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Tomoko Sawada, School Days/E (detail), 2004
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Feminist Art
April 4-17, 2007
After years of marginalization, feminist art gets major institutional attention this spring with a wave of museum shows. WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at LA's Museum of Contemporary Art probes feminism's influence on art of the '60s and '70s, while Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum celebrates contemporary women artists and their diverse practices. We interview the curator of WACK!, Cornelia Butler, about the role of feminist ideas today, and profile the brazen A.L. Steiner, an artist who tackles gender politics with candid snapshots and films. We also review a book of Tracey Emin's infamously confrontational work and a show of Monica Bonvicini's architectural interventions in Stockholm.
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The World of Contemporary Art - Online
news. diary. artguide. in print. previews. critics' picks. |
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The Getty Gets Current
(LA Times, March 25)
With new exhibitions of postwar Japanese art, a musical sculpture by Tim Hawkinson, photographs by Sigmar Polke, and paintings by Gerhard Richter, the Getty Center is beginning to engage with contemporary art in a big way. Hawkinson's Überorgan (2000), a giant mass of plastic tubes and red netting, plays its primitive, player-piano tones in the rotunda. Polke's layered,
messy photos, taken between 1968 and 1972, are displayed in the museum's recently opened Center for Photographs, while Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art: Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan, 1950-1970 shows off rarely seen avant-garde work from across the Pacific.
Ball & Nogues Awarded MoMA/P.S.1 Prize
(New York Times, March 24)
A psychedelic rust-colored canopy made of Mylar, propped up with wooden poles and cargo netting, has propelled two young Los
Angeles architects onto the national design stage. The canopy's creators, Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues, were recently tapped as the winners of the annual MoMA/P.S.1 Young Architects Program. P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center director Alanna Heiss called the project a "Felliniesque, low-tech circus tent with the canvas
replaced by hallucinogenic red, orange, and amber silicon scales." The competition rules called for projects that provide
shade, water, and seating in a 15,000-square-foot space, with a $70,000 budget. Ball and Nogues' design will periodically
dump water on patrons, who can take a load off by sitting in the netting. "We're essentially creating an outdoor daytime nightclub,"
explained Ball. The result will open on June 21 in P.S.1's courtyard.
Moscow Biennale Brings Art to Factories
(Washington Post, March 19)
Bolstered by a burgeoning art-market bubble, the Second Moscow Biennale recently attracted increased attention by putting the spotlight not only on paintings and video installations, but also on
the buildings that housed them. Former 19th-century factories, which were restored to show art, caught visitors' eyes. Gallery owners are increasingly leaving central Moscow in order
to take advantage of the cheap real estate and exhibition spaces offered by industrial spaces. Project Fabrika, the site of Pam Skelton's video homage to Soviet poet Anna Akhmatova, is still a functioning paper plant, while Vinzavod, a 172,000-square-foot former wine factory, played host to work by more than 60 Russian artists, who installed their works
in the building's underground chambers and tunnels. As the most recent sale of Russian contemporary art at Sotheby's commanded over $5 million, speculators can expect more factory-ready art in the
immediate future.
Piano Quits Boston Tower Project
(Boston Globe, March 16)
A disagreement over creative control between Renzo Piano and developer Steve Belkin has resulted in the Italian starchitect walking away from what was to be Boston's tallest tower. It remains to be seen what
elements of Piano's design for a 1,000-foot, eco-sensitive glass skyscraper — which included a sunlit ground floor as well as a rooftop public space
and restaurant — will remain as the project moves forward. Belkin apparently requested that Piano increase the proposed tower's
width, and the architect refused. A senior executive at Renzo Piano Building Workshop in Genoa, Italy, would only comment,
"Some modifications were asked for. We felt they weren't appropriate."
