Review: Art without Balls Reviewed Work(s): Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art by Maura Reilly and Review by: Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw Source: The Women's Review of Books , May - Jun., 2008, Vol. 25, No. 3 (May - Jun., 2008), pp. 7-8 Published by: Old City Publishing, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/20476718

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Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art

Edited by Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin

London and New York: Merrell, 2007, 304 pp., $54.95, hardcover

......

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D oes a woman artist need to have balls to be worth talking about?" I asked a senior male colleague. He and I were sharing the stage at a panel discussion held in conjunction with the exhibition "Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love" at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City in November 2007. He had just addressed the capacity crowd, regaling us with a wildly animated and presumably extemporaneous tribute to Walker, an artist who is included in the Global Feminisms catalogue, in which he said she is a "very bad girl" who has real "balls" for working with violent and sexual subject matter. I was completely taken aback. A big part of what makes Walker's work so important, and so worth my having spent countless hours thinking about it during the past eight years, is precisely that she doesn't have "balls" (so far as I know). She has successfully transgressed the notion that masculine sexual energy is a prerequisite for the attainment of artistic dominance. To his credit, my colleague was embarrassed, and quickly retracted the offending characterization, explaining that it was an unfortunate choice of words and that what he really meant was that Walker has "courage"-a good thing. I let his comment go after that, and as the initial rush of confrontational adrenaline began to subside I realized that for the first time in my career I had publicly challenged patriarchal authority by calling out a powerful male. It felt great. I was able to challenge my colleague's flippant sexism that night only because I was following in a line of important -historical activism that has descended directly from Linda Nochlin, whose germinal article "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" was first published in Art News in 1971. In the early seventies, Nochlin began a concerted reworking of a discipline that had previously concentrated on issues of formalist teleology and connoisseurship, and was only just beginning to embrace methodologies that mobilized social and historical concerns. Her challenging article, together with the exhibition she co-curated five years later, "Women Artists: 1550-1950," exposed most art historians' lack of knowledge about women's participation in the Western art world (even though they'd been active in it at least since the Renaissance). However, Nochlin's article and exhibit also marginalized Western and non white women artists-who were even more obscure to American audiences than their white Western sisters. Nochlin's most recent project, the 2006 "Global Feminisms" show at the Brooklyn Museum and its catalogue, curated with her former student Maura Reilly, is an acknowledged update of "Women Artists: 1550-1950." It redresses omissions committed during a time when "woman" meant "white woman" and "black" meant "black man." Now, Nochlin says, she

