Brooklyn is for (art) lovers...and feministas

Photo by Evelyn Shih. (Photo not available on northjersey.com)

Famous work anchors wing for feminist art
Friday, March 30, 2007

By EVELYN SHIH
STAFF WRITER

Feminism may have a problem with history -- specifically, that it ignores herstory -- but it's beginning to accumulate a history of its own. The debut exhibits at the Brooklyn Museum's new Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art show that it's also begun to create its own culture: an aesthetic of shock and self-realization.

Consider the central piece of the center, now on permanent exhibit: "The Dinner Party" (1974-1979), an installation by Judy Chicago that is considered the first epic feminist artwork.

Three long tables come together in an equilateral triangle, providing seats to 39 real and fictional women of influence and power, such as the goddess Ishtar and Susan B. Anthony, with ceremonious place settings, medieval chalices and plates hand-painted to symbolize their personas. The names of 999 additional women grace the white tiles of the floor. A low light in the triangular viewing room enshrines the names in a candlelight glow.

But this isn't the round table. This is the women's table, complete with goddesses, suffragettes, poets and queens. Viewed on a crowded day, the place settings are Olympian, worshiped by the masses. Viewed early in the morning, the emptiness is haunting. Where are the women who belong at those seats? Must they always be retrieved from the erasures of history?

Gender performances

From the perspective of the artists in "Global Feminisms," Chicago's work is history and part of their heritage. Of more than 100 international female artists featured, none was born before 1960. They came of age during or after the apex of the feminist epoch in the '60s and '70s.


Photo credit: Evelyn Shih. The roiling plate of Susan B. Anthony. That woman had some beef.

While Chicago's painted ceramic plates still shock the eye with clearly vaginal imagery clothed in the guise of flowers à la Georgia O'Keeffe, the younger artists pick up where she left off.

Instead of being eroticized or hidden, breast imagery is matter-of-fact, often the subject of stark photography and video art. Canan Senol from Turkey shows a video work, "Fountain," that frames a mother's breasts and shows the slow drip of milk with documentary precision. He Chengyao of China collects a photographic triptych in which a boy sits bare-chested for his portrait -- as do the mother and grandmother to his left, unashamed. American artist Mary Coble performs a painful video piece in which she repeatedly applies and removes duct tape from her alarmingly reddened breasts in a never-ending cycle of preserving her outward androgyny.

"Bind" by Ryoko Suzuki, Japan. Courtesy of brooklynmuseum.org.

The feminist idea of gender as performance pervades the exhibit. In one corner, Israeli artist Oreet Ashery exhibits photographs of herself dressed as an Orthodox Jewish man named Marcus Fisher, an experiment inspired by Marcel Duchamp's stint in cross-dressing as alter ego Rrose Selavy. One photograph shows Ashery holding her own revealed breast while suited up and mustached. On the opposite wall, Moroccan Latifa Echakhch cross-dresses as a young boy in "Pin-up," mimicking the pose from posters of Western male models during World War II. The catch: She's also dressed as a pious young Muslim, legs tucked submissively on the traditional prayer rug.

Having fun, too

The constant subversion of body image and identity can be exhausting to take in, but the exhibit also has a joyous side. Japanese artist Hiroko Okada photographs two men grinning cheekily at the camera, their thin frames naked and interrupted by large prosthetic pregnant bellies. Countrywoman Miwa Yanagi ages young women with makeup in her "My Grandmothers" series and celebrates older women in unexpectedly "young" photographed scenarios, such as joyriding on a motorcycle with a young man. Milena Dopitova of the Czech Republic shows two older women embracing with remarkable grace and sapphic intimacy in "Dance."

Perhaps the one central theme of "Global Feminisms" is that of a post-feminist self-awareness. These contemporary artists will not need to be retrieved -- on the contrary, they have retrieved their own womanhood. They will make their own spaces at the table.

E-mail: shih@northjersey.com

Copyright © 2007 North Jersey Media Group Inc.