inconceivable!

Why, look. It’s an article about author and feminist Rebecca Walker in the Times Sunday Styles section. Walker has a new book coming out on Thursday called Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence. It’s even reviewed, alongside Peggy Orenstein’s similarly mommy-themed book, in this weekend’s Book Review. So what is it about this piece that makes it right for the Styles section? Is it the detailed description of Walker's estrangement from her famous mother, Alice Walker? Maybe. But more importantly, we learn that:

Ms. Walker and her partner, a Buddhist teacher named Glen (whose last name does not appear in the book), have been living in Maui, where [her son] Tenzin plays amid the lush landscape and is pushed about in a Maclaren stroller.

Oooh, I want a Maclaren stroller. And a trip to Hawaii.

In her review, Alexandra Jacobs calls Baby Love “a solipsistic open diary of gestation,” and prefers Orenstein’s account of trying to conceive by any means necessary. “Orenstein’s interrogation of her own profiteering pregnancy retinue comes across as a welcome, even necessary exposé,” Jacobs writes. “Walker’s merely a paean to pampering.” They both sound pretty excruciating to me. Jacobs’ lede is a gem:

One of the pill’s most pernicious side effects is bloat in the publishing industry. For most of history, having a baby — or heck, a dozen — has simply been women’s natural lot, not something they had time or inclination to examine at any length. Now the “journey to motherhood,” as it is often called, is something to be feared, postponed, mulled and eventually exalted in endless memoirs, or “mom-oirs” (though plenty of dads are writing them too).

But what luck! If certain insurance companies have anything to say about it, women will have a hard time getting those birth control pills (while men enjoy coverage for their Viagra). Less birth control and more babies might weaken people's interest in writing about their journeys to parenthood.

-- Peggy Orenstein is teaching women to write Op-Eds.

Ms. Orenstein asked: Could every woman at the large rectangular table name one specific subject that she is an expert in and say why?

...Of the next four women who spoke, three started with a qualification or apology. "I'm really too young to be an expert in anything," said Caitlin Petre, 23.

"Let's stop," Ms. Orenstein said. "It happens in every single session I do with women, and it's never happened with men." Women tend to back away from "what we know and why we know it," she said.

And then…

"What I want to suggest to you," she continued, is that the personal and the public interests are not at odds, and "the belief that they are mutually exclusive has kept women out of power." Don't you want money, credibility, access to aid in your cause? she asked.

Cristina Page, a spokeswoman for Birth Control Watch in Washington, leaned forward. "I've never heard anyone say that before," she said. "What you've just said is so important. It's liberating."

-- Also liberating: having a vagina + playing a guitar.

That she's now a woman who "shreds" — the verb for super-fast, heavy metal-esque guitar playing — doesn't strike her as unusual, even though many still see rock guitar playing as an expression of male sexuality, and the guitar itself as phallic prop... "I'm conscious that I'm a woman playing the electric guitar relatively well, and that it's not that common," Ms. Stern said. "But — and this maybe sounds really cheesy — there's the personal relationship I have with the guitar which doesn't have to do with gender or anything like that. It's the thing that produces a creative side in me. I just see it in a totally separate way."

-- File this under Branding Disguised as Liberation: Piece of CAKE: Recipes for Female Pleasure (the red velvet-covered inanity that was published over a year ago and billed as a bible to women’s sexuality) came out in paperback last month. Gone are the plush covers and fancy transparent slipcover. The book has been re-titled The Hot Woman’s Handbook: The CAKE Guide to Female Sexual Pleasure and the cover now features a tried and true photo of a bra and pantied torso, with no head. But this chick's got her hand on her hip, so you know, she’s sassy.

This month’s issue of Frieze magazine is all feminism all the time. Thankfully, it’s a whole lot better than the similarly themed issue of ARTNews.

Meanwhile at the Times, Holland Cotter has been doing an impressive job covering feminist art, not just reviewing and contextualizing the various shows and symposiums, but thinking hard about what it all means. Last week he reviewed “Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution” at the Museum of Contemporary Art out in LA (it’ll come to P.S. 1 in Queens next year). And he has a lot to say about how the history of the related art and activism has been written and defined.

He notes a lot of the things I’ve been thinking about, the things that keep coming up in every related conversation I have with artists, activists and curators: the enduring, increasingly complicated problem of having a canon…the whole essentialism debate…inter-generational tensions…the way that feminism’s love of questions complicates coherence. Cotter writes,

The show is a thrill, rich and sustained. Just by existing, it makes history. But like any history, once written, it is also an artifact, a frozen and partial monument to an art movement that was never a movement, or rather was many movements, or impulses, vibrant and vexingly contradictory.

