of film, magazine photographs, and fashion. Dara Birnbaum’s groundbreaking video works exist as some of the earliest examples of media critique, and her Technology, Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978–79) is still one of the most strikingly succinct examples of the demystification of a popularly conceived icon of female empowerment. Margaret Harrison’s exaggerated drawings of sexualized cartoon figures in hyper-masculine drag claim a similarly humorous and critical tone through the conventional mode of stylized figuration, while Adrian Piper’s biting Political Self-Portraits (1979–80) crystallize the thematics of gender and race.

A number of themes explore the subversion or political deployment of traditional crafts or methodologies. Pattern and Assemblage loosely characterizes the practice of Betye Saar, whose interrogation of African-American identity and history takes the form of collages and boxes filled with found objects and relics of memory; Fluxus artist Mary Bauermeister, who combines needlework and found objects to make a poetic sculptural accumulation; and Mira Schendel, who worked in Brazil and used language and paper as the materials for her delicate Droghuinas and Objetos Gráficos. In delicate assemblages of hole-punch debris and other banal materials, Howardena Pindell’s reductive abstract accumulations subtly comment on the problem of content and cultural identity, whereas her video Free, White and 21 (1980) offers a harsh critique of institutionalized racism in the art world. Nancy Grossman, who draws on her family history in the garment industry to make powerful collages and sculptural busts whose physicality speak of humanity and a kind of emasculating violence to the human form.

The cutting, pasting, and recombination in Pattern and Assemblage often parallels the strategies seen in Body Trauma. Nancy Spero’s monumental drawing Torture of Women (1976) is a searing protest against the violence and subjugation of women across history. Annegret Soltau and Iole de Freitas use the metaphor of cutting or binding to speak about the ways in which language and other cultural constructs constrict female identity. Constraining the male body, Colette Whiten made casting contraptions resembling instruments of torture to capture the male form. In photographic series made when she was a student in Iowa, Ana Mendieta manipulates and distorts her own naked body or uses it to shockingly restage the trauma of rape.

In Taped and Measured, many works employ a serial format as part of a conceptual strategy of presentation. Rosler’s Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained (1977) is a classic video work in which a woman is elaborately measured by a team of scientists who exhaustively document and chart their research results. Her monumental collage series Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain (1966–72) searingly juxtaposes mediated imagery of the female body with political commentary. Collecting media images of women, Annette Messager’s provocative collection of found imagery critiques the ways in which women’s lives are accounted for and incrementalized through beauty rituals. Friedl Kubelka and Eleanor Antin use serial photographs as a daily practice to document or literally graph the changes to their own bodies both self-imposed and through the inevitable process of aging. Alexis Hunter excerpts the hyper-masculinized bodies of men—bikers, truckers, and construction workers—in a painting that presents them anonymously and monumentally. Kirsten Justesen explores the cultural compartmentalization of the female body in a poignant sculptural packaging of her own naked form.

Autophotography evidences the new sexual empowerment with which artists scrutinized the media’s reductive representation of women’s bodies and identity, critiquing notions of beauty and the sentient or aging body. Indeed, the camera was often both tool and subject, as a new postmodern consciousness emerged about the gaze and the location of power inherent in the photographed subject. Hannah Wilke’s career-long engagement with her own photographed image is a poignant evolution of subjectivity. Joan Semmel’s paintings replicate the gaze of the camera when the artist turns the lens on her own and other female and male post-coital bodies. Also engaged in self-conscious self-reflexivity, Sturtevant was an early practitioner of appropriation and here animates and inhabits Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending the Staircase, recreating it as performance. Jay DeFeo and Helena Almeida each explore the formal characteristics of the camera as apparatus. DeFeo literally dressed her tripod and created portraits of it, reversing and reflecting back its objectifying gaze. Almeida photographs herself as she paints on glass, making her own expressive gestures the subject of her work. Maria Lassnig makes deeply introspective self-portraits in paint and film.

