Brooklyn Museum, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Through July 1, 2007.
The Brooklyn Museum is certainly one of the least risk-averse of the major New York museums. After all, it hosted the provocative anti-religious photographs of Andreas Serrano that so inflamed Mayor Giuliani in the 1990s, and it now has an entire floor devoted to feminist art.
The gem of the Sackler Center is Judy Chicago’s landmark piece, The Dinner Party (1974-79), which had been in storage for nearly two decades before it was resurrected for an exhibition at this museum in 2002, and then given a permanent home here in 2005. In it Chicago pays homage to 1038 women throughout history, going back to prehistoric times, and specifically honors 39 of them by designing place settings — large ceramic plates and embroidered placemats (traditional female crafts seen here as high art) — that pay tribute to the themes of each woman’s life. Each plate is a stylized variation on the vaginal motif, in a style that evokes the life work of its honoree. The table itself forms a large delta (of Venus, of course); the lighting is dramatic and the atmosphere solemn.
One emerges from a circuit around the table — as from a pilgrimage — into the high-tension atmosphere of the Global Feminisms show, whose in-your-face diversity of theme, medium, and tone feel like a splash of ice water on the brain.
The exhibit is organized into four broad though overlapping thematic sections: Life Cycles, Identities, Politics, and Emotions. What follows is a description of a few of the 95 works by 95 artists from 49 countries.
In the Life Cycle sections, we encounter unusual images of motherhood capable of subverting a thousand GOP fund-raisers: Australian artist Patricia Piccinini (b. 1965) contributes Big Mother, a 5’9” tall, hyper-realistic silicone and fiberglass anthropoid mother (baboon-shaped face, Neanderthal haunch, Caucasian complexion), standing naked, nursing a diapered infant, light-blue leather diaper cases at her feet, worried expression on her face. How much “other” can we take in our desire to endorse motherhood?
What about Catherine Opie’s (b. USA, 1961) chromogenic print, Self-Portrait/Nursing (2004): the overweight tattooed lesbian mom, formerly the multi-pierced, hooded S-M queen, now tenderly nursing her very real son? Or what about the very moving black and white images by Indian photographer Dayanita Singh (b. 1961) documenting the life of Mona Ahmed, a hijra (eunuch) parenting her stepdaughter in a rural village in India? Episodes depict her after her child is taken away, and showing the scars from a police beating.
But does this mean that Global Feminisms is little more than a presentation of bizarre woman-oriented anecdotes, painful cases that might deserve our sympathy, but isolated from more “general” experience?
This is the fulcrum of the Life Cycles section of the exhibition. Of all the domains of art, feminist art addresses in particular the domains of the interpersonal and the personal. It does not concern itself with the natural world outside of us humans, with the collective, the industrial, the abstract, or with the celebration of those favored by prevailing social norms. When it aims at Life Cycles (the intersection of the personal and the interpersonal) it uses extreme anecdotes to expose the invisible contraints that weigh more heavily on the less powerful players in the transactions — invariably women. The recent death by stoning of a 17-year-old Kurdish teenager for dating a man of a different background exposes such constraints on all women in that society in a similar exaggerated synecdoche. Would anyone dare to show any of the many photographs taken of this social murder — the modern day equivalent of lynching photographs — as “art”?
The show’s second theme, Identity, is perhaps its most complex. It evokes questions of who one is, how one perceives oneself, and how one is perceived by others. In male-dominated societies, women since Virginia Woolf in her room of her own have been trying to sort out these notions, both by deconstructing objectivizing stereotypes and by exploring new identity combinations and possibilities outside of male-generated convention.
For example, what Cindy Sherman (b. 1954) has done with female stereotypes and beyond in American culture, Japanese photographer Tomoko Sawada (b. 1977), does on a smaller scale (so far) in her own culture. Known for her multiple pictures of herself in various guises in a large sheet of photo-booth images, here in School Days/E (2004) she plays with the themes of homogeneity and difference in a “school picture” showing a class of uniformed elementary school girls with a variety of hair styles and facial expressions — but they’re all Sawada. She has taken a situation that lends itself to stereotypes — the uniformed racially homogeneous school girl — and intensified that homogeneity to the point of absurdity.
Israeli artist Oreet Ashery (b. 1966) reverses this strategy by contradicting a stereotype rather than intensifying it: with a wink to Duchamp, she assumes a strongly gendered male identity as the Hasid “Marcus Fisher,” in Self-Portrait as Marcus Fisher I, complete with dark beard, long curling peyes, and black hat, who happens to be holding a female breast protruding from his shirt. By doing so she tweaks a social group that immerses itself in a uniformity that decrees strict and constraining gender roles — Yentl in a glance.
Reversing direction yet again, American artist Cass Bird (b. 1974) presents herself as a gender-ambiguous young person, with an angry look on her (?) face and a barely concealed tattooed word below the neck, wearing a hat emblazoned with a pistol and the legend “I look just like my daddy.” Is this a girl? Is she being ironic? Is their resemblance an embarrassment to him (the Daddy)? Does her Daddy really accept her for who she is?
The most elaborate inquiry into the notion identity comes from Serbian artist Tanja Ostojic (b. 1972), who takes aim at categorical identies, both personal and bureaucratic, in a high-risk performance piece, of which we see the documentary records. As a citizen of a non-EU European country who was refused entry into Austria to participate in an artists’ workshop, Ostojic created posted an ad for a husband with an EU passport on the Web. After sorting through fifty respondents, she married German media artist Klemes Golf, and took up residence in Germany. Her piece, Looking for a Husband with an EU Passport (2000–2005), shows her ad, depicting herself nude with shaved head staring frontally and impassively into the camera — pure body with no attempt at allure — along with photographs, documents, and transcripts that record her search for a husband and its results.
Ostojic is attacking the bureaucratic reduction of a human being to a nationality, whose life may be determined by a wholly arbitrary set of immigration laws, such as the US practices with a savage arbitrariness. Her self-portrait’s disturbing evocation of the image of a concentration camp victim headed naked and hairless to the shower is a solumn reminder of where this form of dehumanization can lead.
Editor’s note: In Part 2 of Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art, Joel Simpson will describe the other two thematic sections of the exhibition, Politics and Emotion, and provide more background and context for the entire show.