One thing is certain: Feminist art, which emerged in the 1960s with the women’s movement, is the formative art of the last four decades. Scan the most innovative work, by both men and women, done during that time, and you’ll find feminism’s activist, expansionist, pluralitic trace. Without identity-based art, crafts-derived art, performance art and much political art would not exist in the form it does, if it existed at all. Much of what we call postmodern art has feminist art at its source.

Yeah, I shivered a little. And then he manages as worthy and complete a definition of feminism as I think I’ve seen anywhere:

With their interest on experiencing gender – along, one must hope, with race and class – as an unfixed category, but one they control, and their interest in playing with various versions of “great,” they are exercising freedoms of choice that feminism always offered: freedom to challenge received truths, to exchange passivity for activism, to find solidarity in diversity, to adopt ambiguity and ambivalence as social and aesthetic strategies. And by doing so, they are acknowledging that the art they are making, whatever form it takes, is political by default.

black snake moaning

At the Times, A.O. Scott (who is also in rare form today with his review of Wild Hogs) writes that Black Snake Moan...

...joins a dubious stereotype of black manhood to an uplifting, sentimental fable....the character, played with his usual fearsome wit by Samuel L. Jackson, is a tried-and-true Hollywood stock figure: the selfless, spiritually minded African-American who seems to have been put on the earth to help white people work out their self-esteem issues. No doubt “Black Snake Moan” is a provocative title, but a more accurate one might be “Chaining Miss Daisy to the Radiator in Her Underwear.”

At the Voice, Rob Nelson writes:

[A]fter his camera has had its fill of ogling Rae [Christina Ricci], [director Craig] Brewer turns out to have…only a little on his mind and none of it, amazingly, to do with race. Whatever provocation helps sell the movie…doesn't give Black Snake Moan the slightest hint of substance, which is maybe the real reason it got the green light. Both times I saw the film…male buddies in the theater turned to one another with knowing smirks—like, Holy moly, now ain't this one a l'il vixen? Maybe these guys had lost their . . . uh, full attention by the time Brewer contrives to get Rae all gussied up and ready to shake her thing down the aisle. But by then, I might reckon the good ol' boys got what they came for.

David Edelstein at New York Magazine:

At bottom, Black Snake Moan is an old-fashioned feel-good, Sunday-schoolish kind of parable about a broken, bitter ex-alcoholic who's spiritually reborn by, uh, chaining a little white nympho in shorty-cutoffs to his radiator. But it's not how you think! Wouldn't you have chained Anna Nicole to your radiator if you could have saved her? Wouldn't you chain Britney to your radiator?

Lisa Schwartzbaum at Entertainment Weekly recommends that you...

…jump for the chance to see the slip-slim, saucer-eyed star…arch and moan and writhe with abandon, acting out sexual addiction as a fever of lust and emotional emptiness that entitles the camera to focus on her little white underpants. The picture would have been a whole other kettle of blackened catfish had Rae been played by an unknown, or a clothed chick. But that's not what's for sale here; showbiz is.

Over at Salon, Stephanie Zacharek calls it “a wild and sweet little picture about sex, redemption and music, though perhaps not necessarily in that order.” She writes approvingly that “Brewer is a provocateur, a troublemaker…I think, with Black Snake Moan, Brewer's secret is finally out of the bag: For all that he wants to rattle and disarm us, he's really a humanist in wolf's clothing.”

Here's Brewer himself, from an an earlier interview with Zacharek:

So can we actually have movies where a woman chained up can be a character in a narrative, like you would in a Flannery O'Connor short story, and not represent my take on women?

I'm exploring something that has nothing to do with race or gender. I'm the crazy girl on the end of that chain. I'm the one who felt I was losing control of my mind and my body because I was not tethered to anyone. And I needed to be snapped back…. So I think it's foolish to immediately jump to sexism because of the imagery. But I will give them this: I'm asking for it.

…man alive, you look at this imagery on this poster, and I'm so obviously banging this drum. It's like, you really believe that I believe this? That women need to be chained up? Can we not think metaphorically once race and gender are introduced? ... Can we never go back to that time when people can be people and we can explore whatever the hell we want to? Of course we can, but there are going to be people who take exception to that.

so. much. art.

-- There was a profile of the photographer Justine Kurland in the Times last weekend. Worth noting, as the article does, is that Kurland “first came to attention when her work appeared in “Another Girl, Another Planet,” a famous 1999 group show whose curators included the photographer Gregory Crewdson. It heralded the arrival of the so-called ‘girl photographers’ like Dana Hoey, Malerie Marder and Katy Grannan…”

I immediately loved the first Kurland photographs I saw. They showed teenage girls in natural landscapes, climbing trees, braiding each other’s hair, parading around and telling secrets. There was something special and slightly dark about them…Kurland didn’t treat the girls delicately, but she also didn’t objectify or turn them into overly mythical, essentialist symbols of girlhood (as is so often the danger with this kind of work). The excellent movie My Summer of Love (2004) reminded me of a Kurland image come to life.