Working in the wake of postmodernist and post-structuralist literary theory, many artists included in Making Art History located the subject of history itself as the battleground around issues of authorship and cultural permission. Mary Beth Edelson’s collaged reconstructions of history paintings feminize the canon of art history by asserting the identity of known and forgotten women artists as active subjects in the composition. Alice Neel, though in her seventies during the decade of primary activity of the women’s movement, made particularly provocative images of pregnant and aging female bodies as well as portraits of many of the movement’s most important figures. Also acting as court painter to the movement, Sylvia Sleigh made large group representations of Artists in Residence and SoHo 20, the two most active women’s cooperative galleries in New York at the time. Her renditions of the male nude are equally important in their frank and anti-heroic portrayal of the male body. Both Léa Lublin and June Wayne tackled the authorship of history through direct public address and a kind of performative pedagogy. Lublin polled the public for answers to basic questions about the construction of history, whereas Wayne, printmaker and founder of Tamarind Lithography, acted as instigator in Los Angeles feminist circles to directly confront institutional resistance at its doorstep.

Speaking in Public encompasses activist or conceptually based works through which artists including Lynda Benglis, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Ann Newmarch, and Faith Ringgold—as well as Valerie Solanas through her infamy as an activist, writer, and outlaw—radically challenged existing modes of representation to frame discussions of gender and/or race. While Newmarch utilized the ready circulation of print media to broadcast powerful messages about women’s lives, Tutti infiltrated the porn industry as a performer to subvert the medium’s power of subjugation. Similarly, Benglis made a series of conceptually based interventions into art-magazine and advertising formats using her own naked image as a provocation to her male peers and challenging the arbiters of power within the art world. Ringgold responded to the politics of the women’s movement as it related to the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, two critical social conditions of its formulation.

The related theme Silence and Noise highlights works that incorporate spoken language, compositional sound experiments, and noise. The collective Disband made performances that combined pithy spoken word with non-instrumental sounds and addressed the gender politics of the moment. Similarly outspoken in terms of her address to the audience was the composer and avant-garde musician Pauline Oliveros, who worked with an all-female group of musicians and in 1970 composed To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe, In Recognition of Their Desperation—-. Ketty La Rocca and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha used text and the deconstruction of language to explore cultural identity and translation. Louise Fishman’s Angry Paintings (1973), made during a departure from her abstract output, are a screaming invective silenced by the historical constraints of the medium. Prior to swearing off all communication with the art world, Lee Lozano made journal entries and conceptual projects that comprise an ongoing diatribe against the hegemony of the New York art world. Rita Donagh excerpts found textual or visual information from news photos to highlight and dignify otherwise anonymous bits of marginal or politically charged information in the public realm. In language-based video works, Sonia Andrade takes on issues of nationhood and the politicization of the body in Brazil.

Other artists more pointedly critique the representation of the repressive aspects of the domestic in Female Sensibility. In Benglis’s single-channel video Female Sensibility (1973), two women in heavy makeup caress one another in extreme close-up. Their exaggerated kisses reference pornography’s blatant woman-to-woman sex scenarios intended for a heterosexual male audience. As the only Photorealist painter among male colleagues who painted images of cars, machines, and the urban environment, Audrey Flack turned inward towards “the feminine realm,” as she described it. Jacqueline Fahey’s claustrophobic portraits of her domestic environment are elaborately painted with an enervated eye and almost kitschy application of paint. Constructed as part of the now legendary and monumental Womanhouse, in which artists from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) Feminist Art Program took over a house in Los Angeles, Faith Wilding’s Crocheted Environment (1972) is a netted room of webbed string which both references craft and the repressive and confining aspects of the domestic realm on women’s lives. Her performance Waiting (1972), a ritualistic recitation of the events which historically have constructed women’s lives, is tragic and touching in its simplicity. Susan Hiller’s 10 Months (1977–79) documents her own pregnancy in photographs which abstract the ordeal and physical alteration of a woman’s body. Martha Rosler’s Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain series comprises collages reminiscent of the work of Hannah Höch and is equally damning regarding the ritualized torture of the beauty industry.

