- Venue
- MOMA New York
- Location
- United States
WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, housed at the cavernous PS1, is a vast international survey of over 120 artists, collectives and collaborations with over 400 works exhibited and all produced from the period 1965-1980. The scope of the work installed covers performance work, figurative painting, conceptual manifestos and sculptural objects, collage and interventions, film and video, all criss-crossing intersections of feminist art, its activism, its scrutiny of gender, politics, sexual politics, the media and pornography, and a collective notion of acceptability, disfigurement and discrepancy within gender representation. And ultimately feminism and its theories to art institutions, to academia, to museums.
The exhibition follows a number of surveys of feminist art practice currently or recently presented across the States and internationally. However this survey is distinctly historic in its position, its inclinations and motivations are rooted in feminist art’s foundations, its cornerstones and principal characters: artists, curators, theorists. And in that sense WACK! is really about museum display, it is about feminist art’s movement toward the institution, how its theories became positioned within the institutions and how a show like this could only have originated within this environment. WACK! delivers some great punches but it is a stifling, saturated project housed in the meandering and spacious PS1 and quite tellingly not in this institution’s mother ship, the Museum of Modern Art in midtown Manhattan.
Wack! is presented not chronologically but thematically through the building spaces; large and small galleries are identified with particular practices, dialogues, techniques or narratives. The sensation of presenting the work in this architecture leaves some of these themes dangling in disconnected rooms, stairwells and corridors; the flow of the different spaces/themes and their negotiation sets an unnerving quality of uncertainty, dislocation and abruptness. Adding this to the sheer scale of this daunting project leaves a concluding thought of heaviness, entrenchment and a stifling impenetrability. But its most difficult aspect is its lack of context, leaving much of this work to what feels like the vault, the archive, the dated. The Revolution will not be televised, it’ll be archived.
WACK! adds a massive voice to current debates and scrutiny of art from the 60s and 70s, it adds a chorus of vocabularies, activities, ideas and debates that have fostered and inspired recent generations of artists as well as forming the structural skeleton of forms within queer art, socially-engaged art and outsider art. In that sense this project is a valuable exercise, its failing is in its lack of a convincing approach to select and edit this work, to position accurately, in this context, the radical from the everyday, the confrontational from the easily comparable, the groundbreaking from the generic. It renders all feminist art, its languages and its activisms as equivalents, sitting pretty on the same contour. It fails to answer why these generations of artists have so forcefully positioned themselves within the imagination of artists who were not born when most of this work was being made. It fails to address in detail what contexts, political and social realities informed and propelled their practices and does not attempt to consider what this consequence has on a new generation of artists who revisit them repeatedly. This show makes assumptions about prior knowledge that make its centre blank.
I think this show is really difficult to describe in detail or criticize in philosophy, a great deal of the work has a kind of victim, suffering, pain aspect that gets diluted across such a broad range of work while some of the major pieces from Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneemann, Marina Abramovic, Martha Rosler, Chantal Ackerman, Joan Jonas, Mary Kelly, Orlan, VALIE EXPORT, and Louise Bourgeois seem lost in these arduous framings. The principal values here seem to be craft as art activity and pornography as constant site of distress, gaze, power, conflict and exploitation. Beyond this there are images on race and feminism that find newer articulations and contexts within the work of African American artists like Kara Walker and Wangechi Mutu. There are a number of projects describing socially-engaged, collaborative work, including Suzanne Lacy and Kanonklubben that convey either very pure interventions into social frameworks or extremely angry disruptions to specific places, contexts and narratives. The body as material resonates through the spaces, galleries, video voices and images: this is either represented in discordant, abusive scenarios, as challenges to the media, challenges to the framing of female identities, careers, ambitions or as sensitive moments of intimacy. A great deal of the work shows women in tedious, menial, almost invisible roles, in cleaning public, corporate spaces or in domestic scenes.
There is much beauty, intellect and value to be found in WACK! The problem is negotiating these spaces, thematic rooms, channels of density and heavy-handed collage after collage of pornography to find it.
