by Rebecca Honig Friedman

It’s not often you see an actual person on display in an art museum, but that is one of the first things I encountered on my visit to the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art’s inaugural show, “Global Feminisms,” hailed as the “first major exhibition to examine international feminist art at the turn of the twenty-first century” and features contemporary work by 88 female artists, most of them under the age of 40, from about 50 countries.
The woman on display was Italian artist Sissi, and she was standing inside her piece, “Wings Have No Home,” a nest-like cage suspended from the ceiling. Sissi’s presence really brought the piece to life, and was quite funny, but she was on display for one day only, and without her presence inside it, it’s unclear what makes the work feminist exactly.
Which is kinda the point.
Says Co-curator Maura Reilly of the exhibit, “we are attempting to construct a definition of ‘feminist’ art that is as broad and flexible as possible. And most excitingly, it is a testament to what Feminism means now, as opposed to what it meant 30 or 40 years ago.”

This broadness of definition excepts the “Global Feminisms” show from the NY Times review’s overall critique of the Center for Feminist Art:

The false idea is that there really is such a thing as feminist art, as opposed to art that intentionally or by osmosis reflects or is influenced by feminist thought. Feminist art is a shorthand phrase that everyone uses, but institutionalizing such an amorphous, subjective qualifier should make us all reconsider.

But the Center’s inaugural show does not use that term in its title and instead tries to grasp the state of feminism(s) and the concerns of women around the world through their artwork. The variety of the works, showing the artists’ different perspectives and voices, is what makes the exhibit successful.
Alongside the expected pieces that aim to shock and disturb — such as Japanese artist Ryoko Suzuki’s “Bound,” a series of three photographs of a woman whose face is bound with red leather; American Catherine Opie’s “Self Portrait/Nursing,” depicting the topless and tattooed artist with a child at her breast; Japanese Hiroko Okada’s “Delivery By Male Project,” a video about a man who gets a uterus transplant in order to have his own baby — are more subtle and even whimsical pieces — like Finish artist Elina Brotherus’ “Honeymoon,” a photo montage of the artist alone on honeymoon-esque travels; Beatrice Cussol’s (France) “Untitled (#263 ),” an ink and watercolor drawing with a vaguely vaginal form; and Milena Dopovita’s (Czech Republic) “Dance,” a moving photograph of two (fully clothed) elderly women embracing.
The show is organized into four thematic sections: Life Cycles, Identities, Politics, and Emotions. While the first two sections make up the bulk of the show, and are connected to the installation of Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party,” the latter two sections are contained in a separate set of rooms on the other side of the gift shop, making them seem like an after-thought. Which is unfortunate because they are certainly worth viewing.

Some other pieces that stood out include:
-Israeli artist Oreet Ashery’s “Self Portrait as Marcus Fisher I,” a photograph of Asheery wearing typical male hasidic garb and exposing her breast, which makes a disturbing and comical image. Asheery took inspiration for her hasidic alter-ego from Marcel Duchamp and his female alter-ego Rrose Selavy, and she actually disguises herself as Marcus Fisher on occasion and goes out in public, sometimes infiltrating male-only spaces, other times dancing at nightclubs and shocking patrons.
-Palestinian Emily Jacir’s “Crossing Surda (A Record of Going to and From Work)”, a video documentary of Jacir’s daily crossings of an Israeli checkpoint.
-Costa Rican Priscilla Monge’s “Room for Isolation and Restraint,” a free-standing chamber whose walls are lined with (unused) sanitary napkins. Not sure if the artist intended this to be comical, but it was. Simultaneously strange and comforting.
-”Big Mother,” by Australian Patricia Piccinini, a huge sculpture of an ape like woman with a baby nursing at her breast, reminds us of our evolutionary past.
-Polish artist Anna Baumgart’s “Sylvia,” a photograph depicting a recreation of Sylvia Plath’s suicide, it’s one in a series of photgraphs recreating the suicides of famous women. Cheery.
-South African Tracy Rose’s “Venus Baartman,” a self-portrait in which the artist depicts the figure of Saartjie Baartman, a young Khoisan woman from Cape Town who, in “perhaps the most infamous case of exhibiting ‘otherness,’” was brought to Europe and put on display to exhibit her “enlarged buttocks.” The image at left does not do justice to the actual photograph, which was one of the more affecting pieces in the show.
Global Feminisms will be up until July 2007.

Also on view at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art are Pharaohs, Queens and Goddesses, “an exhibition drawn from the museum’s renowned Egyptian collection to illuminate the role of women in Egyptian art and life,” and An Art of Our Own: Women Ceramicists from the Permanent Collection.

Posted on April 17th, 2007 Filed under: Uncategorized |