Installation view, Tanja Ostojić, Misplaced Women? (2009–16), mixed media (all photos by author for Hyperallergic)
Most people know the story by now: Feminism’s first wave came with the suffragettes; the second wave with women’s liberation in the 1970s; and the third wave crashed in with riot grrrls and zinesters. Today, a question is bubbling up of whether or not we’ve reached a new wave, a new era in feminism.
It’s certainly the case that there’s been a popular push across feminist media and arts in the US to spotlight the ongoing and long-overlooked contributions of women of color. And women of color–led efforts are rightly taking center stage of their own accord, in movements such as #BlackLivesMatter and the fight for immigrant rights. We’re also seeing a broader recognition that gender equality goes beyond the male/female binary and requires embracing trans and gender-nonconforming people. Which is to say, there’s a growing understanding at a mass scale that all oppressions are linked.
But even saying the above is tricky if you look at the history. Linear or unifying narratives of progress leave a lot out in the desire to preserve a clear story. While many white feminist leaders of the past had a fairly narrow focus, others, along with womanists, have long been looking at oppressions beyond the patriarchy. In the 1970s, for instance, queer women of color were already articulating an intersectional approach to their political work. In other words, the only new development is that intersectionality has moved into popular discourse. At the same time, the kinds of political battles being fought by women who call themselves feminists in the US today can feel worlds apart — from those fighting for access to CEO positions at Fortune 500 companies or to serve on the front lines in the military to women demanding a higher minimum wage or to be given legal status in their own country. If anything, the feminism of today seems more diffuse, varied, and subject to interpretation (or co-optation) than ever before. And that’s just feminism within the US.
Installation view, Mujeres Públicas, “Untitled” (2003–16), wallpaper and matchboxes These kinds of complications are precisely why the exhibition Feminism as Politics!, curated by Olga Kopenkina and currently on view at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery, falls short. Comprised of work by 11 artists and collectives, the exhibition is compact, likely a limitation of both the space and the reality of funding feminist-focused projects. Spanning nine countries, the show centers primarily on works by European and Russian artists, but seems to gesture toward a global perspective with works by practitioners in the US, Guatemala, and Argentina. This tiny, scattered taste left me wondering what’s happening in unrepresented countries and why Kopenkina chose the places that she did. Why, for instance, have such a heavy showing from countries that were part of or adjacent to the USSR without focusing exclusively on that region? That might have allowed for a tighter show with a clearer sense of the worlds in which the artists are working.
Kopenkina’s essay doesn’t offer many ways to better understand her choices. She suggests that the artists in the exhibition are all working to “identify possibilities emerging from the ruins of the global status quo” and draws on the work of academics Stefano Harney and Fred Moten to reference an “undercommons,” or an “antipolitics that emerges from the outraged, endangered, indebted population.” But few of the artists seem to be addressing a global status quo or undercommons directly. She also draws on the work of Isabell Lorey and Jack Halbertstam in trying to define the New Feminism that she’s interested in; related conversations can be found in places like Dissent magazine and the Guardian. Yet her writing remains mostly academic and theory-bound, rather than focusing on how these ideas play out in the artwork itself.
All of which gets at the central contradiction of the show. On the one hand, in her essay, Kopenkina seems to argue against the drive to homogenize culture and political movements: “economic and political precarization has become a neoliberal instrument of governance that does not make any absolute separation between center and margin.” On the other hand, she presents this sampler of artworks with few meaningful insights into the unique political climates that gave rise to them, either assuming that the viewer knows this information or will look it up. Whether it’s intentional or not, by not providing context she ends up homogenizing the work to some extent, or at least obscuring its political specificity, which seems to defeat the purpose of the exhibition and clouds a potentially compelling argument about contemporary feminism no longer having a center or cohesive vision.
Installation view, Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, “Toxic” (2012), film, featuring Ginger Brooks Takahashi and Werner Hirsch
This contradiction feels particularly evident in the film work “Toxic” by the Berlin-based duo Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz. In the video, artists Ginger Brooks Takahashi and Werner Hirsch perform dryly as a punk and a drag queen, playing reluctant, even antagonistic, parts for the camera. There are references to the work of queer art figures such as Jean Genet and Catherine Opie, as well as Basquiat, in the fantastical and uneasy mug shots and masks that populate much of the film. Watching it unfold without reading anything about it, you can assume that the work was shot somewhere in Europe (it was indeed shot in Paris) and is intended for those who have experience within Western universities, museums, and galleries. Certainly, that is its own specific context, but it is a liberalized one that aims to be highly transportable and legible to any arts audience. In that context, the terms “feminist” or “queer” become generic statements that don’t articulate the actual values or positions of the people laying claim to them. They become totalizing ambiguities to which viewers can ascribe a great deal of assumed meaning, nodding in presumed agreement, while knowing very little about what the people using the terms actually do in the world to assert their politics. Set within this exhibition,”Toxic” feels vague and, because of that, toothless.