Women's Review of Books 7

This content downloaded from 165.123.34.86 on Fri, 08 Jan 2021 04:41:20 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms approaches feminist art from the performative viewpoint self withinof the the context of art as "collective experiences of women transformative cross-culturally," social practice. Kapur concludes that aiming at the "full inclusion of thethird-world work of these and artists so points "toward the ASt ~from called 'minority' feminist voices, necessity not of justunraveling a token alternatives that struggle few." Global Feminisms expands against the the geographicalinstrumentalization of radical culture; and the historical purview of alternatives what constitutes that repudiate in big and little ways G ERMAIN E feminist art-in particular, that Westernby women, capitalist whichregimes programmedis to violate socially and / or politically engaged. and hegemononize the globe." This interest in To achieve this worthy goal, the moving Global the discourse Feminisms from what used to be the G REE R catalogue works hard to explicate center what of the Reilly art world callsto the emergent margins, and the "shared differences" of a tonumber the mouths of of womenwomen artists and critics in artists from around the world whoparticular, were is perhaps born the since most important aspect of 1960. Its subject is art that connects the Global Feminismswith various catalogue. It is notable, for intergenerational and international example, feminismsthat the catalogue bythat accompanied the using "the sense of work as critique, Kara Walker exhibition involving at the Whitney, at which the The Female gender issues not necessarily overt heated but exchange underlying." mentioned at the beginning of this Reilly's catalogue essay provides a critical review took place, featured essays that were all Eun uch historiography of a multitude of feminist discourses written by men. The essays in Global Feminisms and theoretical practices as they relate to museum remind us that it continues to be important for truly exhibitions and other art-historical efforts of the past invested feminists to write about work that engages forty years. She provides a cohesive discussion of and explicates such inherent concerns. the various identity politics at play during the 1980s Much of the work represented in the catalogue and 1990s, and parses the difficult issues of deals with the body, in particular the female body, postcolonial and neocolonial exhibition practices. By which is shown at rest; at play (in the series of photo providing the reader with a discussion of the recent booth stills by the Bulgarian artist Boryana Rossa for "transnational" exhibitions, such as Documenta 11 in example); being held up for examination (in the 2002, she explores the ways that other curators have work of South Africa's Berni Searle); suckled sought to address the challenge of an increasingly (breasts and breast milk make frequent appearances diverse audience and a greater ability to access in the work of Heng Chengyao from China, Canan artists outside of the traditional world art centers. Senol of Turkey, and Margi Geerlinks from the Reilly's project is to expand the discourse Netherlands among many others); being surrounding feminist art history and exhibition transformed (in the of Wangetchi Mutu of practice by highlighting its history, while Nochlin's, Kenya); or transposed (in the composite beings by in her companion introductory essay, is to explicate Australian artist Patricia Pacini). Often these female A ^ po emia, groundX,-bre@ . aking that history's material contents. Women's limited bodies are abject, as in the work of the British access to artistic training, materials, and commercial painter Jenny Saville, or even tortured or self success long preserved traditional painting and mutilated, as in the work of Sigalit Landau from as media of masculine privilege. Israel and Catherine Opie from the United States. A feins crtc of our time. S fContemporary women artists have embraced few male bodies also make their way in, nude in the "Mt-usig. Geman Gre' defense changing modes of representation and the video installations of Julika Rudelius of Germany; of An Hahaa gvs enrtos f performance of identity, including video and smiling and amusingly pregnant in the photos of badltosarihydsevdkikn. performance art, to express alternative ideas of the Hiroko Okada from Japan. All of this explicates the self in time and space, within and outside of more myriad types of interpersonal relationships traditional forms. They address questions of artistic throughout the world between men and women, selfhood, in particular as they relate to gender and women and children, women and other women, sexuality. However, despite a notable attempt to and especially within women themselves. Many of include a diverse group of artists in her discussion, the images, such as the South African artist Tracy Nochlin manages to steer clear of the thorny issues Rose's imagined portrait of Saartje Baartman (who of class, race, and other nongendered aspects of in the nineteenth century was kidnapped from www Ha rprcae ic difference that Reilly addresses in her essay. Africa and exhibited in European museums as the "Hottentot Venus"), represent women's battles with T he remaining essays in the catalogue provide internal demons, who originate in traumatic overviews of work by women from outside interaction with a world that denies gender and _ s - | _~~~ARE _BS the United States and Western Europe-by sexual equity. country, as in Michiko Kasahara's "Japanese Global Feminisms also includes artist biographies Women's Self-Awareness"; region, as in Virginia and a bibliography divided not only by global Perez-Ratton's "Central American Women Artists in region but also by theme, with sections devoted to a Global Age"; or even an entire continent, as in writings on "transnational, global, and local N'Gone Fall's "Providing a Space of Freedom: feminisms," for example, and lists of important Women Artists from Africa." The success of these exhibition catalogues and theoretical texts. It is a essays is mixed, since each author approaches her publication that will prove useful to scholars and designated body of work differently. The most other engaged viewers of contemporary art; and it satisfying and cohesive essays focus on small will challenge those who still believe that it takes groups of works or sets of artistic practices, engaged balls to make really dynamic visual art. &) with particular issues or media. For example, in "Gender Mobility: Through the Lens of Five Women Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw is an associate professor Artists in India," Geeta Kapur demonstrates of history of art at the University of Pennsylvania. convincingly that the photographic, time-based Her books Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara practices, which- include multichannel video Walker and Portraits of a People: Picturing African installation, of Nalini Malani, Pushmala N., Americans in the 19th Century both deal with issues Dayanita Singh, Sonia Khurana, and Tejal Shah, of race, gender, and sexuality in American art. engage issues of mythology, mimesis, sex, gender, abjection, transgender identity, and the

8 Women's Review of Books Vol. 25, No.3, May/June 2008

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