NEWSgrist - where spin is art

Google, ca. 1960

via Stephen's Untold Stories: [thanks Erika!]

Feminist Futures (If I Had a Hammer...)

L: Coco Fusco in combat fatigues; R: Lucy Lippard.

via NYTimes:
Feminist Art Finally Takes Center Stage
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: January 29, 2007

"Well, this is quite a turnout for an 'ism,'" said the art historian and critic Lucy Lippard on Friday morning as she looked out at the people filling the Roy and Niuta Titus Theater at the Museum of Modern Art and spilling into the aisles. "Especially in a museum not notorious for its historical support of women."

Ms. Lippard, now in her 70s, was a keynote speaker for a two-day symposium organized by the museum that was titled "The Feminist Future: Theory and Practice in the Visual Arts." The event itself was an unofficial curtain-raiser for what is shaping up as a watershed year for the exhibition — and institutionalization, skeptics say — of feminist art.

For the first time in its history this art will be given full-dress museum survey treatment, and not in just one major show but in two. On March 4 "Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution" opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles,  followed on March 23 by "Global Feminisms" at the Brooklyn Museum. (On the same day the Brooklyn Museum will officially open its new Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art and a permanent gallery for "The Dinner Party," Judy Chicago's seminal proto-feminist work.)

Such long-withheld recognition has been awaited with a mixture of resignation and impatient resentment. Everyone knows that our big museums are our most conservative cultural institutions. And feminism, routinely mocked by the public media for 35 years as indissolubly linked with radicalism and bad art, has been a hard sell.

But curators and critics have increasingly come to see that feminism has generated the most influential art impulses of the late 20th and early 21st century. There is almost no new work that has not in some way been shaped by it. When you look at Matthew Barney, you’re basically seeing pilfered elements of feminist art, unacknowledged as such.

The MoMA symposium was sold out weeks in advance. Ms. Lippard and the art historian Linda Nochlin appeared, like tutelary deities, at the beginning and end respectively; in between came panels with about 20 speakers. The audience was made up almost entirely of women, among them many veterans of the women's art movement of the 1970s and a healthy sprinkling of younger students, artists and scholars. It was clear that people were hungry to hear about and think about feminist art, whatever that once was, is now or might be.

What it once was was relatively easy to grasp. Ms. Lippard spun out an impressionistic account of its complex history, as projected images of art by women streamed across the screen behind her, telling an amazing story of their own. She concluded by saying that the big contribution of feminist art "was to not make a contribution to Modernism." It rejected Modernism's exclusionary values and authoritarian certainties for an art of openness, ambiguity, reciprocity and what another speaker, Griselda Pollock, called "ethical hospitality," features now identified with Postmodernism.

But feminism was never as embracing and accessible as it wanted to be. Early on, some feminists had a problem with the "lavender menace" of lesbianism. The racial divide within feminism has never been resolved and still isn’t, even as feminism casts itself more and more on a globalist model.

The MoMA audience was almost entirely white. Only one panelist, the young Kenyan-born artist Wangechi Mutu, was black [sic!]. And the renowned critic Geeta Kapur from Delhi had to represent, by default, all of Asia. "I feel like I'm gate-crashing a reunion," Ms. Mutu joked as she began to speak, and she wasn't wrong.

At the same time one of feminism's great strengths has been a capacity for self-criticism and self-correction. Yet atmospherically the symposium was a very MoMA event, polished, well executed, well mannered, even cozy. A good half of the talks came across as more soothing than agitating, suitable for any occasion rather than tailored to one onto which, I sensed, intense personal, political and historical hopes had been pinned.

Still, there was some agitation, and it came with the first panel, "Activism/Race/Geopolitics," in a performance by the New York artist Coco Fusco. Ms. Fusco strode to the podium in combat fatigues and, like a major instructing her troops, began lecturing on the creative ways in which women could use sex as a torture tactic on terrorist suspects, specifically on Islamic prisoners.

The performance was scarifyingly funny as a send-up of feminism's much-maligned sexual "essentialism." But its obvious references to Abu Ghraib, where women were victimizers, was telling.

In the context of a mild-mannered symposium and proposed visions of a "feminist future" that saw collegial tolerance and generosity as solutions to a harsh world, Ms. Fusco made the point that, at least in the present, women are every bit as responsible for that harshness — for what goes on in Iraq for example — as anyone.

Brooklyn Arts Council Announces Art As Anecdote

Art as Anecdote February 1 – April 20, 2007
  Curated by Sarah Schmerler
 
  Opening Reception:  Feb 1, 6 - 8pm
  1st Thursday curatorial talk: March 1, 6 – 8pm

View Artworks here

BROOKLYN, NY.- Brooklyn Arts Council announces Art As Anecdote, exhibition that looks at the events, impressions, and ambitions that are part and parcel of an artist's daily grind—and the unlikely meanings they generate for others. The exhibition, which includes works by Alexis Ditkowsky, Benjamin Evans, Marney Fuller, Chris Herbeck, Orrie King, Nsenga Knight, Ellen Letcher, Dominic Miller, Brent Ridge, Annick Rosenfield, Yasmine Soiffer, Kurt Strahm and Annette Tacconelli, is curated by art critic Sarah Schmerler and will be on view from February 1 through April 20, 2007 at BAC Gallery, located at 111 Front Street, DUMBO.

The small stuff is the best stuff. Like knowing what an artist likes to eat, where they paint, what bugs them, what theyve just read. Strangely enough, it's artists themselves who disagree: "The details of my life are so boring," say the young artists Schmerler has met over the years at the New School (where she teaches a class called "Artists' Writing Workshop”). "People can't possibly be interested in hearing about me."

This show looks to the resources of a non-profit institution (where, ostensibly, artists' best interests are always in mind) and begs the question: Why is it that what makes an artwork so meaningful—to a broad audience—is often what makes an artwork incredibly personal and unique? [read on...]

Lecture at the National Academy of Sciences

[thanks Alana!]

Spectral Evidence, in Bkyn

Spectral Evidence
curated by Steven Lam
January 17 – March 3, 2007
Rotunda Gallery
33  Clinton Street
Brooklyn, NY

In conjunction with the exhibition, a sound performance and screening addressing revolutionary time and aural history by Adkins, Godmilow, Hsu, and others will be held at:

BRICstudio
57 Rockwell Place, 2nd Floor, Brooklyn, NY
Feb. 7 at 8:30pm
For reservations, please call 718 875.4047

Following the temporal condition of the ghost, the works in Spectral Evidence operate like a haunted return. The artists utilize history as material, re-imagining the future by haunting the present. Curator Steven Lam is the 2006 recipient of the Lori Ledis Memorial Award for the Curatorial Initiative. The Rotunda Gallery's Curatorial Initiative Program fosters emerging curatorial talent in the field of contemporary art. Each year the Rotunda dedicates its professional space and full staff support to realizing the vision of an emerging curator selected through this open call for proposals. The curator is awarded the Lori Ledis Memorial Award, which was established through the donations of family, friends and professional associates of Lori Ledis, a pioneering art dealer and music producer, and member of both the Rotunda's Artist Advisory Committee and the Board of Directors of Brooklyn Information & Culture.

[more info]

Artists include: Terry Adkins, Walead Beshty, Mary Billyou, Melissa Dubbin & Aaron S. Davidson, Chitra Ganesh & Mariam Ghani, Jill Godmilow, Olen Hsu, Simon Leung, Lin + Lam, Conor McGrady, Sreshta Premnath, Elaine Reichek.