Community: feminist.bloggers@brooklynmuseum

We love male feminists: Above Average Looking/Accessible Lives (Somatopower), work by Sands Murray-Wassink, is open in Munich at Lothringer Dreizehn through January. Murray-Wassink, working in the spirit of 1970’s American Feminist artists such as Valie Export and Carolee Schneemann, critiques the silencing of homosexual identity in the U.S. and forces viewers to confront their discomfort with overt sexuality and nudity.

(Sands Murray-Wassink, Above Average Looking/Accessible Lives (Somatopower), exhibition announcement. Courtesy: Lothringer Dreizehn.)

Mariette Pathy Allen’s show Beyond the Gender Frontier opens November 26th (with a gallery reception and artist’s slide presentation on Nov. 28th) at the Anderson L. Wallace Gallery of Bridgewater State College in Bridgewater, MA. Mariette Pathy Allen’s photographic and written work deals extensively with transgender perspectives and experiences.

Lucy and Jorge Orta’s Antarctic Village-No Borders opens November 24th at Galleria Continua in San Gimignano, Italy. Antarctic Village-No Borders was originally installed in Antarctica in March 2007 as part of the 2007 Biennial at the End of the World. The 50 dome-shaped dwellings, reminiscent of nomadic shelters or refugee camps, comprise Lucy and Jorge Orta’s idea of the “global village.” In their work, the Ortas routinely address global politics, human rights, and environmental concerns; their site is definitely worth checking out.

(Lucy and Jorge Orta, Antarctic Village-No Borders, 2007. Courtesy: Studio Orta.)

Two weeks ago, while the City was getting ready for the New York City Marathon, an event that gathers many people from Europe, I visited the exhibition Senso Unico at PS1 in Queens, New York.

The show presents eight Italian artists who have marked their presence in the contemporary art world, featuring works by female artists Vanessa Beecroft, Rä di Martino and Paola Pivi, as well as Paolo Canevari, Angelo Filomeno, Adrian Paci, Pietro Roccasalva, and Francesco Vezzoli. These artists do not represent a movement happening in Italian art, but it is the uniqueness and independence of their research that brings them together. Indeed, as the Museum hand-out suggests, Senso Unico means “one way,” but, translated literally, also means “unique feeling.” It was interesting seeing together for the first time, right here in New York, these artists, who express their personal researches, artistic pursuits, and individual paths while confronting art with different media and languages.

(Vanessa Beecroft, VB61 Still Death! Darfur Still Deaf?, performance, 2007. Image: Vanessa Beecroft. Courtesy of Galleria Massimo Minini & Galleria Lia Rumma).

Some of the works in the show address political and social issues, like Vanessa Beecroft’s VB61 Still Death! Darfur Still Deaf?, a performance piece (featured as a video in the exhibition) that took place at the Pescheria di Rialto, the public fish market on Canal Grande, during the 52^nd Venice Biennale. This performance is a powerful reaction to the genocide happening in Darfur. In other works there is a shift towards a more private sphere, like Rä di Martino’s glimpse into a moment of domestic folly in the video Cancan!, or the elaborate textile-based works embroidered with crystals, beads and other precious finery created by Angelo Filomeno.

(Rä di Martino, Cancan!, 2004, single channel video installation. Courtesy of Galleria Monitor.)

Senso Unico is at PS1 through January 7th, 2008.

Opening…

ALL PURPOSE, a show of work by Shinique Smith, opens November 15th at Moti Hasson. Smith paints and collages unusual materials– fabrics (for example “ex-boyfriend’s clothing” in the piece below) and ready-made, daily objects–into innovative, often graffiti-esque, sculptures and compositions.

(Shinique Smith, Thank you, come again, 2007, detail on right. Courtesy:Moti Hasson.)

Already open: watch, look, and listen…

Claiming Space: Some American Feminist Originators is now on display (through January 27th) at the Katzen Arts Center of the American University Museum in Washington, D.C. Concurrent with the National Museum of Women in the Arts showing of WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, Claiming Space features 19 founders of the U.S. Feminist Art Movement, with an emphasis on their political and large-scale works.

(Betsy Damon, Betsy Damon As the 7,000 Year Old Woman, street performance, New York, 1977. Courtesy: American University Museum.)

**Throughout November, the American University Museum will also host a series of great lectures featuring major figures in the Feminist Art Movement: Suzanne Lacy, Leslie Labowitz, Faith Ringgold, Joyce Kozloff, and Global Feminisms Co-Curator Linda Nochlin.

Pricked: Extreme Embroidery at the Museum of Arts and Design (through March 9th) takes a traditionally feminine craft and shows just how grotesque and confrontational embroidery can be.

(Nava Lubelski, Side Dish, 2004. Courtesy: Museum of Arts and Design.)

Don’t forget:

The biennial Performa07 is already underway with performances, screenings, and lectures all over the city; be sure to check out the listings!

(Mary Beth Edelson, Double Agent, 2000. Courtesy of the Artist).

