Double X Art

Ad Hoc Vox Holds Panel: Man Schools Feminists on History; Gallerist Saddened; Young Women Silent

Wednesday night both This Broad and That Broad attended the Ad Hoc Vox, Double X Art Panel on Feminism at Brooklyn Fireproof. This Broad promptly fled the heat, as her dear friends were too lame to effectively save her a seat, even after she had been held up in midtown after the explosion. We suck, and we apologize. Thus, it has been left to me to report that the whole thing wound down just as it was really getting going.

As part of a general discussion, Deb Kass was the undisputed highlight of the panel, giving a broad personal and historical perspective on feminism and painting (of particular interest to me). Wendy Olsoff of P.P.O.W., made a valuable contribution with remarks often ending with “and it makes me sad,” referring to the current role and value (or lack thereof) of women in the art market. General remarks were made that are by now very familiar regarding the art market, the devaluing of women's work and, of course, the double-whammy of being female and over-30. Oh, the horror!

Astonishingly, aside from the very able moderator Colleen Asper (one of the panel’s organizers along with co-founder of Double X Art, Jennifer Dudley), and the delightful Art Fag City's Paddy Johnson (who will be weighing in on her own experience), the younger women, were virtually silent. What’s up ladies?! You have to speak up. Especially because NO ONE satisfactorily answered the question I went to hear addressed: Why the hell are young women so invested in disassociating themselves from feminism? Danica Phelps took a stab at it, but I’m not convinced that it’s as she conjectures, that women want to think that we’ve moved on. I think, as was pointed out to me later, there are too many associations with the Goddess and peasant skirts and unshaved legs… still.

As someone who falls squarely in the middle of these two generations, I would really like to hear something more convincing. Katy Siegel gave a few illuminating remarks on the subject, based on her experience as a professor at Hunter with international students who feel feminism is a “white, middle class” movement that doesn't speak to their concerns as they are more interested in identity, politics and economic issues. Um... excuse me, but last time I checked, those were all feminist concerns.

While the presence in the audience of members of the Brainstormers demonstrates that some of the young ladies are able to see the big picture, fighting for the advancement and empowerment of women with humor and sass, I would still really like to hear from people who were there as I remain,

Yours truly, flummoxed,

That Broad

Go Ball Fem-what? The Occasional Toddler Perspective

The other day my mommy took me to the Brooklyn Museum because she said she wanted to see an important art show before it closed, and she said she would show me a whole lot of art by women artists and we would have a great time. I was very excited to go to the museum because I thought there were going to be really big dinosaurs there, like there were the last time we went to the museum. My first warning should have been when I noticed that the woman at the ticket counter glanced at me and said something to my mommy about the content in the show possibly not being suitable for small children, but I followed my mommy's lead and paid her no mind. I was very excited about the museum because I got to push the elevator buttons (not once, but twice!) to go to the floor where I thought the dinosaurs were going to be.

At first I was a little confused because I didn't see any dinosaurs at all, but I didn't mind seeing lots of naked women, especially the booby-feeding pictures. I think my mommy must have thought that those were the images the museum staff was referring to, and I shared her disdain at that bourgeois attitude. But as we walked through the next room I started to feel very upset. There were a lot of really unpleasant images of women being hurt in all these different ways. My mommy picked me up and hurried us through that room but the next room was no better, and neither was the one after that. Then she tried to appease me by spending some extra time in a dark gallery with a video of a funny brass band following a woman walking down the street, but by this time I really didn't like being in the dark rooms in this scary place, even if I was getting to watch a giant TV, and I refused to walk anymore and made her carry me because I wanted to go home, and I know because she tells me all the time that I'm getting to be a very big heavy boy and she has a hard time carrying me for long periods of time. So after just a couple more minutes my mommy said we could go home now and I could tell she felt really bad because she said she didn't know that the art was going to be like that. But I guess this "feminist art" term that I hear my mommy use so much actually describes a lot of stuff that is really ugly and violent and mean. But I can't figure out why that should have to be the case.

