Signs of the Times

Martha Rosler, <i>Cargo Cult</i> (c. 1972), 40 inches

by 30 inches, photo montage printed as color

photograph.

Martha Rosler, Cargo Cult (c. 1972), 40 inches by 30 inches, photo montage printed as color photograph.

by Susan Hagen

Once upon a time in America -- in the 1970s to be exact -- the feminist movement reactivated the women's suffrage movement begun decades earlier and proceeded to completely transform the world we live in. At about the same time, female artists began to address political issues both in their work and by organizing collectively. Using techniques from popular culture, photography, video and film (that are, unlike oil painting, perhaps a bit less tainted by centuries of use as a patriarchal vehicle for objectifying women), these idealistic and energetic artists sought to inform their audience and redress social inequities. Their impact has been felt throughout the art world ever since. Now, appropriately, Moore College of Art is presenting an exhibition, organized by White Columns in New York, of over 200 examples of feminist art, ephemera and documents from the 1970s. The goal of guest curators Ingrid Schaffner and Catherine Morris was to reappraise work by feminist artists, examining its "focus on the art's radical essence and strategies of empowerment." They titled the show "Gloria," citing a slew of '70s references, among them Gloria Steinem, Gloria Stivik from the television show All in the Family and the Van Morrison song, "Gloria."

A large number of the 22 artists with work in the show used shock value -- still effective after all these years -- to get their messages across. A case in point is Lynda Benglis' famous 1974 advertisement in Artforum showing a photograph of the artist, posing nude with an enormous dildo. She wryly spoofs the Western traditions of the nude while turning a symbol of patriarchy into an icon of self-gratification. Nearby are several letters written in response to the ad, among them, a letter by the associate editors of Artforum "dissociating themselves from a portion of the magazine's content." Also reclaiming and reemploying the female nude in a highly unconventional manner are Hannah Wilke's soft-core-porn self-portrait photographic series, So Help Me Hannah (1978), and Carolee Schneemann's Interior Scroll (1974), a videotaped performance of Schneemann slowly removing a long piece of paper with a typed diatribe from her own vagina. Equally shocking, but for a different reason, Ana Mendieta's People Looking at Blood, Moffit (1973), a slide show documenting an intervention/performance dealing with violence against women, is a disturbing foreshadowing of Mendieta's death.

Other artists in the show worked with more subtlety, but no less powerfully. Mary Kelly's Primapara: The Bathing Series, dated 1973/1997, documents her baby's first bath in gorgeous close-up black-and-white photographs of body parts -- mouth, ear, crown of head or creases of fleshy little appendages. Kelly and several other artists used the substance of their own everyday lives to find broader political implications. Mierle Laderman Ukeles' conceptual art project, Interviewing Passersby on the Sidewalk About Their Maintenance Lives (1974), was documented with photographs and a seven-page questionnaire about the cleaning habits of respondents. In Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), a marvelously well-conceived video piece that draws from cooking shows, Martha Rosler quietly presents a series of kitchen implements, and then violently demonstrates their use. The show also contains three of Cindy Sherman's brilliant Untitled Film Stills from 1978 and 1979, early photographs of her enactments of alternative identities, and Adrian Piper's strangely beautiful Food for the Spirit, No. 1, 6 and 12 (1971), autobiographical photographs documenting a summer of fasting and reading Kant.

To be sure, not all of the work in this vast exhibition is equally rigorous in aesthetic terms, but it helps to remember the passion and commitment with which all of these artists invested their work with their political goals. In their statement, the curators wrote, "Revisiting the work of some of the most compelling artist of the 1970s -- the decade to which all subsequent feminist thought, action, and art inherently refer -- we have come to see this exhibition not so much as a reminder, but rather as an affirmation of the feminist continuum." It will be interesting to see what kind of effect this exhibition will have on the current generation of young female artists at Moore.

Through Feb. 26, The Galleries at Moore, Moore College of Art & Design, 20th St.