Beat Generation: New York, San Francisco, Paris at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (June 22 – October 3, 2016)

Beat Generation: New York, San Francisco, Paris, surveys a far-flung group of over 80 artists, centered on William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, who met in 1944 in New York City. It’s a literary group distinctly impatient with the printed text, and even language itself; they favor collective experience, collaboration across media, improvisation, and performance. Ginsberg presented “Howl” in a famous public reading, while Burroughs used texts for random “cut-ups”. Language migrates from one medium to another in the immersive, cave-like space of the show’s central gallery, where curator Philippe-Alain Michaud, assisted by film scholar Rani Singh and artist/curator Jean-Jacques Lebel, have orchestrated a comprehensive installation of original materials that encourage reflection on the interplay of European and American modernism.

Unlike a recent exhibition at the Orangerie dedicated to poet Guillaume Apollinaire, which focused on writers and artists in early 20th- century Paris, this one emphasizes travel across continents, fueled on a mix of Transcendentalism and Surrealism, on Walt Whitman and Arthur Rimbaud. There’s an appealing narrative, with a French inflection, to this voyage of marginalized individuals, alienated from a conformist society, who, as America expanded its world influence, turned to Antonin Artaud and Apollinaire, and insisted on immediate, lived experience. They explored film and audio recording and new methods of composition in the “open field”, and questioned consciousness itself through meditation and drugs. The journey ends, appropriately, in Paris circa 1960, at the seedy “Beat Hotel”, where Ginsberg composed “At the Grave of Apollinaire” and Burroughs’ visionary works took form, in the context of the group’s ongoing struggles with poverty, mental illness and addiction. There’s inspiration to be found in their vision, in these times of renewed threats to the individual, but also enough darkness to recall the warning of poet Charles Olson, who observed that we revere Whitman because he gives us hope, but that Melville is “the truer man”, who gives us “America, all of her space, the malice, the root.”

To paraphrase Olson again, “SPACE” is the “central fact” of the Beat Generation, with Jack Kerouac’s typewritten scroll of On the Road extending like a highway for 120 feet across the main gallery. Typed over three weeks on sheets of tracing paper, taped together so as to obviate changing pages in the machine, it’s a performance as much as a text, configured here as a sculptural installation. Anonymous film clips of the American road are projected on screens suspended overhead, while piped-in recordings of vintage blues and jazz intermingle with the hum of film projectors to create a buzzing, flickering field, a realm of surrealist suggestion, in which visitors are encouraged to wander. Displays of vintage typewriters, microphones, and tape recorders ground it all in the material context of cultural production.

Candid, hand-captioned photos taken by Ginsberg himself punctuate the exhibition, insinuating the poet’s personal magnetism and blurring the line between work and documentation. Photos selected from Robert Frank’s famous cross-country road trip, The Americans, supply a gritty visual context for Kerouac’s text, reinforcing the journalistic intensity of his verbal snapshots of marginalized characters. In a neighboring alcove, Frank’s 1959 film, Pull My Daisy, a whimsical collaboration narrated by Kerouac under the direction of Abstract Expressionist painter Alfred Leslie, features Ginsberg and others in a casual sequence of daily interactions. The improvisatory structure of jazz provides an important model for this informal art, and gestural painting seems a sideline for a number of writers, including Kerouac and Julian Beck, whose Living Theater exemplifies the group’s transgressive, participatory spirit.

If there’s innocent exuberance to Kerouac’s hunger for experience, to the freedom of “having nothing”, the cathartic incantation of Ginsberg’s “Howl”, drawn from Blake and Rimbaud, and from his own experience on the road and in a mental hospital, provides a counterpoint. Here, one can listen to Ginsberg himself reading the poem, examine his original manuscript with handwritten revisions, or interact with the words more directly by reading aloud a phonetic transcription, broken down onto some 200 posters created by contemporary artist Allen Ruppersberg. Neighboring displays of tabloid headlines from the 1950s featuring the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg evoke the era’s hysteria over communism and fears of nuclear war, traumas that can’t help but resonate with current anxieties in Europe.

