CARISSA MARSH
A&E Editor
Wack. One cannot think of a better word to describe the exhibit at the Geffen Contemporary, one of three locations of the Museum of Modern Art in downtown Los Angeles. The works featured throughout the modest white galleries shock the senses with colorful, strange and erotic imagery.
Even upon entering the warehouse-like space, visitors eyes are engaged by a very large, striking red hanging piece of cloth, slit down the middle. Titled “Abakan Red” by artist Magdalena Abakanowicz, the feminine shape resembles a womb. This is only the beginning of the sexuality on display in the Geffen.
“Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution” examines the foundations and legacy of feminist art created during the period of 1965 to 1980. The show is the first exhibition to fully survey feminist art, featuring both women who worked in an explicitly feminist mode as well as those whose art is appropriately classified as such.
Like other iconoclastic artistic movements, feminist art changed the way people see and understand art and exploring this fact is the goal of “WACK!,” according to the exhibit’s Web site.
Some may wonder about the significance in the exhibition’s chosen name. While WACK does not specifically stand for anything, it does pay homage to the acronyms of the many activist groups that formed during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Of course the term “wack” also has a vaguely sexual connotation, befitting the always shocking and sometimes scandalous exhibit (read: pornographic magazine installation and a lot of nudity).
The exhibition features 119 artists and artists groups representing 21 countries around the world. The pieces included in the show display a wide range of media: painting, sculpture, photography, film, collage, installation, drawing and even performance art.
According to curator Connie Butler, who leads an audio tour of “WACK!” on the MOCA Web site, the exhibit seeks to map a broad definition of feminist art in the social and political context.
While some of the pieces in the exhibit express the ideas of feminism in powerful and obvious ways, others are more subtle and somewhat confusing.
Kirsten Justesen’s 1968 work, “Sculpture II,” seems fairly straightforward in its message. The sculpture is a painted white cardboard box which, through creative photography, looks to have a woman sitting hunched inside it. Justesen’s work literally puts woman in a box, perhaps like the confining sociopolitical box that feminists seek to destroy.
“WACK!” also showcases a set of interesting works by Joan Semmel. One is the painting “Intimacy-Autonomy,” which features the naked bodies of a male and female lying on a bed. No faces are shown; it comes from the perspective of the woman’s eyes looking down at her and her partner’s bodies. Though the subjects of the work are participating in an intimate act of exposure, their bodies never touch and it almost seems as though an invisible line demarcating their individuality has been drawn down the bed.
Next to this work is a completely different nude painting called “Erotic Yellow,” which shows a couple, flushed in the heat of passion, entangled in each other’s bodies, her hand on his crotch. No mistakes about it, Semmel’s painting exudes sexual energy.
Humor can be found in the exhibit as well. In a collection of Mary Beth Edelson works, the artist has superimposed the faces of her contemporaries onto famous historical paintings, such as “The Last Supper.”
Marta Minujin and Richard Squire’s “Soft Gallery,” a self-standing room of mattresses held together by rope and a metal frame, references the idea that people spend much of their lifetimes on their backs, either sleeping or, well, doing what lovers do.
Finally, a number of Judy Chicago’s works are on display, including a set of five drawings called “Reflection Quintet.” The colored sketches lead viewers through Chicago’s own personal and artistic breakthrough, as she sheds her formal structure to reveal her real subject— the female form.
Despite its overtly sexual nature, it is a worthwhile show to go see once armed with the knowledge to expect something you have never seen before.
For information visit moca.org.
03-22-2007