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Tate moves to collect more female artists more »
Digging through the estate of Clyfford Still more »
LA is an art capital looking for an audience more »
Three Chinese artists each command $1 million-plus at Sotheby's more »
Gehry makes NYC debut with IAC headquarters more »
Walker Art Center director decides it's time to leave more »
Koolhaas unveils plans for Singapore skyscraper more »
Exhibit finds "Critical Space" for Andrea Zittel more »
How will skyscrapers work in the London skyline? more »
Beijing plays host to British art more »
Eric Orr brings his graf-inspired art to New Zealand more »
The rise of European architecture more »
Museum shows wrestle with slavery more »
Spotless Mind creator shows off his art more »
Auction to include Bacon's nearly discarded works more »
Alvar Aalto's natural designs draw praise more »
"Saatchi of the North" opens gallery more »
Mark Ryden drawing crowds for solo show more »
Environmental art to be a highlight of Sharjah Biennial more »
Art mistaken for garbage more »
Dallas art collector Raymond D. Nasher dies at 85 more »
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[
Global Feminisms
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Ryoko Suzuki / Catherine Opie / Mequitta Ahuja / Lisa Reihana
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Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum puts its finger on the myriad pulses of contemporary feminism. The exhibition organizes these preoccupations into four themes:
Life Cycles, Identities, Politics, and Emotions. Eighty-eight women artists — born after 1960 and hailing from 49 countries
— pick up after Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, which is installed at the newly opened Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.
This generation's predilection for photography and video is visible in each segment. Miwa Yanagi and Hiroko Okada, both from Japan, employ digital media to humorously expand imagined possibilities that subvert sexist expectations. Okada's
The Delivery by Male Project turns the female responsibility for childbearing on its head by depicting a hilarious alternative, while Yanagi's Yuka, a photograph from her series My Grandmothers, shows a vivacious older woman screaming her dyed-red head off as she speeds away from constraining expectations.
Other digital works aim not to escape reality but to depict it frankly. Mary Coble's video Binding Ritual, Daily Routine unflinchingly exposes transgender experience by depicting the artist repeatedly binding her breasts. Palestinian artist Emily Jacir makes personal the ever-hardening division of Israel in her documentary Crossing Surda (A Record of Going to and from Work), which she was only able to film through a hole in her bag. Recasting geopolitical borders, Kenyan artist Ingrid Mwangi sunburned the shapes of her two homes, Africa and Germany, onto her stomach and then photographed them in Static Drift.
Despite this digital dominance, painting and sculpture also join the fray: Spaniard Angela de la Cruz's deconstructed and marginalized canvas Ashamed evokes the powerful male domination of painting, while Brit Jenny Saville's enormous corporeal painting Fulcrum rejects such timidity to depict lumpy female bodies. Fellow YBA Sarah Lucas recycles banal objects such as a steel bucket, a cast football, and pantyhose to portray a crude but lighthearted version
of intercourse in her sculpture The Sperm Thing. At the other end of reproductive rights is Australian Patricia Piccinini's Big Mother, a frighteningly lifelike sculpture of a genetically altered simian breast-feeding a diapered, human baby.
Performance and installation pieces repeatedly return to the contested space of the body. Italian artist Sissi imprisoned herself for several days — perched like a bird, composed and concentrated — within her suspended installation,
Wings Have No Home, and Thailand's Skowmon Hastanan's light box installation Les femmes en route: Magnificent Journey reminds us that the bodies of young women can be a tourist destination. In Egyptian artist Ghada Amer's arrangement of embroidered boxes, The Encyclopedia of Pleasure, the collision between religion and sexuality embroils the female body in the strictures of modern Islam. This theme, which
continues to trouble much of the world, recurs in Arahmaiani's Display Case (Etalase), which presents common items such as a Coca-Cola bottle and a box of condoms alongside the Qur'an — a juxtaposition provocative
enough in the artist's homeland of Indonesia to warrant her arrest. (AA)
Global Feminisms, curated by Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin, continues at the Brooklyn Museum through July 1 and is on view at the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts from September 12 to December 9. A comprehensive catalogue has been published
by Merrell Publishers in association with the Brooklyn Museum.
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Cerith Wyn Evans: Futa Omote (double face)
Tokyo
Taka Ishii Gallery
Now through April 7
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Minimalists will love this small-scale exhibition from Wales' most famous artist and erstwhile assistant to filmmaker Derek Jarman. Cerith Wyn Evans is no stranger to diverse materials — his previous works have used mirrors, celluloid, and most famously, neon. For Futa Omote (double face), he returns to his material of choice with two light sculptures, Mobius Strip in white and Black Mobius Strip, which form positive and negative lines on the gallery walls. In these works, the neon twists and turns like a child's scribble
to strangely beautiful effect. The centerpiece of the monochromatic show is Untitled, Black Fountain, a sculptural water feature that appears to be crafted from coal, referencing, as is common in the artist's oeuvre, his Welsh
homeland. (LCD)
Cerith Wyn Evans has concurrent exhibitions at CCA Kitakyushu through April 27 and Bubble Peddler in Graz through May 13.
