!Women Art Revolution

by Robert Boyd



Lynn Hershman Leeson speaking after the showing of !Women Art Revolution

Last night I saw !Women Art Revolution, a documentary by Lynn Hershman Leeson, which compiles video of feminist artists taken by Hershman since 1967. She's been videotaping interviews with these artists continually and has literally thousands of hours of interviews. In a sense, this film is an adjunct to the video, which is an amazing database of information about feminist art. And you can see it online--Hershman donated the video to Stanford University, who have made some of the video accessible online. (I wonder if making the video accessible online is an ongoing project--if so, they have made a good start but have a long way to go.)

The movie has a somewhat confused structure. In part, it is chronological--the origins of feminist art is located in the 1960s. The film is clear on placing this art within the social movements of the 60s and in opposition to the apolitical, contentless art of minimalism. This is something that is key and will come up later in terms of art history.

Hershman places her own story within the context of the larger topic, including discussing how she wrote fake reviews of her work under three pseudonyms, got them published, and used them to get her first gallery shows. Her point was that because she was a woman, it was hard for galleries to take her work seriously, so she had to engage in this ruse. Without knowing the specific circumstances and galleries, it's hard to judge how true that is--I mean, any young artist without a gallery, male or female, finds it hard to get a gallery. (Old artists, too!) Nonetheless, her clever tactic worked, but more important, it actually prefigured some of her subsequent work in which she took on a fictional identity (so well, in fact, that her alter ego had better credit than she did). All this is interesting, but it stops the movie dead whenever she talks about her own art. It's tricky to make a movie that is simultaneously about an art movement and about oneself.

The movie moves into the early seventies, when feminist art really took off as a thing. Judy Chicago becomes a major figure, not only for her own art, but also for her founding and cofounding several programs in feminist art. The funny thing about this section is you see that Chicago wasn't good at keeping these programs going--the details are never spelled out, but you get the idea that there were fallings out with her collaborators. That said, lots of interesting artists and thinkers came through Chicago's programs. The movie also discussed A.I.R.--Artists in Residence, a non-profit women's art gallery founded in 1972. Probably the two most famous artists in A.I.R. were Nancy Spero and Ana Mendieta.

The way I'm describing the movie makes it seem much more narrative than it is. While there is a general sense of time passing (60s-70s-80s), !Women Art Revolution veers off into discussions of different media that were pioneered by these artists (particularly performance and video) and different subject matters. It touches on controversies (particularly Congress discussing The Dinner Party and later the revocation of certain N.E.A. grants in the 80s), but mostly keeps it focused on the artists and what they were doing.

The film portrays the 80s as a period of cultural retrenchment--Reagan, the NEA, and the Guerrilla Girls. But it also makes the point that this was the moment when women art stars came to the fore--Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer. The Guerrilla Girls are interviewed at length, and their clever, fact-filled graphics about the percentage of women in galleries and museums is recognized. The film suggests that they had to be anonymous because of the danger to their professions if they became known, and wraps that up into the general sense of 80s reaction. But to me, what we have with the Guerrilla Girls is moving beyond feminists addressing other feminists (for example, consciousness raising) which was very common in the 70s to feminists addressing everybody in the art world, whether they were self-identified as feminist or not. When they pointed out how few female artists there were in the Museum of Modern Art, their intended audience were the curators, directors and trustees of MOMA. And perhaps even more important, future curators, directors and trustees. Because as the movie pointed out, trustees--particularly women trustees--have gradually pushed for more women in permanent collections.

The battle between feminist art and minimalism reaches a gruesome apotheosis in 1985. Ana Mendieta, whose work dealt with identity, gender, and the body--obviously important fields for feminist art--was married to one of the key minimalist artists, Carl Andre. Mendieta fell from a 34th floor window on September 8, after an argument with Andre. Andre said he was not in the room when she fell. Andre was tried for murder, and many artists contributed to his legal defense (the film specifies male artists, but I don't know if his supporters were exclusively male). This outraged women artists, and they picketed the trial. Andre was acquitted, which increased their outrage.