In an inspired contrast to the dark activity of the opening gallery, the curators have dedicated the north gallery and its panoramic view of Montmartre to a reading room. Among its bookshelves, a lone monitor features Ginsberg being interviewed by Lebel, while the silent presence of the city at large animates the room in a flood of natural light. Combining intimacy and spectacle, it informally celebrates the wonder of everyday life and the possibility of enlightenment, anticipating Michael McClure’s ecstatic “Peyote Poem”, reproduced in a neighboring gallery: “I KNOW EVERYTHING! I PASS INTO THE ROOM.”

In side galleries, we follow the group from New York to California, where they establish affiliations with a rich culture of artists and writers, including McClure and Zen environmentalist Gary Snyder. A film clip shows McClure reading poems to a lion at the zoo, engaging with his animal body, while Bruce Conner’s mural-scale film clips of mushroom clouds from nuclear tests ironically conflate American expansionism and hallucinogenic drugs. There’s much art based on clipping and splicing, including the intricate “paste-ups” of Jess, which integrate science, art and myth. Wallace Berman’s collages using early xerox technology underline connections between collage and montage that emerge dramatically in Stan Brakhage’s Desistfilm (1954), with its opening credits hand scratched onto celluloid and compressed editing that develops tensions in an informal gathering, not unlike the one recorded more digressively in Pull My Daisy. A similar hallucinatory intensity animates the magic lantern effects of Harry Smith’s color animations, noteworthy in an exhibition that’s largely black and white, which extend Apollinaire’s concept of Orphism by coordinating shifts in visual patterns to music.

Of the three central figures, Burroughs took longer to establish his literary career, migrating to Mexico and Latin America in search of hallucinogenic plants, and sojourning with writer and ethnomusicologist Paul Bowles in Tangiers, before rejoining Ginsberg and other poets in Paris. A dilapidated bed evokes the seedy atmosphere of the “Beat Hotel”, where he and British writer Brion Gysin developed the “cut-up” – a technique of slicing up texts and randomly recombining the pieces that helped him complete Naked Lunch. For Burroughs, who regarded language as a virus, it was important to rid the body of its control. The cut-up, which Ginsberg saw as an extension of Cézanne’s process of construction with patches of color, also generated a wealth of visual material, combining photography, painting and calligraphy, that culminated in the “Dream Machine” – a rotating light box informed by primitive cinema and by the orgone theories of Wilhelm Reich, designed to activate the electrical energy of the body and generate a hypnotic state in which light could transcend language altogether.

In Paris, Ginsberg sought out Apollinaire’s grave at Père Lachaise and wrote his tribute to the poet who coined the term “surrealism” and gave verses visual form in “Calligrammes” – bringing an American movement back to its European roots. Curator Lebel, who was a member of the group at that time, even introduced the Americans to Marcel Duchamp, envisioning a fusion of European and American avant-gardes; the writers were drunk, but Duchamp, who welcomed the rawness of America in his assault on high culture, was not put off, even as Ginsberg kissed his knees and Gregory Corso clipped off his tie. Beat Generation responds to American scruffiness and homegrown mysticism with a similar generosity of spirit. World-weary Europeans attuned to Baudelairean irony might respond more to Andy Warhol’s reduction of transcendence to celebrity and commodification than to Ginsberg’s raw hunger for life. But by bringing French ideas back to Paris fully embodied in American space and popular culture, this exhibition inspires visions of a Whitmanesque merger. There’s a bracing freshness to the abrupt word juxtapositions of Ginsberg’s “Apollinaire”, while the harshness of Burroughs’ bodily imagery recalls us to the unkempt power of everyday experience.

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Martial Raysse: Rétrospective 1960-2012 at the Centre Georges Pompidou
May 14 through September 22, 2014
Place Georges-Pompidou
Paris, +33 1 44 78 12 33

Martial Raysse’s career falls into two phases. One stars the precocious Pop artist who exhibited in New York and Los Angeles in the 1960s and pioneered the use of neon and video, envisioning an art culture extending from North Africa to Japan. The other features the hermetic figure who abandoned the commercial art scene for a commune, made shamanistic assemblages, and emerged from the political and cultural turmoil of 1968 to reincarnate, under the influence of Marcel Duchamp, Baudelaire’s “painter of modern life.” The more than 200 works in this 50-year retrospective, multi-faceted and leavened with art-historical references, trace an unconventional artistic trajectory.

