Feminism & art [9 views] - Panel Discussion

In conclusion, it might make sense to speak to how a growing hunger for spiritual fulfillment in a spiritually degraded society is leading people to feminist art (or, I could add, any other idealistic art practice). I recall the New Museum's experience hosting the Adrian Piper retrospective a couple of years ago: Having thought of Piper as a bit of a cult figure, we were unprepared for the hoards of twenty-somethings who, filling our galleries, seemed entirely comfortable with what they were experiencing. At the time, I reflected that most art skips a generation before finding its audience and that a generation raised on the Internet no longer questions the precepts of Conceptual art. Now I'm happy to expand that thought to propose that feminism, as a phenomenon, must seem refreshingly radical to a generation raised on Baywatch. Or, to put it more generously, this generation, facing a previously unimagined set of challenges, assumptions, and possibilities, can now experience feminism as something its founders never could: a historical continuity, flowing from one generation to the next, always adaptable to the needs anti strengths of a new wave of the curious and the bold.

Dan Cameron is senior curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, and curator at the 2003 Istanbul Biennial, which remains on view through November 16.

COLLIER SCHORR

Is feminism a celebration of the "feminine" or of freedom and optimal choice? Clearly, the two are not always the same.

It is interesting that the "destruction of pleasure" is sometimes cited in relation to earlier feminisms. I never thought that women in the '70s movements were rejecting pleasure--rather, they were claiming authorship of it. Of course, this is the perspective of someone who grew up reading her mother's copies of Ms. magazine. I think we often overlook the fact that bra burning was actually sexy and that women's sexuality had to--if only momentarily and symbolically--extricate itself from the masculine domain in order to write itself into the script. For me, feminism has often been the by-product of a heterosexual constitution. As excited as I was by late-'80s and early-'90s postfeminism and French theory, as applied to the work of Barbara Kruger and Laurie Simmons and others, these arguments were situated in a dialogue with men. At that point, you began to see a schism between the goals of a more homogeneous feminism and the ideologies of queer theory. In fact, queer theory, which includes the possibility of changing one's gender through grammar (i.e., a woman sees herself as a man, so she calls herself a man, a "he"), could hardly be seen as celebratory of femininity when it offers a clear desire for masculine privilege. In that sense, contemporary queer theory actually almost becomes reactive conservatism: The same woman--who may sleep with other women--adopts a different gender and simultaneously opts out of homosexuality. The advent of this nonsurgical sex change has all the uncomfortable baggage of racial "passing" and creates, in its most political sense, an erasure of early feminism. But then we must ask: Is feminism a celebration of the "feminine" or of freedom and optimal choice? Clearly, the two are not always the same.