Among the most provocative groupings in this exhibition of primarily content-driven art are those of Abstraction and Gendered Space. Benglis and Joan Snyder co-opt the space of painting and the American legacy of Abstract Expressionist drip paintings, while Shigeko Kubota critiques this legacy in a work that directly equates the ejaculatory functions of the body with the excretory act of painting. From the cultural perspectives of Brazil, India, Los Angeles, and Chile, Anna Maria Maiolino, Zarina, Nasreen Mohamedi, Senga Nengudi, and Ceclia Vicuña each developed a new and highly personal language of abstraction incorporating language and the body. Isa Genzken, a resolute anti-formalist, began her career with long ellipsoid sculptures that bisect space and speak of an embodied interiority. Interventions into architectonic space are incorporated into the theme Gendered Space. Mimi Smith’s delicate wire mappings of domestic architectural detail and Eva Hesse’s architectonic Hang Up (1966) simultaneously occupy the spaces of painting, sculpture, and architecture. Louise Bourgeois, whose career-long production has dealt with themes of the body and the architecture of memory, is represented here with forms that are biomorphic, sexual, and resolutely formal. Mary Heilmann’s self-described interest in domestic space and its abstraction informs these early paintings, which conflate her background in ceramics with her eye towards gendering the strictures of architecture. Similarly reacting to the confines of domestic architectural space, Sylvia Plimack Mangold made intimate portraits of her home/studio, carefully tracing its floor, walls, and the residual subject of daily life.

Collective Impulse and Social Sculpture feature strategies which attempt to construct or disrupt models of community. The movement into the social realm was undertaken in specific ways by women artists in the 1960s and ‘70s. The brief but generative activities of Where We At “Black Women Artists,” the only African-American collective of women artists; the public work Lygia Clark made with her students in Paris at the end of her career; the work orchestrated by Nil Yalter with Judy Blum and Nicole Croiset in a women’s prison; Mónica Mayer’s collective installations in Mexico; and the theatrical performances of the Native-American group Spiderwoman Theater all propose new models of community, one of the most profoundly generative legacies of feminist practice on subsequent generations of artists. Social Sculpture examines the move of many women artists into the public realm and into a direct engagement with specific groups. Marta Minujín constructed a “soft gallery” (1973) in which visitors can view performances and take part in communal events. Bonnie Sherk built a working farm at a freeway intersection in San Francisco. Suzanne Lacy documented the occurrence of prostitution with the city of Los Angeles (1974), linking her practice with the social sculpture of Joseph Beuys and deeply political impulse of Allan Kaprow’s Happenings. By inserting her naked body into the public realm, Ewa Partum confronted the public with its own expectations about gender and sexual decorum.

One of feminist art’s lasting legacies was a revolution in pedagogy and the teaching of young women’s self-image as artists; Knowledge as Power represents this major cultural shift. The West Coast was a center for such development at programs like the Feminist Art Program and Women’s Design Program at CalArts and the community-based mural project SPARC, initiated by Judith F. Baca to engage Hispanic youth in the representation and memorialization of their own community. Judy Chicago, Sheila Levrant de Brettville, and Miriam Schapiro began the programs at CalArts, even as they continued individual art practices. Seen here, Chicago’s early postminimalist imagery led to the ceramic portraits of women artists in her later work, The Dinner Party (1974–79). Also honoring the matriarchal lineage in Chicano culture, Baca and her collaborators painted larger-than-life women as inspirational figures for a troubled community.

The body as subject—both the artist’s body and the sexual, lived, and performed body—is central to much feminist production. Body as Medium presents some of the most provocative work in the exhibition. Primarily using video and performance, Marina Abramović, Carolee Schneemann, Joan Jonas, Lili Dujourie, Barbara T. Smith, Gina Pane, Rebecca Horn, and VALIE EXPORT explore endurance, confront the audience, and intentionally exploit the conditions of power located in the relationship of audience to viewer.