Raysse, now 78, was shaped early on by art in the South of France. Raised in Vallauris, where his parents were ceramicists, he encountered Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso and became friendly with artists in Nice, including Yves Klein and Arman. Responsive to post-war popular culture, the so-called School of Nice offered an upbeat alternative to the angst-driven legacy of war, Existentialism and Abstract Expressionism. Affiliated with Nouvelle Realisme, in the 1950s Raysse explored sculpture and became known for his vitrines displaying objects from the French supermarket Prisunic.

These objects open the exhibition, followed by works from the 1960s that envelop the viewer in sunny, Pop nostalgia: Raysse Plage, an installation featuring sand, beach toys, life-size pin-ups, a neon sign and a jukebox was created for the famous 1962 “Dylaby” exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Raysse is perhaps most identified with his riffs on Ingres’ odalisques, some of which form part of “Made in Japan,” a series based on postcard reproductions of Western masterpieces. Alluding to the French Impressionists’ interest in Japanese prints, they also recall Man Ray’s altered photograph, Le Violin d’Ingres (1924).

Raysse draws less on the industrialized reproduction of Andy Warhol than on Duchamp’s art of ironic appropriation and hermetic imagery. Duchamp introduced readymades in America, and Raysse’s stays in New York and California extended this trans-Atlantic dialogue. He rejected the tormented individualism of abstract painting and shared Duchamp’s ambivalence towards “wet paint.” L’appel des cimes: Tableau horrible (1965) — its neon mountain crest a Pop allusion to the Sublime — makes ironic reference to American landscape painting and to the material density of Abstract Expressionism. Raysse responded to the new intellectual currents of Structuralism and semiotics with ever more simplification and refinement. To free signs from their material context, he reduced his iconic odalisques to cut-out silhouettes and he eventually projected them, along with other symbols, on the inner surface of a desert tent.

That installation, Oued Laou (1971), inspired by a trip to Morocco, also grew from Raysse’s interest in film-making. While TV commercials inspired the satiric humor of his Jésus-Cola (1966), American independent films like Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963), with its use of appropriated footage and occult images, stimulated Raysse to more-incisive investigations of dreams and myths, of the underlying psychology of media culture. The political failure of the 1968 strikes reinforced this inward turn, inspiring a feature-length film, Le Grand Départ (1972). Chronicling a guru leading his deluded followers on a quest for a better world, it resonates with the improvisation of Godard’s Pierrot le Fou (1969) but features characters inspired by the comics of R. Crumb. Using color negatives and exaggerated contrast, Raysse simultaneously invokes and deconstructs paintings like Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830) and Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1818-19), blending a dystopian political vision with evocations of childhood innocence.

Childhood merges with psychedelic culture in his subsequent papier-mâché mushrooms, colorful hand-made sculptures and fetishistic assemblages. Raysse went on to pursue hermetic visions in painting, using automatic writing and mixed techniques on paper. Moving to bucolic surroundings in the Dordogne, he extended his references to the ancient Mediterranean, including Bacchus and Carnival, cultivating a broader vision of Pop. Developing an ideal of liberation informed by literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, who saw in Carnival a reversal of established order, celebration of the body, and visions of universal participation, Raysse took on broader social themes in large-scale painting and sculpture, and he’s created public projects that encourage civil reflection.

The public ambition of his work provides the context for his embrace of painting, which takes on a theatrical character, like the multimedia provocations of his Pop period. While the cinematic mash-ups of Delacroix and Géricault in Le Grand Départ use gestural camera movements and solarized shapes to suggest the Dionysian immersion of Abstract Expressionism, a vision of Bakhtin’s “carnivalesque body,” Raysse emerges from his psychedelic phase with irony intact, along with Duchamp’s ambivalence towards paint. There’s dystopian darkness in Carnival à Périgueux (1992), with its harsh illumination and bursts of neon-inflected color. Utilizing the frieze as an organizing device, with figures isolated against a flat backdrop, Carnival recalls David’s Neo-Classicism, but also the artifice of Berthold Brecht’s anti-illusionist theater. Favoring acrylics and the unconventional medium of distemper, associated with theatrical and commercial painting, Raysse distances himself from oils, from the full-bodied figural tradition of Balthus or Gérard Garouste. His numerous portraits, often recalling movie headshots, seem more fully painted, but the collaged face in Miss Bagdad (2003) suggests that, for him, paint is more like a decorative veneer, applied like make-up.

