Wack! at MOCA
opened this weekend. My friend has been working on this show for eight years. Connie Butler is an amazing art professional -- a serious person, a curator with an even hand and a lot integrity.
I salute her.
That said, this show made me remember why I felt oppressed by the feminism of the previous generation of women academics. Not all of them mind you....Linda Nochlin was a glorious exception, but I chose to work with a prominent feminist scholar whose work i admired -- until I realized that her intellectual frames of reference had been restricted by a principle and code of social networking -- I could only refer to friends who had passed the feminist litmus test. It all took on a Stalinist tinge, but the work in WACK! wasn't Stalinist so much as it was angry, messy, and exhibitionist. So much nakedness, so many bushes...it was as if the female artist tried to exorcise the demon of the nude by stripping herself down. Most of these women were in their twenties when they did this and the result is not so much a glorying in the body and its potentialty as much as it was an almost totemic display of it to ward off the power of other naked bodies and nudes.
I ran through the show quickly while I tried to herd a group of underage viewers into bush-free zones, but this show was incredibly educational -- there was so much work I had never ever seen! Go see the show. It's at the Geffen Contemporary.
I salute her.
That said, this show made me remember why I felt oppressed by the feminism of the previous generation of women academics. Not all of them mind you....Linda Nochlin was a glorious exception, but I chose to work with a prominent feminist scholar whose work i admired -- until I realized that her intellectual frames of reference had been restricted by a principle and code of social networking -- I could only refer to friends who had passed the feminist litmus test. It all took on a Stalinist tinge, but the work in WACK! wasn't Stalinist so much as it was angry, messy, and exhibitionist. So much nakedness, so many bushes...it was as if the female artist tried to exorcise the demon of the nude by stripping herself down. Most of these women were in their twenties when they did this and the result is not so much a glorying in the body and its potentialty as much as it was an almost totemic display of it to ward off the power of other naked bodies and nudes.
I ran through the show quickly while I tried to herd a group of underage viewers into bush-free zones, but this show was incredibly educational -- there was so much work I had never ever seen! Go see the show. It's at the Geffen Contemporary.
2 Comments:
connie butler and the entire non-political, privileged, out of touch with reality artworld got rightfully roasted at the feminist futures conference last month at the MOMA. as i have yet to see the show i'll refrain from comment, but her own assessment of the curatorial process and knowledge of the very era was less than brilliant
and why would you worry about herding "underage viewers into bush-free zones" given that was their damn (port)hole into the world?
Feminism in the art world unfortunately devolved into privileged frustrated white women, whose sense of entitlement often got the best of them -- why am I not in the Biennal does not a political position make. The "politics" of the artworld are so Baroque and hypocritical that one hankers for the purely formalist chops of revolt against any kind of participation at all -- the refuseniks of 1862 Paris for instance -
We want to know more about the Feminist Futures conference. I have heard nada about this event, no street
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