December 4, 2007
Claiming space, raising questions
Records are being set at the AU Museum. On a single day in November, 452 people came to see ART of CONFRONTation, which includes paintings of Abu Ghraib by famed artist Fernando Botero. The number of daily visitors has quadrupled, says museum director Jack Rasmussen. But if Abu Ghraib is the most widely publicized show, it is not necessarily the show where viewers linger longest.
Enter the museum, and visitors confront a mannequin of a woman trapped in a linen closet. Nearby are other images of women: at a sewing machine, in the bath, covered with bags of flour, as victims, as goddesses.
Sandra Orgel Crocker’s Linen Closet, right, is a recreation of the original 1971–72 installation.
The show is Claiming Space: Some American Feminist Originators, curated by AU art historians Norma Broude and Mary Garrard. It’s an exhibit of work from a moment in art history that is still recent enough, and still not fully absorbed enough, to unsettle some viewers and resonate with others. This work was confrontational in its time; it is still confrontational today.
In the 1970s, as the feminist movement raised questions about women’s place in society, women also began to address the issue of gender artistically, and claimed the right to be represented more widely in galleries and museums.
But more was in question than a share of the wall space. Artists such as Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, Faith Ringgold, and many others were creating art that asserted the right to claim political space, theological space, the meaning of their bodies, and even the abstract space of aesthetic judgment.
Claiming Space focuses attention on the art that emerged from this time of innovation and questioning. The art tends not to be overtly political; it is not stumping against the Vietnam War or for the Equal Rights Amendment. But it is infused, often explicitly, with the conception of the personal as political.
When Yolanda Lopez pairs images of three women as the Virgin of Guadalupe—her grandmother sitting primly with religious icons and a carving knife, her mother hunched at a sewing machine, and herself running on muscled legs—the socio-political implications are apparent.
Nancy Fried makes the personal political by showing the daily life of a lesbian couple. Betsy Damon appeared on New York City streets as The 7,000 Year Old Woman, wearing 400 bags of flour.
Betsy Damon’s The 7,000 Year Old Woman was a New York City street performance in 1977. Photographs by Stu Friedrich. Artist’s collection. Courtesy of Betsy Damon.
To dismiss this as merely political is to fail to grapple with the art, and to make use of an easy excuse for marginalizing it. “The criticism of ‘too political’ harbors a value judgment about the lesser importance of feminism itself. Nobody says that the work of Goya or David or Gericault or Picasso—or Botero’s Abu Ghraib paintings, to cite our companion exhibition in the American University Museum—is too political to be successful as art,” note Broude and Garrard in their catalog essay.
Much of the work, in fact, is confrontational in very nuanced ways. It was confrontational, for instance, for Jane Kaufman to string glass pearls into an elegant privacy screen in Pearl Screen (1980), and for Miriam Schapiro to use fabric in Anatomy of a Kimono (1975–76). These artists were contending, through their work, that such notions as beauty and prettiness had been devalued as too “feminine” and could be reclaimed in a more inclusive aesthetic that also admitted “crafty” skills and fabrics.
A detail from Miriam Schapiro’s Anatomy of a Kimono, 1975–76. Photo courtesy of Miriam Schapiro.
More than a quarter century later, there is enough perspective to start placing this art in context. Broude and Garrard contend that feminist artists “opened up new opportunities for activist and pluralistic art in the late twentieth century,” yet also represented a continuity with the artistic past, particularly the notion of art as a force for social change. (Fittingly, this show, and Botero’s, is paired with the work of an artist who used art for social reform, Dark Metropolis: Irving Norman’s Social Surrealism.)
The work in Claiming Space conveys ideas that are still confrontational, but it also has the ring of a particular time—which, of course, is what it means for art to become art history.
Interestingly, the woman stored in the linen closet who greets visitors as they enter the AU Museum is not the 1971 original; that was an installation, long gone, and this is a recreation. Today’s woman is almost the same. But not quite.
In 1971, she gazed down, and her chin sat so close to the shelf she appeared close to strangling. In 2007, the neatly folded linens still surround her, and she is still in the closet. But her head is held high, further above the storage shelf, and her gaze is direct and unflinching.
The woman in the linen closet is emerging.