The film concludes with the success (one might say triumph) of feminist art, including its institutionalization. Hershman discusses how her own work is now in the collection of MOMA and the Tate, and that she was able to finance this film. She interviews younger feminist artists who have received MacArthur grants. She discusses WACK!, the huge survey of feminist art at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. And perhaps the most amusing parts of the film were excerpts of an interview with Marcia Tucker, the first female curator at the Whitney Museum who later founded the New Museum. Tucker proved that a feminist could create a lasting art institution.

But the most powerful statement--and the most revisionist--was by Martha Rosler. She stated that feminism was the most important art movement in recent history, and pointed out that art historians and critics still tried to split all these artists up into an art history based on style (minimalism, post-minimalism, conceptualism, neo-expressionism, whatever) or medium (performance, video, etc.), when the most logical grouping was by ideology (feminism). This rings really true--they way you read about these artists is as members of different movements as opposed to all being part of the same movement, the feminist art movement.

I've read most of the WACK! catalog, and now I've seen this film. What I would really like to read would be a good narrative history of feminist art. Who did what when, written in a down-to-earth warts-and-all style. (I hate to admit it, but I'd like to know how Judy Chicago managed to piss off so many of her colleagues in the early 70s, for example.) But that's just me--the art world tends to prefer more high-level art histories, as well as more theoretical texts. Story-telling and reportage are frowned upon for some reason.

Although it's not without faults, I recommend !Women Art Revolution highly. It will be showing again in Houston in February, 2112, at the MFAH.

The Must-See Movies at the Cinema Arts Festival

by Robert Boyd

The third annual Cinema Arts Festival's schedule has been released, and among its many interesting items are a few movies that I personally consider must-see movies. Here are my recommendations:

!Women Art Revolution by Lynn Hershman. I first heard about this documentary on feminist art two years ago at the Cinema Arts Festival when Hershman was a guest. It's gotten somewhat mixed reviews, but I think it's going to be a crucial film--Hershman has been filming interviews with key feminist artists since the late 60s or early 70s--basically banking the footage for decades. So what I'm expecting is to be seeing interviews with people like Carolee Schneemann, Miriam Schapiro and Judy Chicago right at the beginnings of their careers--in the heat of the moment, so to speak. A must for anyone who is interested in the history of art since the 60s.

Crazy Horse by Frederick Wiseman. Kind of the polar opposite of !Women Art Revolution is this documentary about the creation of a floor show at Paris's famous strip-tease club, Crazy Horse. Frederick Wiseman is, of course, one of the great documentarians, whose work includes Titicut Follies and Welfare.

Trimpin by Peter Esmonde. In the early 90s, I lived in Seattle and often checked out the local art happenings at the Center on Contemporary Art. The director was my friend Larry Reid, and the shows he put on were real crowd-pleasers (and opening nights at COCA were the hottest tickets in town). It was at COCA that I first encountered Trimpin, a German sound artist who lived in Seattle at that time (and maybe still does, for all I know). The first Trimpin piece I saw (and heard) was a room full of wooden shoes, arranged in a grid, hanging from the ceiling. You could walk through the grid among the shoes. Each show had a small electric motor inside that would bang a clacker against the inside of the shoe. The motors were controlled by a computer. So in effect, these shoes--hundreds of them--were a gigantic computer-controlled percussion instrument that you could immerse yourself in. Who wouldn't want to see a documentary about the guy who created that?

Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film by Pip Chodorov. Another interesting looking art-history film. When I first saw the title, I thought it was going to be a film about Nick Cooper's band, which would have been cool. But this sounds fantastic--interviews with people like Michael Snow, Ken Jacobs and Stan Brackage, including some complete shorts by some of these filmmakers. One thing that interests me especially is that the film discusses the filmmaker's status of being neither fish nor fowl--neither commercial filmmakers nor part of the art world as it was then constituted. This is an issue I think about a lot, especially in regards to people who make art comics--which currently occupy a similar no-man's land that the experimental filmmakers did in earlier decades.

Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow by Sophie Fiennes. With a title like that, one could be excused for imagining an unusually poetic post-apocalyptic science fiction movie. Instead, this is a documentary about Anselm Kiefer and the "city" he is building. But perhaps the initial impression isn't so wrong. The photos I've seen make La Ribaute, Kiefer's estate, look very much like a bizarre post-modern ruin. As an artist whose work has dealt so much with destruction (particularly the destruction of Europe and European Jewry in the second world war), this project seems apt and the film sounds fascinating.


Pieter Breugal, The Procession to Calvary, 1564


The Mill and the Cross by Lech Majewski. The only fiction film among my "must-sees", this nonetheless has an art angle--a highly unusual one. The film is based on the painting The Procession to Calvary by Pieter Bruegel (1564). Essentially Majewski enters the crowded image to tell the stories of the people pictured (and there are hundreds of people depicted). The stills look spectacular--I'm hoping the film lives up to the images I've seen.




Lech Majewski, still from The Mill and the Cross, 2011

Tiptoeing through the Tulips

It's intellectually risky for a dude to approach feminism and feminist art. But I just read Through the Flower by Judy Chicago, and it's really interesting, so I'm going to try to tiptoe through the subject (but will probably end up blundering about). Through the Flower was written originally in 1975, before she finished her most famous piece, The Dinner Party (1974-1979). This one is a new edition from 1993. I found it at Half Price Books, and as luck would have it, it's an autographed copy.



Chicago began her career as an artist in the 1960s in Los Angeles. She was one of the L.A. style minimalists, and as such, her work embraced high-tech fabrication, a high level of craftsmanship, and a certain playfulness. Think of artists like John McCracken and the Ferus boys--Ken Price, Craig Kauffman, Robert Irwin, Billy Al Bengston and Larry Bell. Chicago was doing pieces like this:


Judy Chicago, Car Hood, sprayed acrylic lacquer on a 1964 Corvair hood, 1963-64

You can definitely see the resemblance between what she was doing and what Billy Al Bengston was doing. And there is a high level of craft here. But she had an ambiguous relationship with craft. In Through the Flower, she sees craft as a thing that boys learned as a matter of course (in shop class) but that girls did not. I think this is really arguable, and that in a way, she is seeing craft through male eyes if she sees it that way. There were (and are) traditionally female crafts that few boys learn. Sewing and needlework, for example. I think an issue was that such crafts were not looked at as art--and that is a male failing. That they weren't looked at as craft in the context of Chicago's book is a failing on her part.

In her desire to acquire craftsmanlike skills (above and beyond what was taught to her in art school), she took a class in auto-body painting (the only woman with 250 men in the class) and another in pyrotechnics (!)--which feel totally like "boy" things to learn. Perhaps she felt she had to do these things to compete in a man's world. Certainly the piece above speaks to manly kind of things--custom car culture, in particular. (Custom car culture was a big influence on other artists in L.A. at the time, especially Robert Irwin.)

She tried to fit in with the art scene of L.A. of the early 60s. Now readers of this blog know I have often expressed admiration for the Ferus scene. Chicago--without naming names (damn!)--paints a less attractive picture.

Halfway through my last year in graduate school, I became involved with a gallery run by a man named Rolf Nelson. He used to take me to the artists' bar, Barney's Beanery, where all the artists who were considered "important" hung out. They were all men, and they spent most of their time talking about cars, motorcycles, women, and their "joints."

A piece like Car Hood (which is excellent, in my opinion) was her way of trying to demonstrate to them that she could be a "tough" artist like them. She writes about her work then as hiding her real self in an attempt to fit in (to "pass"?). And maybe so, but look at this piece:


Judy Chicago, Rainbow Picket, originally sculpted in 1966 and recreated in 2004

Rainbow Picket is awesome! The colors, the angle, the way it fits against the wall. It would stand proudly next to a Sol Lewitt, a Dan Flavin, a John McCracken.


Judy Chicago, Red Dome Set, sprayed acrylic lacquer on formed acrylic, 1968

This is another really cool minimal piece. But again, Chicago felt like she was hiding from herself. In retrospect, she believes that in these round forms, her female nature is trying to come through, but she didn't want to believe it at the time. She describes how a woman artist from New York (who?) visited her studio and saw these pieces. She said, "Ah, the Venus of Willendorf." Chicago was crushed because she took it as a critical, cutting remark, and also because this woman had seen through her minimalist defenses.

