Failing to think outside the box: A Review of "Global Feminisms" at the Brooklyn Museum
I went to check out the Global Feminisms exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum yesterday, on the second-to-last day of its three-month run. As someone who's interested in women in pop culture, and also happens to be a resident of Brooklyn, I'm ashamed it took me so long to make it to this important and buzzed-about event. This international show of over eighty women, which features art from 1990 to the present, was interesting and thought-provoking –- at times to a fault. As with any thematic exhibition, there was simply too much to take in during a single visit, too many works with too much to say about feminism, womanhood, femaleness, and I fear that the long-form video works suffered the most from this intellectual overload (we just didn't have the time or the energy to sit through anything that ran longer than three minutes).
The stated goal of the show's curators, Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin, was not only to give a glimpse of what international feminist artists have been up to recently, but also to "move beyond the specifically Western brand of feminism that has been perceived as the dominant voice of feminist and artistic practice since the early 1970s." A well-intentioned goal, to be sure, but is it necessary? Or even feasible? I think that the curators should have stuck with simply showcasing contemporary art by women, and resisted trying to box it into a particular ideology. My Brooklyn museum ticket certainly didn't serve as a passport to feminism 'round the world.
Let's start with the title of the show, "Global Feminisms." My artist friend Melissa, who accompanied me to the museum, said that she liked the pluralized "feminisms," as it implied that there's more than one way to be a feminist, and frees modern women from the obligation to rally behind outdated ideals. That makes sense, if we're talking about feminism as an evolving political or social movement. But as a category of art? The feminist movement was a real political movement with articulated values and platforms and acknowledged leaders. Regardless of how we as individuals choose to interpret feminism today, that word will always be rooted in the 70's struggles for recognition, freedom from oppression, and equal rights.
I'd expect a show called "Global Feminism" (singular, not plural) to feature art that shows how women around the world are carrying on that struggle in their own countries. And some of the work in this show speaks to that, like a video by the Canadian Rebecca Belmore that showed a woman on a busy street corner, calling out the names of women who had recently disappeared from that area in an attempt to get others to take notice; and photographs by Claudia Reinhardt, a German photographer who stages disturbing scenes of women who have been raped, murdered and abandoned, mostly naked from the waist down, on the sides of roads or along fields. Certainly the heart, or vagina (sorry, I had to say it) of the show, Judy Chicago's well-known but little-seen "The Dinner Party", as a pedantic but important tribute to feminists throughout the ages, fit the description of "feminist art" -- too literally, it must be said.
But most of the pieces here (the better pieces, in most cases) are more about the female experience, or how that particular artist feels about the expectations of being a woman her country and in this world today. The Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu shows the conflicting ideas of femininity, race, and politics in her incredible wall collage of an abstract native woman, dancing engulfed in flames, surrounded by images of motorcycles and thick, blood-clot-red globs of a paint spackled with glitter and embedded with pearls. Miwa Yanagi's large-scale photograph depicts a young Japanese woman's imagined future as a free-spirited, free-wheeling, bling-ed out granny on a motorbike. A short video by Boryana Rossa, from Bulgaria, freeze-frames two screaming women in exaggerated expressions of a range of stereotypically "female" emotions, like excitement and horror (their faces, frozen in moments of extreme feeling, hover between campy and disturbing – it's no wonder the museum chose an image from this piece as the icon for the show). One of the most visceral pieces in the show is a video of a woman's torso, gyrating slowly within a hula-hoop of barbed wire. The camera occasionally zooms in for a close-up of her torn, bleeding flesh, as if to prove that this is for real. Yet the artist, Sigalit Landau from Israel, continues to twist the hoop around her bare hips, making a powerful comment on women's complicity in their own abuse and torment.
These insightful, provocative works show us different perspectives of femininity, but what are they saying about feminism? Identifying as a woman is not the same as identifying as a feminist. Sticking an "s" on the end of the term doesn't really broaden what the movement stood for or stands for, or what feminists believe. And in some ways, it fails to acknowledge the significance of the original movement. Can you imagine an art show called "Global Socialisms"? Or "Global Modernisms"?
Then there's the question of how to view the few pieces in the show that aren't about the female experience at all, like Loretta Lux's quietly surreal photographs of a little boy at play, or Emily Jacir's spy-cam video records of crossing the Israeli-manned Ramallah-Birzeit Road. Both of these are strong, well-executed works, but they don't really belong here. The only reason to include them in an aggressively-titled thematic show like "Global Feminisms" is that the artists are both women (they both happen to be well-known artists that have appeared in other large shows, so it's not like they're hurting for exposure).
I understand Reilly and Nochlin's desire for inclusiveness, especially considering all the (rightful) criticism the 70's women's movement got for focusing on white, Western middle-class women, and basically ignoring everyone else. I love the idea of a truly international collection of talented women's art, and this show totally delivers on that promise. It's a well-organized and smart survey of works by women. But it's not a representation of global feminism, or global feminisms, or whatever. The title "Global Post-Feminism" might have been more accurate, given that we're living in a post-feminist political age in which most young women don't obsess (or even worry) about inequality or fair representation and view "feminism" as a dirty word. But that sounds clunky and abstract, and doesn't really say much at all. And these artists had a lot to say about being a woman.
Lin Tianmiao, who created a large, faded grey image of a woman's face over which she'd embroidered tiny knots, had posted a written statement explaining that she considered herself first an artist, then a woman, then Chinese. Through their work, many of the other artists seemed to be expressing something similar.