With so much phenomenal attention on feminist art these days, its important to acknowledge that many of the women who rose to fame in the 1960s and 1970s continue to produce stellar work today. An artist that exemplifies this concept is Mary Beth Edelson, a prominent figure in the 1970s feminist art movement, and a pioneer in the reclamation of Goddess imagery alongside Ana Mendieta, Hannah Wilke, and others. Edelson is best known for photographing her body in re-arrangements of mythic or ritualistic poses, photographs which she drew on or collaged in a gesture of playful defiance. By contrast, some of her recent works appropriate images of women and femme fatales from Old Hollywood movies and film noir, and re-present them on objects in the home, such as doors, curtains, bedspreads, and pillows. While these works are a departure from her earlier Goddess photographs and performances, they preserve Edelson’s playful, pop culture inflected feminist sensibility, and remind us that a woman’s work is never done.

(Mary Beth Edelson, Woman Rising, 1974. Courtesy of the Artist).

See Mary Beth Edelson discuss more of her recent and early works at the Brooklyn Museum on Saturday. For more information please click here.

(Carolee Schneemann, still from Fuses, 1965. Courtesy of the Artist.)

This month there are a fantastic crop of programs showcasing the work of Carolee Schneemann, a feminist pioneer, and one of the most influential film and performance artists of the 1960s and 1970s. Early in her career, Schneemann was a protégé of experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage, whose signature style of scratching film emulsion and choppy editing inspired Schneemann’s films like Fuses (1965) and Kitsch’s Last Meal (1973-76). But issues of the body and female subjectivity are always more central to Schneemann’s art than mere technical prowess. Schneemann became one of the first woman artists to articulate and eroticize her own body on film, while affirming the everlasting statement of feminist discourse: “the personal is political.” This is something Schneemann has always achieved with attitude and a fierce sense of individuality. If you’re in Boston, you can see a screening of Fuses and Kitsch’s Last Meal, as well as Plumb Line (1968-71) at the MassArt Film Society on November 20th. Meanwhile PERFORMA 07 has organized a comprehensive multi-program film retrospective that includes both the classics and some more recent installation works, plus a FREE conversation with Schneemann herself on November 7th.

We mentioned earlier that the Pierre Menard Gallery is celebrating Schneemann with an exhibition titled Carolee Schneemann: a selection of recent and early work. Curated by artist Heide Hatry, early works is just that, a collection of paintings, collages, photographs, and performance footage. Look for Schneemann’s beautifully assembled box constructions (made out of materials such as old photographs, mirrors, paint, strips of cloth, feathers, and bones) which anticipate her later performance work. Soon after creating these objects, Schneemann began using her body as an extension of her paintings and constructions in works such as Eye Body (1963) and Meat Joy (1964), two performances that challenge the standard images of women as powerful agents rather than simple objects in art history.

(Carolee Schneemann, Eye Body: 36 Transformative Acts, 1963. Courtesy of the Artist)

On Sunday, November 4th, beginning at 4 pm, at Studio Soto there will be a program dedicated to Schneemann’s impact on the art of contemporary feminist performance artists that will include performances by Heide Hatry, Mari Novotny-Jones, and Theresa Byrnes. Like Schneemann, Byrnes’ work is often characterized by critics as ‘body art’–a term that describes how artists will use their bodies as a literal canvas for enabling political or social commentary. This notion is punctuated by Byrnes’ in one of her most recent piece’s called Trace (2007), a performance in which Byrnes submerged herself in a vat of crude oil, and then spent 30 minutes cleaning herself of the thick substance in front of a crowd of spectators on a New York sidewalk. In Boston, Byrnes will be performing a new work titled Theresa Tree, a piece that she writes us is based on a question from her childhood: “What is the difference between me and a tree?” A worthwhile investigation indeed.

(Theresa Byrnes, Trace, performance, 2007. Image: Andrzej Liguz.)

Boston’s Carolee Schneemann events…
Sunday, November 4th at 4pm. After the Orgy: A Tribute to Carolee Schneemann. Curated by Jed Speare and Michelle Handelman, in conjunction with the exhibition, Carolee Schneemann: a selection of recent and early work at Pierre Menard Gallery through November 25. With performances by Heide Hatry, Theresa Byrnes and Mari Novotny-Jones, and films by Lydia Eccles, Jesse Jagtiani, Michelle Handelman and Luther Price. Followed by a panel discussion with the artists. At Studio Soto. See the Studio Soto website for more details.

And…

Tuesday, November 20th at 8pm: Carolee Schneemann: a Film Tribute featuring a screening of Fuses, Plumbline, and Kitch’s Last Meal. Shown and introduced by Saul Levine. At Mass. College of Art, MassArt Film Society. See the MassArt Film Society website for more details.

New York’s Carolee Schneemann events as part of PERFORMA 07…
Remains To Be Seen: New and Restored Films and Videos of Carolee Schneemann. Programs in Remains to Be Seen include: An Artist Talk & Screening on Wednesday, November 7th at 6pm. FREE. At Electronic Arts Intermix. Restorations & New Works on Thursday, November 15th at 7pm. Kitsch’s Last Meal on Friday and Saturday, November 16th and 17th at 7 pm. Both programs at Anthology Film Archives. See the PERFORMA 07 website for more details.