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"Global Feminisms"
ArtForum, May, 2007 by Carol Armstrong
"Global Feminisms"
BROOKLYN MUSEUM, NEW YORK
"WACK!"
MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, LOS ANGELES
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WHY ARE WOMEN so angry? What do women want? Why can't a woman be more like a man? Can a man be a feminist? Why have there been no great women artists? Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? What is feminism? What is art? Is feminist art "art"? Is feminist art great art? Is art by women artists feminist art? Is feminist art women's art? How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Do feminists have a sense of humor? Can women be funny? (No, but we can be hysterical.) Do we have permanent PMS? Is a woman born, or is she made? Is she nature, or is she culture? Is she a victim of the species or just of society? Is she a sex, or is she a gender? Is hers an identity or a performance, a construction or an essence, an excess or an absence? Have we come a long way, baby, or no distance at all? Are we now the first or the second sex? (And just how many sexes are there?) Which came first, the woman or the egg? How many feminists can dance on the head of a pin? Can anything else be said by and about women other than that throughout history we, collectively and individually, have been raped, abused, and punished, confined, marginalized, and excluded, dominated and dehumanized, objectified, othered, and orientalized, invented, imprisoned in stereotype, and made invisible? And that this is our inevitable fate under the never-ending, self-reproducing ideological order of patriarchy and phallocracy? And what does art have to do with any of these questions? Why art, in fact? Why feminist art? Why bother?
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An increasingly delirious host of questions occurred to me as I wandered despairingly through "Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art," at the Brooklyn Museum. Despairingly, because I think of myself as a feminist, because I don't like to write trashing reviews, and because I had gone with the express wish of finding some things I especially liked and singling them out for analysis and praise. And that exercise was doomed. I did find, toward the beginning, a large color ink-jet print, Dance, 2003, by Czech artist Milena Dopitova of two attractive, apparently sixty-something women (maybe the same woman twice?) embracing (or dancing?) that I rather liked for its gentleness and its ambiguity. I saw two odd little (digital?) photographs by German artist Loretta Lux--Study of a Boy 1 and 2, both 2002--of a pristine, large-headed boy whose uncanniness I tried fleetingly to understand. I came upon three watercolors by Pakistani artist Ambreen Butt that I found momentarily appealing for their mixture of traditional graphic elegance and modern tomboy adventures. Later, I discovered two watercolors, one by another Pakistani, Shahzia Sikander, with spermlike squiggles dancing around in a bloom of pink mist, the other by French artist Beatrice Cussol, a mushroom cloud of crimson and liquid white that made me think simultaneously of an amorphous family tree and a Rorschach spreading of scarlet ink in water, until it made me think of the old gynophobic myth of the odor of menstrual blood fouling and curdling milk. But none of these images answered the desire for something either to take my breath away or to make me smile or laugh or ponder. Something to make me linger. Or something to make me learn something I didn't already know. Instead I came away depressed.
For whether it was under the heading "Life Cycles," "Identities," "Politics," or "Emotions" (principally hysteria and rage), there seemed to be nothing new under the feminist sun except that feminism, or at least self-described feminist art, has gone global: The show includes works from all six inhabited continents, from all sorts of different regimes and cultures, in which the "otherness" of femaleness is joined to many other othernesses. This pluralism is good, because it promises that still more variety lies outside the museum--at the very least I could say that if I didn't like any of these feminisms, perhaps there might be others out there that I might like better. There is work in all media--in sculpture, painting, print and drawing, photography and video, weaving and sewing (and, in an anteroom to the exhibition, ceramics). That pluralism is good as well, insofar as it made me feel that if there's a lot of bad feminist art out there in so many different media, then maybe there are possibilities for good art, too. And anyway, there's so much bad art by men out there--much more than by women--that I thought, Oh, well, at least this show gives equal opportunity to bad art by women. (Though surely that's not what the curators, Linda Nochlin and Maura Reilly, had in mind when they assembled these objects.)
I asked a question earlier about what art is, let alone feminist art. It's a question we've ditched or copped out of in the past decade or so. It is true, however, that it is easier to define what bad art is than to say what good art is. What is bad, to my mind, about all this art by women that calls itself feminist art is not just its reaffirmation of negative stereotypes (under the banner of undoing those stereotypes), not just its reification of the Other as Victim, not just its reinscription of misogyny, but also its general understanding of art as the half-realized illustration of half-baked and often sophomoric concepts. And worse, that this general understanding hardly ever seems to rise to the level of consciousness and self-query; for the most part, it seems blindly propelled by an inertia driven simultaneously by the glut in the art market and the languishing condition of "political" art. And feminist art is, of course, eminently political: art in the name of the feminist revolution. It seems that art by women that is aesthetically compelling, formally challenging, and materially sustained, and art by women that does not illustrate negative stereotypes, victimhood, and pornographic misogyny cannot be understood as feminist art. I guess it must be for this reason, then, that artists such as Ellen Gallagher, Rachel Whiteread, and Carrie Mae Weems did not make the cut for "Global Feminisms."
