The Best “Set of Politics” Humankind has known thus Far

Abstract

Feminist and ... Mattress Factory Pittsburgh September 7, 2012-May 26, 2013 In her 2011 comic memoir, How to be a Woman, British critic and gleefully self-professed strident Caitlin Moran offers female readers who have been made wary of the f-word an easy test to determine whether or not the term applies to them. First, she says, Put your hand in your underpants and then asks them to answer the following two questions: a) Do you have a vagina? and b) Do you want to be in charge of it? As to assessing the outcome, she continues, If you said 'yes' to both, then congratulations! You're a feminist. While her measure is intentionally crude, as well as exclusive of men, Moran's larger point is successfully made: At the beginning of the twenty-first century, there is no singular definition of a and no singular definition of feminism. Most simply, Moran suggests a believes in the radical idea that women should be able to control their own bodies and destinies. Feminist and ..., organized by Moran's compatriot, Hilary Robinson, proffers a similarly expansive definition, and her selection of six women artists lays to waste any monolithic ideas about what constitutes art. As such, the show serves as a corrective to blockbuster exhibitions of the last decade, which Robinson believes constrained what is--undeniably--a perpetually ongoing and continually evolving of processes in the wider world. Robinson's curatorial statement stands as a potent reminder that is neither a movement bound and limited by historical epoch, region, or media, nor is it. a definitive style. Rather, as she states and the work illustrates, feminism is a set of politics, dedicated to the analysis of gender and the liberation of all women in support of the improvement of all humankind. To be is to be actively involved with a process of thinking and acting and engaging with the whole world. As the exhibition title insinuates, the artists vary with regard to race, place of origin, ethnicity, faith, and age (as well as myriad other aspects of their identities). They arc all feminist and ... something else--but what they share is an earnest desire to improve humankind through art. The ellipsis allows one to fill in the remaining space as one wishes, creating, as Robinson says, openness, inclusion, and spilling over. Spilling over is the perfect phrase to describe Written Room (2012) by Parastou Forouhar. Here, Forouhar has filled an expansive white gallery--as well as hundreds of ping-pong balls that cover the floor--with exquisite Farsi calligraphy, those inky arabesques that Westerners tend to read as either decorative exotica or a threateningly impenetrable cipher scripted by terrorists. As visitors attempt to translate the meandering arcs, which are comprised of various passages conjoined by dramatic black lines, or get a purchase on the balls, which ricochet in every direction as one steps through the gallery, their inability to affix definitions to that which they only know superficially quickly becomes obvious. Even those who read Persian fluently eventually discover that Forouhar's boundless flourishes are nothing but incoherent fragments, and that she intentionally denies viewers all meaning. Yet her lyrical arrangements do what the abstract patterns of ancient Iranian tilcwork, infinitely unfblding, do best: allow one's mind to transcend earthly concerns and the didactic rhetoric so often associated with legible texts. The constraints of hegemonic language and a feminist's desire for poetic subjectivity are also insinuated in Ayanah Moor's beautiful tribute to black female poets, writers, and musicians, by and about (2012). Using a wide range of brown, black, orange, and red inks to silkscreen phrases by and about African American women on half-pages of the New York Times, Moor makes artistically visible the wide range of skin tones of women otherwise defined and limited by the term black. …