Labor includes the often expansive, collective, or performative activities of the Berwick Street Film Collective and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, whose film work and public performance/intervention respectively highlighted and dignified the plight of maintenance workers. Working in a very different industry educating women about their health and bodies, Tee Corrine created the Cunt Coloring book which is both prescient in its stark graphic style and typical of the frequent use of a direct, frank style. Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973–78) and Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s Riddles of the Sphinx (1976) deconstruct the labor of motherhood.

Family Stories is a grouping of practices that broadly embraced the feminist rubric of the personal as political. While Ree Morton made whimsical celastic sculptures using sources from her personal life—children’s games and women’s folklore—Barbara Hammer’s portraits of lesbian intimacy are viewed from extreme close-up, the artist often narrating her own sexual subjectivity in film. Often naïve and strikingly simple, these film images were among the first to portray, in frank and sexual terms, lesbian identity. The Lesbian Art Project abstracted narratives of lesbian lives in performances which were touching and powerfully accessible.

IMAGE CREDIT: Kirsten Justesen, Sculpture 11, 1969, painted cardboard box and photograph, 19 11/16 x 23 5/8 x 23 5/8 in., courtesy of Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, courtesy of the artist, copyright Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / COPY-DAN, Copenhagen

originally posted March 23, 2007

Disband performs Get Rebel at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, 1979. Photo by Sarah Jenkins

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Martha Wilson, Ilona Granet, Ingrid Sischy, Diane Torr, and Donna Henes discuss the formation of Disband and the works they performed in New York from 1978–1982.
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Listen to four songs from Disband:

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originally posted April 27, 2007

Over the past two weekends, an array of women’s groups came to the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA’s Reading Room to share their “Stories of Work and Survival” as part of Suzanne Lacy’s Public + Artist Project. Nurses, teachers, home care workers, police officers, clerical temps, bike messengers and other hard workers gathered in small groups by profession or common interest in the semi-private, semi-public space near the entrance of the exhibition. Seated leisurely in the comfortable, creamy white couch and chairs, the women described experiences in their work life given their profession and their gender, and the subsequent effects on home life as well. Responding to requests from their group community leader such as “What is an average day in your life?” and “What are your dreams and goals?” the women took turns over the course of 1-2 hours to relay their realities and react to each other’s insights and struggles.

While the women were in full view behind the frame of glass doors, their conversations were inaudible to MOCA visitors. Each group wore a cohesive color of their choice that bonded them within the bright warmth of the room. The light-colored carpet under their feet spread out into neutral gray floor of the exhibition space suggesting a connection between these discussions and the feminist concerns of the WACK! show. During each conversation, a woman sat knitting a pillow in the group’s chosen color in a complementary seating area just outside the doors, placed to encourage visitors to observe the conversations. Was each stitch the knitter made intended to connect to the voices being brought together in the room? What do these domestic references accomplish when placed boldly within the white walls of a contemporary art museum?

These intense weekends are the result of several months of grass roots community group organizing by artist Suzanne Lacy and her production team comprised of MOCA staff Suzanne Isken and Denise Gray as well as Masters of Public Art Studies graduate students from USC and other female artists and activists in the Los Angeles area.

For many of these working women, this was the first time they visited the MOCA and there was a mixture of nervousness and pride in having their voices invited into the museum. Visitors standing or passing by the exterior were curious, but often hesitant. Were the glass doors an asset or an obstacle to connecting with each group’s honest presence and wealth of stories?

On Saturday, May 5 from 1-5pm, a public opening reception will take place at the MOCA Geffen for a sound installation in the Reading Room. The installation will be in place for the remainder of the exhibition and will contain photographs and recordings of each group providing the public access to the conversations, and the women, behind the glass doors.

Suzanne Lacy prepares the homecare workers group to engage in conversation as Elana Koff knits a purple pillow to match their SEIU Union T-Shirts.

Listen to the audio clips to hear a sample of the perceptions by observers who could see the women’s groups in conversation, but couldn’t hear them.

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Photos by Sara Daleiden

originally posted April 26, 2007