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Dolores Zinny & Juan Maidagan: The coast, the attack, the same
Bilbao
Sala Rekalde
Now through April 8
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Artistic duo Dolores Zinny and Juan Maidagan transform the exhibition space at Bilbao's Sala Rekalde with their new site-specific intervention, Alarga la lengua (Stretch your tongue out). A curving installation of towering wood and polyester forms that conjoin and intersect, the sinuous shapes echo those of
Frank Gehry's neighboring Guggenheim Bilbao and Richard Serra's Torqued Ellipses, famously displayed there. The exhibition also includes models, drawings of the sculpture, collages, and smaller sculptures
alongside an earlier red-and-white fabric work adapted for the show. A hybrid of creative disciplines, Alarga la lengua ultimately serves as a physical prototype for the spirit of collective activity. (HGM)
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Trenton Doyle Hancock: The Wayward Thinker
Edinburgh
Fruitmarket
Now through April 8
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Envisioning a land of evil Vegans, their peaceful, plant-human hybrid cousins the Mounds, and salty pleasures, American artist Trenton Doyle Hancock turns Fruitmarket's galleries into unfamiliar territory. Hancock's European debut adds another painted chapter to the life
of St. Sesom, a descendent of the masturbating apeman Homerbuctas, who attempts to save the Vegans' humanity. With huge concrete text
arcing into the gallery's crevices and Pepto-Bismol-pink canvases dazzling at each turn, this larger-than-life narrative might
appear absurd. But Hancock's illustrated epic realizes a disturbingly allegorical image of a brave new world balancing veiled
fears and entrenched traditions. Despite their trashy comic-book allure, Hancock's aborted forms are rarely as playful as
they pretend to be. (ILY)
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George Condo
London
Simon Lee Gallery
Now through April 21
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When the Wrong Gallery installed George Condo's painting of the Queen-as-Cabbage-Patch-Kid in Tate Modern last fall, the English press cried foul. Condo's current exhibition of paintings, drawings, and sculptures at Simon Lee Gallery proves less provocative, though
the artist's "antipodal," bestial characters pilfer from art history. In the large oil painting Metamorphosis, a woman with a wooden peg and a rhinoceros hoof for legs arches back into the glamorous, hysteric pose familiar from Picasso's
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which reappears in several other works. Less expected are the sculptures, which Condo began producing in 1999. Desireah, an ostentatiously bejeweled sphere filled with dried, milky deposits, unnervingly walks the line between decadence and perversion. (TC)
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Monica Bonvicini: What does your wife think of your rough and dry hands?
Stockholm
Bonniers Konsthall
Now through April 29
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Monica Bonvicini's architectural interventions are minimal yet effective at Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm's new Johan Celsing-designed glass palace for art. Sheets of fragile drywall, placed on the floor, make each footstep potentially destructive,
forcing visitors to consider the way they move in the space. Bonvicini's signature chain swing — one of her many flirtations
with S&M culture — similarly invites healthy, though uncomfortable, interaction. The exhibition's titular piece continues
Bonvicini's intimate Q&A's with construction workers in various countries, now including Sweden, through which the artist
highlights connections between architecture, sexuality, and power, using aggression and humor in equal measures. (ES)
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[
A.L. Steiner
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A.L. Steiner
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Few artists have managed to sustain the prolific production that defines the career of New York-based A.L. Steiner. Born in Miami as Amy Steiner, the artist is one of the core members of Chicks on Speed — an all-female electroclash band first formed at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts in 1997 — as well as an active photographer,
video artist, and curator.
Using these varied approaches to art-making, Steiner continues the tradition of feminist artists like Carolee Schneeman, Yoko Ono, and Hannah Wilke, employing the body and a low-tech, DIY aesthetic to challenge the sexualization of the female form. In her recent photography
exhibition 1 Million Photos, One Euro Each (Minimum order) at John Connelly Presents, Steiner used a straightforward approach to picture composition to create rough, riot-grrrl-esque snapshots of crotches,
nudes, and clothed women.