So she embraced feminism. She educated herself on woman artists through history (there is a great chapter here on what she learned looking at their work, as well as studying the great women writers and thinkers). She found other women artists who had seen the sexist environment of the art world and of society in general, and who wanted to do something about it. Chicago befriended an older artist, Miriam Schapiro, and they began to work together on feminist art classes and spaces, including Womanhouse and a feminist program at CalArts.

Chicago and Schapiro eventually split their partnership over an ideological disagreement. Chicago was, essentially, a separatist. She wasn't an extreme separatist (she was married to a man, after all), but she thought there should be an entirely separate art world for women--all woman art classes, women's galleries, etc. Schapiro, rightly I think, wanted to work within the system and evolve it from within. Whatever problems she had with CalArts, she thought it was still worth fighting the battle there. And I think Schapiro was right, basically. The art world, for itrs many faults, is a less sexist place than many other parts of society. (At least, that's how it seems to me--but I'm a guy after all.)

Chicago also rejected abstraction, and started drawing and painting a lot of flowers and vaginas. Also doing a lot more performance--cartoonish plays like "Cock and Cunt," but also shamanistic performance like Woman/Atmosphere.


Judy Chicago, Woman/Atmosphere, fireworks and painted body, 1971

Despite a change in subject matter towards the real and away from the abstract, her basic painting style--mostly hard-edged with smooth, spray-painted gradations of color, remained the same. (Which reminds of Philip Guston, who around the same time also went from doing abstract paintings to figurative paintings--but his skittery bruch style and his pallet remained constant.)

Obviously her journey of self-discovery was leading somewhere. And we now know where:


Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, ceramic, porcelain, textile, 1974-79

This is her most famous work. Generally, Chicago doesn't seem to be a major figure in recent art history. It may be because people see a work like The Dinner Party and feel it is too literal, too obvious. My feeling is, so what? It's so beautiful and so cool. That outweighs the hit-you-on-the-head obviousness of it. But at the same time, I think her early minimal pieces are great, too, and really underrated. (At least, what I've seen of them.)

Feminist art is something I really want to learn more about. Fortunately, there is a movie that I think is going to be key for understanding this movement that is premiering right now at the Toronto Film Festival. It's called Women Art Revolution--A Secret History. The director, Lynn Hershman, has been working on it literally for decades. I saw a short preview of it at the Cinema Arts Festival, and it looks really good.

Was the Cinema Arts Festival a Success?

Robert Boyd

I love the idea of the Cinema Arts Festival. This year was the first "full" festival (apparaently there was a mini-festival last year). The concept is movies about art and artists. The support structure is from a variety of arts organizations around town, importantly some fairly alternative organizations like The Aurora Picture Show, Diverse Works, SWAMP and more. So, how was it?

I saw 6 features during the time it ran. The opening night was Me and Orson Welles by Richard Linklater.

 

Linklater introduced the film and talked afterwards. Linklater is one of my favorite filmmakers. In 1990, I was living in Seattle. When the Seattle Film Festival came around, they printed lots of programs in a slick magazine. It was huge--they seemed to be showing 100s of films. I carefully read through it, choosing films to see. I picked Slacker for the dumbest reason--it was set in Austin, so I thought it would be interesting to see a film about Texas in Seattle. It was a huge hit. Apparently, Linklater was not prepared for the reaction he got.

We went to the Seattle screening, and there was this line around the block. This was Seattle before it was a scene, or before it was officially called anything. It was like, "Wow, they're all dressed like people in the movie!" (Salon, "Slacker": 15 Years Later, July 5, 2006)

 But this wasn't a line of people who were into the film because of good word-of-mouth or sympathy to the subject matter--it was totally unknown. This was what it was like for every movie. The Seattle Film Festival was extremely popular!

Elsewhere, Linklater has written how this was the turning point for the film--the first time a non-Austin audience really got the film. After the film, he bounded on-stage and answered questions from the audience. He was funny and energetic.