In any case, it's going to be a while before I let my mommy take me to the museum again.

UPDATE: Apologies for not captioning that image above:
Ryoko Suzuki, images from the Bind Series, 2001

Late To The (Dinner) Party, Yet Again

You’ve read the reviews, the critiques of the critiques, so we ask you – isn’t it time you actually went and saw the show? Yes, we're talking about Global Feminisms, AGAIN! You wanna make somethin' of it?

We’ve heard a variety of opinions, in the aforementioned New Yorker, of course from The New York Times, as well as New York Magazine, City Journal and a host of blogs, the most intelligent and in-depth writing coming from John Haber.

But whether conservative or "liberal," snarky or sophisticated, they all ultimately come down on the same side, critiquing the exhibition and its curatorial objectives for nearly the same reasons, namely, that this is a monolithic view of feminism, focusing almost exclusively on women and their bodies as the element in art that distinguishes itself as “feminist.” Such an essentialist view of women, with some notable exceptions (discussed extensively in the above-mentioned reviews) glosses over the broader range of artistic practices also informed by feminism.

As someone who is not afraid of "the F word," it pains me to not like this show. There were a host of interesting comments and complaints on the museum's own website, many echoing my own, simply regarding the uncomfortable layout of the closed and claustrophobic galleries. My overriding feeling was one of being in a graduate school exhibition where women, with Audre Lorde’s prohibition against using the master’s tools echoing in their heads, eschew sculpture, and especially painting, in favor of “media,” that is, video and photography, to critique the public images of women that dominate the cultural landscape in which the appearance of the female body nearly always signifies “sex.”

At its inception, this was a very radical approach, but decades on, despite the persistence of sexism in the culture and the art world, like abstraction, it’s starting to feel like a stylistic option. Again, I don't question its relevance or importance as an outgrowth of second-wave feminism’s exploration of new forms, including performance and installation, but there has been an abundance of complex and interesting painting, sculpture, drawing and installation in the third-wave as women returned to these media (although plenty never left).

If this is to be the first in a series of contemporary work at the Brooklyn Museum’s Sackler Center that will look at a range of feminisms, then please let us know! Using a title as all-encompassing sounding as “Global Feminisms” gives a sense of expansiveness and completeness that contradicts the show’s reality. The “global” moniker feels particularly misleading, for while the artists cut a wide geographic swath, there is an inherent level of privilege in attending art school in any hemisphere and the resulting “cultural production,” is dishearteningly homogeneous, employing the same sort of “strategies” that we are used to seeing with regularity in New York.

But maybe we’re just spoiled.

-That Broad

Lady Artists, Please Choose To Be Either Smart or Pretty

Would it kill the New Yorker to find someone under 60 to write about contemporary art? Their hiring of Sasha Frere-Jones to cover rock music almost gives us hope. Almost. But reading that fuddy-duddy Peter Schjeldahl is so tiring! It doesn't matter how good a writer he is if he refuses to even consider the possibility that there might be good art being made right now, besides that made by (wait for it... no, you can't be serious) John Currin.

We're not saying that the Global Feminisms show over at the Brooklyn Museum is so brilliant or anything (more on that soon), but Schjeldahl's response in the New Yorker was a caricature of the reviewer as crusty old curmudgeon. However, we must give the devil his due: just as his knee-jerk dismissal of pretty much all idea-based art makes us want to lock him in a small room with a giant Jenny Holzer L.E.D. for eternity, some of his musings are actually making us think. Here he is in his 4/9/07 review, the least interesting part of which briefly addressed the actual art:

... The major factor [in the stalemate between the apparently opposing goals of individual female successes and collective feminist aims] is a natural antagonism between school-rooted institutions and the commercial art world, in which an individual's success distances her from the ranks of collective purpose. The market selects art that people like to look at, whatever it may be about. This is bound to exasperate partisans of any particular aboutness, whose goal is not case-by-case approbation but blanketing justice. The conflict cannot be resolved, because the terms on the two sides - politics versus taste, virtue versus pleasure, aggrieved conviction versus disposable wealth - sail past each other. The agon's usual form is an assault, by the party of politics, on the complacency of art lovers. It draws force from the unexceptionable truth that justice is more important than artistic quality. [...] Of course, no movement will admit the inferiority of its art. It will redefine the field to make pleasure appear to be at one with virtue. Many art lovers, for their part, like to imagine a socially salubrious tendency in their takings of joy. Both are wrong.

