"Sense and Sensibility." - Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York exhibit

ArtForum, Oct, 1994 by Jan Avgikos

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART NEW YORK

Despite Minimalism's lingering status as the apotheosis of American-style Formalism, it was never any more "contentless" than other art. Over the years, however, the meanings assigned this work have been subject to considerable revisioning. Michael Fried was among the first to question the neutrality of Minimalist sculpture, condemning its invasion of the viewer's space as subversive theatricality. Rosalind Krauss viewed the deployment of highly repetitive structures as rooted in "the obsessional's unwavering ritual," rather than in rationality. More recently, Anna Chave fueled the escalating discursive wars over Minimalism's interpretation with the charge that the movement's mostly male practitioners wielded the language of formalist sculpture to articulate a "rhetoric of power." Given this history, little prompting was needed to view the work of the handful of contemporary women artists presented in "Sense and Sensibility: Women Artists and Minimalism in the Nineties" in terms of a feminist displacement of Minimalist machismo.

The Museum of Modern Art has never been known for promoting social relevance in the arts. Indeed the institution has been notably reluctant to address the politics of artistic practice--let alone to champion political art itself--and its treatment of controversial subjects has been limited to a well-defined safety zone. Should we regard "Sense and Sensibility" as a long-overdue break with this institutional reargardism? To all appearances, with this exhibition MoMA threw its hat into the ring on two counts: first, by belatedly entering into the discussion of the complex ideologies that underwrite Modernist practice and its theorization; and second, by attempting to compensate for its neglect of previous generations of feminist art, thus 'fessing up to its own complicity in the marginalization of that work. Upon closer inspection, however, it is evident that MoMA neither accomplishes nor even genuinely attempts either.

Lynn Zelevansky, the curator of "Sense and Sensibility," makes a very big claim in the opening paragraph of her catalogue essay: "Minimalism . . . has a place in the second half of our century akin to the one held by Cubism in the first half." Not Pop art, mind you, not Conceptual art--the perpetual nemesis of the institution--but Minimalism. This assertion is suspicious because it asserts Minimalism's hegemony in order to wrest a linear sequence from a network of competing trajectories. Cubism was an epoch-making innovation in that it collapsed Renaissance-style perspective into a surface geometry of fractured planes, foregrounding the tautological dimension of representation. Within a mere five years its formal vocabularies constituted an international style. Minimalism's innovations were less earthshaking; though it did employ production values that challenged conventions of facture and decisively tested key notions of authorship and originality, much of its formal vocabulary and rhetoric was recuperated from previous Modernist moments. Zelevansky's equating of Minimalism with Cubism, then, should be seen as largely rhetorical--as a pointed strategy that allows her to construct a mythology of origin and to make Minimalism's influence over the second half of the century analogous to the wide net Cubism cast over the first. Crediting Minimalism with this exaggerated power, Zelevansky traces the dominance of the grid, geometry, and repetition--her rather simplified list of Minimalism's principal common denominators--from the '60s through "post-Minimalism" in the '70s and into the final decades of the century. Here, the single thread of her argument begins to fray, exposing her proposition for the facile attempt at mastery that it is. Under the rubric of post-Minimalism, all manner of art and artists can be brought into the fold: "feminist" art can even be accounted for merely in terms of formal structure--a schema that would make Carl Andre and Hannah Wilke kissing cousins. The results are self-evidently ludicrous.

If MoMA has a genuine interest in the depth or difficulty of art inspired by or related to feminism, it would not be proffering the work exhibited here (as Zelevansky's catalogue essay might lead one to believe) as recompense for all those female artists who never received institutional approval in the '60s and '70s. The works included in "Sense and Sensibility" either evidence a failure to articulate the complexities of gender, identity, and sexuality, and to grapple with their translation into representational form, that is as pronounced as the curatorial parochialism that brought them together, or they pointedly strain the program, revealing its limitations.

Polly Apfelbaum's is among the contributions that never get beyond worn-out one-liners. She gives us colorful stains on white stretch velvet (signs of menstruation and the premenopausal female body) instead of the "seminal" sign of masculinity--the gesture. Folds of blotched velvet or gridded stacks of patches (as in Splendor in the Grass, Glory in the Flower, 1993) are displayed on the floor, suggesting the violation of the sanctity of the art object. Apfelbaum's titles are rather playful and often refer to storybook characters--Snow White, Sleeping Beauty--presumably as a means of examining the roles traditionally assigned to women. Such froth, however, cannot mask the preciousness of her stains and velvet patches or the shallowness of her take on feminine experience.