With painter Nicole Eisenman, Steiner spearheaded the curatorial project and conceptual art collective Ridykeulous at Participant Gallery last spring, which showcased visually aggressive work that poked fun at lesbian and feminist taboos; one sculpture, entitled
Bush Wackers, featured two beavers having oral sex. Steiner's latest effort, C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience), a video dance collaboration with robbinschilds at Taxter & Spengemann, takes on yet another medium, depicting the female figure against the natural and manmade world. With dancers clad in various
monochromatic outfits eventually spanning the full spectrum of color, the video suggests a partnership between the figure
and landscape that never feels forced or contrived. Rather, C.L.U.E. continues to exhibit the leveled field, whereby gender roles are defined purely by what you see instead of the cultural biases
you already know. (PJ)
C.L.U.E. runs through April 21 at Taxter & Spengemann in New York and Shared Women, curated by Eve Fowler, Emily Roysdon, and A.L. Steiner, is on view through April 8 at LACE in Los Angeles.
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[ Cornelia Butler ] |
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Lynda Benglis / Katharina Sieverding / Martha Rosler / Judy Chicago
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| WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles surveys the historical foundations of feminist engagements with art, featuring
450 works in various media produced between 1965 and 1980 by 119 artists and artist groups from 21 countries. Artkrush editor
Paul Laster talks to exhibition organizer Cornelia Butler, a former MOCA curator and current chief curator of drawings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, about the exhibition,
feminist art, and feminism's impact on the contemporary art scene. |
AK: What is your definition of feminist art?
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CB: The definition I have been using is borrowed from Peggy Phelan's definition in the book Art and Feminism (Phaidon Press, 2001): "Feminism is the conviction that gender has been, and continues to be, a fundamental category for
the organization of culture. Moreover, the pattern of that organization usually favors men over women." Feminist art — as
opposed to art that is inflected by feminist thought or exists in relationship to it, which is what WACK! is about — seems to be art that explicitly deals with these issues.
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AK: How did you organize such a diverse group of international artists in the WACK! exhibition and the accompanying 500-page catalogue?
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CB: The process has been a long one — it took more than eight years to realize this show. We tried, in the curatorial process,
to interrogate the very notion and structure of the survey exhibition by — rather than creating a dominant narrative to build
upon — mapping as wide a field of research as possible and working in from the margins of that diverse and unruly group of
practices. We created a tiered system of lists from the known, canonical group of artists, who we initially put aside, as
well as a list of names drawn from invitations and co-ops of the period to really ask who was working and contributing. The
final exhibition benefits from what I call an ideology of shifting criteria — a system within which artists function in different
ways. There are artists, for example, whose work as activists or teachers, in their radical rethinking of pedagogical methods,
was as important as their visual production.
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AK: Why was the show limited to the late '60s and the '70s? Obviously, women artists are still working with feminist issues, but
were they prior to the '60s? Who were the feminist art pioneers?
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Tracey Emin
Tracey Emin and Carl Freedman
Rizzoli
A controversial artist unafraid of exposing her private life through her practice, Tracey Emin became an overnight sensation in the mid-'90s with her saucy sculptural installation Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995. The appliquéd tent — which named relatives, sexual partners, and aborted children who shared her bed — was first exhibited
in a show curated by Carl Freedman, whose comprehensive interview with the artist runs throughout this massive monograph. Working in a variety of media — including
printmaking, neon, photography, video, sculpture, and needlework — the outspoken Emin, a rape survivor who became a sexually promiscuous teenager, pulls no punches as she reveals a lifetime
of pleasures and pains via her art. (PL)
Tracey Emin's video The Interview is on view in Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum through July 1 and travels to the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College in Wellesley,
Massachusetts from September 12 to December 9. Emin will represent Britain at the Venice Biennale from June 10 through November 21.
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Cover
Art
Tomoko Sawada
School Days/E from the School Days series,
2004
C-print
5 x 7 in./ 13 x 17.8 cm
Courtesy Zabriskie Gallery, New York
All Rights
Reserved
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