Genius and vileness can cohabit an artist's soul as comfortably as mediocrity and rectitude...

On that last sentence, um, Duh. But let's take that first paragraph one idea at a time because there are a whole lot of ideas in there. Sometimes it seems that Schjeldahl is just enjoying his lovely sentences so much, he lets them go on to say whatever they want even when they don't add up to anything coherent.

Firstly, can he be right about the unresolvable conflict between individual female artists and feminism? It sounds like a compelling narrative, but I don't think it makes any sense. When Dana Schutz or Cecily Brown are called geniuses for their work, although neither of their work is considered feminist, the cause of women artists in general is advanced by "genius" being pried open to include more female practitioners and this changes the way women artists in general are viewed by collectors, curators, critics, dealers and the public.

On another major point, most art-lovers agree (and certainly it is fashionable to say) that political art usually sucks, even when one agrees with the politics. But I would argue that there is no more bad political art than there is bad painting, it's just that when political art crashes and burns it's somehow so much more painful to watch because the work, its high-minded goals, and its failure are so obvious.

Schjeldahl's also wrong about the marketplace not responding to art with an agenda: just because some conceptual art may be bad doesn't mean it's not breaking auction records along with some equally bad painting. And does he really mean to assert that the art market responds solely and purely to quality?

Most importantly, Schjeldahl's brush is much too broad by the end; his pretty sentences are lulling his sharp mind with their siren songs. In those lovely pairs of opposing forces (genius/rectitude, pleasure/virtue, taste/politics, disposable wealth/aggrieved conviction) he inexplicably fails to allow the possibility for genius and rectitude, or virtue and pleasure, to coexist, however rarely it may happen. Really, where else should an artist with any sense of morality aim? Or is he actually implying that it is not possible?

- This Broad

Broadsheet Wants to Know, What's So Scary about Calling Yourself a Feminist?

1. You think feminism is incompatible with your wardrobe.

2. You think feminists’ shoes aren’t cute enough (but we all know it depends on how you wear them, what you wear them with and if you wear socks).

3. You’re afraid to earn equal pay for equal work.

4. You're afraid you won’t get laid anymore (except by large hairy women named Brenda).

5. You're afraid you won’t get art shows anymore (except at womyn’s co-op galleries).

6. You think you’ll have to throw out your paint and make art with your menstrual blood.

7. You're afraid you’ll have to read all those Julia Kristeva books (preferably in French) and pretend you understand them.

8. You’d miss the cat-calls and bottom-pinches if men suddenly started being more respectful.

9. You think those formerly flirtatious construction workers will hiss “Lorena Bobbitt” at you when you walk by their work sites.

10. You think you’ll have to stop trying to schtup your way into art shows (Like that even works. We know, we’ve tried.)

11. You think you’ll have to start paying for dinner (newsflash: lots of women already do and your Match.com dates all think you’re a cheap wench!)

12. You think you’ll have to stop shaving (eww! See #4 above).

13. You’re not so sure about women’s suffrage (sounds a lot like suffering, doesn’t it?)

14. You don’t want to have to like The Dinner Party.

15. But you do want to work at Hooters.

16. Because you really do have a nice rack. (We’ve so noticed! Who’s your surgeon?)

17. You feel overwhelmed by your current career choices, and think life was much easier when you could just choose between teacher, nurse & housewife.

18. You think it’s appropriate when the news about women politicians focuses on their hair and wardrobe.

19. You want the big diamond ring.

20. Your hipster burlesque pole dancing class makes you feel, like, so totally empowered.