Destinations of Feminist Art: Past, Present, and Future

Abstract

When women's movements challenge the forms and nature of political life, the contemporary play of powers and power relations, they are in fact working towards a modification of women's status. On the other hand, when these same movements aim simply for a change in the distribution of power, leaving intact the power structure itself, then they are subjecting themselves, deliberately or not, to a phallocratie order. This latter gesture must of course be denounced, and with determination, since it may constitute a more subtly concealed exploitation of women. Indeed, that gesture plays on a certain naivete that suggests one need only be a in order to remain outside phallic powers. -Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman Feminism's headline-grabbing conflicts with New York City's museums have usually been addressed to straightforward equal-opportunities issues. Damning statistics about the low numbers of women artists are accompanied by photo-friendly scenes of placard-waving women. This is a mission that the Guerrilla Girls art collective has combined even more effectively with the use of theatrical costume. In January 2007, wearing their signature gorilla masks to maintain anonymity, two Guerrilla Girls took the platform at the Museum of Modern Art's (MoMA's) first-ever feminist conference, Feminist Future: Theory and Practice in the Visual Arts. Among the list of eminent and emerging scholars and artists present were Marina Abramovic, Ute Meta Bauer, Beatriz Colomina, Coco Fusco, David Joselit, Geeta Kapur, Carrie Beatty Lambert, Lucy Lippard, Richard Meyer, Helen Molesworth, Wangechi Mutu, Linda Nochlin, Griselda Pollock, Martha Rosler, Ingrid Sischy, Anne Wagner, and Catherine de Zegher. Feminist Future was the first in a yearlong round of feminist-centered events in the art world. These have included panels at the College Art Association conference in New York organized by the Feminist Art Project; the establishment of a center for feminist art at the Brooklyn Museum with the permanent installation of Judy Chicago's monumental work The Dinner Party (1974-79); and two major exhibitions, Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum, and WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at the Geffen Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (with further venues to follow, including MoMA's contemporary art venue, P.S.I).1 Perhaps as an attempt to remedy the atrocious record on women artists in New York's museums, these two major exhibitions of feminist-engaged art were women-only affairs. Following Irigaray's warning, however, we must pay careful attention to the form that feminism takes as it enters the mainstream museum world. The complicities it ends up enduring in the name of woman may not in fact benefit that half of the sky. Although the statistical approach is a necessary means of pressurizing museums to improve their policy on gender equality, it is a far less adequate format for presenting the more complicated issues of sexual difference and artistic representation. Before actually viewing these two ambitious exhibitions and attending MoMA's inaugurating conference, I had hoped that the nearly four decades of feminist art, art history, and theory taken up there would assert themselves with a degree of intensity and complexity that would knock me off my feet. Alas, they did not. Perhaps this is an overly tall order, considering the framing dates for the two exhibitions and MoMA's infancy in matters feminist. To be sure, certain occlusions and limitations became visible to me immediately. With WACK! focused on 1965-80 and Global Feminisms addressed to art by a younger generation of women born after 1960 (with works made mostly after 1990), the 1980s seem to have dropped out of the picture. That decade saw feminism embarking upon its first serious period of self-examination. The celebration of universal sisterhood was complicated by differences, of power, geopolitics, sexuality, and so on, and psychoanalytic approaches such as Irigaray's asked difficult questions about the unconscious as well as women's complicity with masculinist structures of power. …