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.

The Times is warming up for the Sackler Center's March 23rd opening with an article about Judy Chicago:

[Chicago] decided her art would address the scarcity of historical information about women. “Women’s history was neglected or added on, as opposed to integrated into the full history of the human species,” she said. “Both implicitly and explicitly the message that is communicated is that what women did wasn’t important.”

The article also quotes Roberta Smith writing about "The Dinner Party" in 2002, when she said that it was “almost as much a part of American culture as Norman Rockwell, Walt Disney, W.P.A. murals and the AIDS quilt.” Whatever you think about its content, "The Dinner Party" is an impressive piece of work, and I'm interested to see how its themes (and indirectly, Chicago's artistic priorities) will influence the Center. Not to mention how having the iconic feminist artwork as a centerpiece will shape ideas about what constitutes feminist art.

It's encouraging to see that the inaugural show "Global Feminisms" will focus on contemporary work from around the world, much of which looks...let's say, "challenging" (in a positive sense). There'll also be an exhibit called "Pharoahs, Queens and Goddesses: Feminism's Impact on Egyptology," which I guess starts to answer the question about "The Dinner Party" influence. I admit to having a knee-jerk reaction whenever feminism is used in connection with goddess-y type stuff, though it's undoubtably a good thing if the existence of the Sackler Center encourages curators at the Brooklyn to look at the museum's permanent collection with fresh eyes, and organize shows that consider classic work a little differently. With these two exhibits starting things off, it seems like the Center will be conscious about balancing its looks forward and back.

Noted: Currently on view at the Rhonda Schaller Studio, "Access: A Feminist Perpective" is a show of contemporary feminist art from around the country. It closes on February 10th. The following Saturday (2/17) at the expansive (and generally expensive) College Art Association conference, the Feminist Art Project is presenting a full day of free panels (scroll down to Saturday).

And hey, how about Julie Atlas Muz's "titillation with an edge"?

In one number a fake bloody hand, shackled to her own, has its way with her, to the tune of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s “I Put a Spell on You.” In another, she escapes from a truss as Lesley Gore sings “You Don’t Own Me.” In one subterranean bar Ms. Muz was bludgeoned as Italian opera played. She emerged from the piece nude and covered in fake blood. It’s one of her favorites.

Intended as a reflection on suicide, terrorism and fear, [her piece "Exquisite Corpse"] offers a sly meditation on the power of femininity in the face of aging and death. At one moment, Ms. Muz is unhappily examining her few lumpy bits in an enormous mirror; at another, she is shoving a naked baby doll in the freezer, pouring a shot of (real) tequila and handling a (fake) AK-47 with the panache of a sexy villain. It’s not just a tease; it’s a kiss-off.

Last month I wrote for Bookslut about the exhausting spate of anthologies related to feminism. The one that really inspired the piece was called We Don’t Need Another Wave, and while I was no fan of the book’s content, I definitely agreed with the title’s contention.

Pretty early on in college I took a Women’s Studies seminar that was specifically about third wave feminism. It was both great and frustrating, at least partly because at the time – just a few years ago -- invoking a new feminist wave didn’t seem repetitive yet. Third wave seemed to be about a genuine resurgence of feminist culture in new(ish) and contentious forms. It was about real things that were happening more than about validating those things by calling them a movement (though there was some of that, too).

With the opening of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art on the horizon, this month’s issue of ARTNews focuses on feminist art, and right on the cover they refer to work being made now as “the next wave.” Funny, I hadn’t noticed it ever going away. Apparently it's difficult to understand feminism as a constant.

The successes and failures of political movements are relatively easy to chart. What’s harder is figuring out what to make of the changes and challenges left in their wake (there’s that wave metaphor again…). It seems to me much less important to pinpoint some lofty conception of The State Of Feminism Today than to realize that feminism (and feminists) are all over the place, engaged in projects of all kinds and scales. Culture inspired or influenced by feminism is everywhere, and feminism is too rich and fascinating to be bound by convenient “wave” designations.