It's weird how little he has changed in 19 years. He didn't "bound" this time, but he still was obviously jazzed to talk about his new film; he was still witty and amusing. The film is about the Orson Welles staging of Julius Caesar on Broadway (this is before Citizen Kane). Linklater filmed it mostly with British stage actors, and he described one of the common questions actors have when they are playing other actors acting. The question is, "Is the actor I'm playing any good?" Linklator's answer was, "The actor you're playing is not only good, but he's a much better actor than you!"

The crowd filled the MFAH theater (which is not small), so it was a successful kick-off.

The next film I saw was What If, Why Not? Underground Adventures With the Ant Farm. The Ant Farm were a group of architects/artists from San Francisco who are best known for the Cadillac Ranch up near Amarillo. The filmmakers, Laura Harrison and Beth Federici were present as were two of the original Ant Farm artists, Chip Lord and Curtis Schreier.




Lord is on the left and Schreier is on the right. Good film, great audience. The screening was delayed so that Houston mayor Bill White could helicopter in and talk about how important art was to him. It was weird, because he left as soon as he finished his remarks. He didn't seem that sincere. But apparently it was White who suggested that Houston needed a new film festival.

So far so good. The next day, Saturday, I went to check out two films at the Angelika, Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies, which was well attended. The actual projection was a crime, though. This was a documentary with a bunch of talking heads, but their names and titles kept getting truncated on the left or right edge of the screen. Still, a large and enthusiastic crowd. The film had a thesis and presented somewhat convincing evidence for the thesis, that Picasso and Braque were influenced by early film (say 1905 to 1914).

Then back to the same theater for Who's Afraid of Kathy Acker. This was a rather intense film, which is what you'd expect based on the subject. But the theater was nearly empty. Seriously, I think there were no more than 10 or 15 people there, including Acker's fellow San Franciscans Chip Lord and Curtis Schreier. I would have thought there were a few more old REsearch-era alternative culture fans out there who would check this out. Acker is kind of a period piece, so maybe that explained the tiny audience. But still, I was a little shocked to see the theater so empty.

Sunday was a Tilda Swinton day. It was the first time I ever saw an Oscar-winner in the flesh. I saw two films-- the first was Derek, an excellent, moving film about Derek Jarman, with whom Swinton got her start as a film actress. It was a powerful, inspiring film. A film about a scene, one of my favorite subjects. Swinton spoke about Jarman and that scene after the movie, and she was terrific. She is an incredibly striking person--that's obvious from her films, but seeing this giraffe-like woman (an effect exaggerated by her very high heels) in the flesh was really something.

The second film was an older one, Teknolust, from 2002. It was filmed by Lynn Hershman Leeson, who was also present. I can't say I loved this movie, but I was really intrigued by Hershman's rough "trailer" for her upcoming work, !Women Art Revolution!, which basically collects 40 years worth of film and video of feminist visual and performance artists, footage that she has been shooting (and hoarding) this whole time. This could be fascinating--but it sounds like it should be a miniseries on TV instead of a feature film. But if it were edited into a miniseries, PBS or Ovation would probably be too conservative to air it. What Saturday showed was that people would much rather see a movie about Picasso and Braque than about a radical woman artist like Kathy Acker.




Swinton is on the left (obviously) and Hershman is on the right. Notice Swinton's bizarre metal skyscraper heels!

So my question: was this film festival successful? I think attendance could have been better. But it does seem like the Cinema Arts Society got the rich and powerful of Houston to open their checkbooks a bit for it. It has establishment support. A long time ago, I would have thumbed my nose at that (if I even paid it any mind). Now it seems a lot more important to me. We get into tricky cultural politics when we say it, but alternative arts organizations survive best with establishment institutional help. But establishment institutional help may negate (or at least limit) the possibility of truly revolutionary art. This is an irony that cannot be denied. (Look at the controversy happening right now with the New Museum.)  The world is littered with the corpses of art organizations, groups, scenes, etc., that were independent of the rich and powerful... for a little while. In that regard, at least, the Cinema Arts Festival feels fairly solid. I hope it lasts.