So I’m a little wary of her new work, which I have not seen yet except the few images in the slideshow that accompanies the profile. They are beautiful, but…

In her current show, at Mitchell-Innes & Nash in Chelsea, the landscape is populated by tribes of naked mature women — many of them pregnant or nursing, suggesting wandering fertility goddesses — who are playing with their children in paradisiac settings of forest, meadow and sea.

The series is titled “Of Woman Born,” a nod to the 1978 manifesto on motherhood by the feminist poet Adrienne Rich. But Ms. Kurland usually refers to them as “my mama and baby pictures.”

…I always get a little nervous about “mama and baby” art. I’ll reserve judgment till I actually see the show, though.

-- Another show to add to the list:

...Family Pictures, the Guggenheim's current show of photographs and videos by 16 artists, most of them women. Drawn from the museum's permanent collection, it feels at times like an assembly of "greatest hits" from the gender-bending '90s. But it also raises the question of whether, over the past decades, artists' perceptions of family and childhood have undergone a radical shift.

Also, Lorna Simpson at the Whitney.

-- Ingrid Sischy writing in the New York Times Style Magazine last weekend:

What’s interesting is that if one goes through the iconic works of the first, second and third waves of feminist writers, there is so little that actually addresses fashion. Rereading Simone de Beauvoir, Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone, Germaine Greer, Lucy Lippard, Linda Nochlin and so many others, I was struck by the dearth of attention to this subject, which after all has everything to do with how identity is constructed for the outside world. There’s no lack of thinking when it comes to inner life, working life, creative life and public life, but when fashion comes up, the attitude tends to be knee-jerk and programmatic.

-- How about this: Clara Driscoll, secret designer of Tiffany lamps! The Times says that this story “turns out to be a touchstone for the kind of detective story that historians fantasize about: one that gives credit where credit is long overdue and in the process rewrites what had previously seemed like settled history.” During one of the Feminist Art Project panels at the College Art Association Conference two weekends ago, an art historian from the Birmingham Museum of Art (whose name I unfortunately didn’t catch) told an anecdote that neatly demonstrated the advantages of a feminist approach to art history. She and her colleagues were investigating a series of quite old prints done by a male artist, expecting to find that women had done the coloring of the prints. It turned out that the coloring had actually been done by a group of men, but the feminist methodology that led to this discovery still ended up challenging assumptions about the Individual Male Artist throughout history…namely, the myth that all these guys were divinely inspired and always worked alone. I thought this was a great example of a concern or area of inquiry that is feminist even though it doesn’t explicitly concern women.

There was and is so much more to say about that day of panels, but it’s hard to distill. There was lots of discussion about what feminist art is and is not, with no clear answers. Martha Rosler, who was my photography professor for a semester as an undergraduate, and whose work has been very important, had a lot of good stuff to say about art and activism. There was the usual talk about the problem of young women not wanting to call themselves feminists, with the added art world complication that even some women who do identify as feminists are reluctant to identify as feminist artists because they don’t want their work automatically identified as being “about or from female subjectivity.” Panelists expressed hope that the events of this year will expand definitions of feminist art instead of leading to the defense of a(nother) limited canon. In a panel on feminist theory since the 1980s, one presenter related how a colleague criticized her use of the word “criticalities” in a presentation title as “so 20 years ago.”

This was seriously hilarious...Women’s Studies just loves those words. I’m not interested in being an academic, but the TFAP panels did remind me why I love the nerdy fun of feminist theory (with all it’s “criticalities”)...going to conferences where I drink insane amounts of coffee and take equally insane amounts of notes in jittery handwriting, and leave exhausted and inspired and maybe also a little unsettled.

Some cool artists, projects and organizations that came up that day, who I mention mainly to keep track of and will talk more about later sometime… Sharon Hayes, Allison Mitchell, Participant Inc and LTTR (that’s Lesbians To The Rescue).

-- Last week I also trekked out to Jamaica to the opening of “From the Inside Out: Feminist Art Then & Now" at St. John’s University. It was the rare show to really highlight feminist art done by two generations, with work done in the 60s and 70s mounted right next to art made in the last couple of year. You couldn’t always tell the difference. My favorite piece (probably) was a sort of quilt/web hand-stitched out of the crotches of pantyhose of various shades of beige, by Jocelyn Nevel (2003). It was sly, a little crass and also just beautiful.

-- And here you can listen to audio from last month’s sold out MOMA symposium, "The Feminist Future: Theory and Practice in the Visual Arts." Because nothing is as much fun as listening to a recording of a conference.