The retrospective culminates with a 30-foot-long panoramic painting, Ici plage, comme ici-bas (2012), another frieze, in which the transgressive and utopian impulses of the 1960s combine with contemporary social commentary. The image depicts crowds of provocative young girls mingling with men of doubtful character, with bloody rituals in the background. It inspires comparison to Breughel and Bosch, but the awkward, illustrative rendering of the figures and faces, along with the cartoon-like color, place it more in the graphic tradition of German artists like Otto Dix, or, indeed, of Constantin Guys, the Parisian illustrator who inspired Baudelaire’s famous essay. But if the technique is illustrative, it’s worthy of note that Raysse does craft these images himself, unlike other post-Duchampian painters.

Raysse’s ambivalent embrace of popular culture works best in the playful self-interrogation of his films, in which he’s more accessible and his irony less severe. In Mon petit coeur (1995), the lush radiance of Pop persists in a magic-lantern glow, even if the veneer of glamour, enriched by old age and history, renders its images as poignantly remote as the cryptic projections of Oued Laou. But by sustaining the glow of his early works they affirm an urge for transcendence, a luminous vision of pleasure and social participation that supports what Raysse soberly calls his “reasoned optimism.”

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The installation of “Mike Kelley” at LA MoCA is more comprehensive than any of its previous three presentations, at MoMA PS1, the Centre Pompidou, or the Stedelijk Museum, where former Stedelijk director (and former LA MoCA curator) Ann Goldstein first organized the show in 2012 in consultation with the Mike Kelley Foundation. The exhibition at MoCA was organized by Bennett Simpson and held in the Museum’s Geffen Contemporary, a former warehouse in Little Tokyo with 40,000 square feet of exhibition space. The Geffen’s open floor plan (with small galleries at the periphery) makes for a very different show than the most recent iteration, at New York’s PS1, which was broken up into smaller groupings due to the Museum’s diminutive galleries appropriated from former classrooms. The LA show puts particular focus on Kelley’s evocative, ritualistic and often hallucinatory video installations, which, shown simultaneously, take center stage in the Geffen’s enormous space. Here, sounds ricochet, lights flash and music drones, contributing to a feeling of sensory overload frequently attributed to the artist’s later works.

Kelley’s appropriation of kitschy stuffed animals and puppets, naughty cartoons and images from high school yearbooks have placed him in line historically with a “postmodern” rubric of production popularized by his Metro Pictures peers in the 1980s. However, rather than open-ended rejections of authenticity or originality (à la Richard Prince or Louise Lawler), Kelley’s work resonates with recurrent references to his own biography as expressed through his deep social and political investments. Be it via inquiries into the controversial subject of “memory repression” with his Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions (2000- 2006); the politics of labor with From My Institution to Yours (1987/2003); or the sanctity of art with his massive (and now iconic) More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid (1987), the artist’s work is imbued with the vulnerable politics of our discursive and manifold selves.

Day is Done (2005-2006), an epic multimedia installation composed of Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions #2-32, opens the show and serves as an important barometer for Kelley’s ongoing artistic concerns. Central to the project is the experience of viewing each narrative from different angles and perspectives, a metaphor that aids the viewer in considering the artworks that follow. Day is Done was inaugurated by Kelley’s 30-minute video Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 (A Domestic Scene), which is on view on a small monitor near the exhibition’s entrance. All of Kelley’s EAPRs were staged and scripted around images from high school plays found in yearbooks. Latching onto a new cultural investment in the study of repressed memory therapy, which rose in popularity in the 1980s and early 1990s due to a moral panic over alleged satanic abuse rituals, Kelley uses these installations to examine the multiple layers of signification in American folk rituals. Understanding the slippages between personal and collective memory, Kelley crafts a series centered on “socially acceptable” forms of performance, such as school plays, Halloween, and corporate “dress-up days.” In one scene, a cherubic middle schooler wanders out alone for a haircut and finds himself at the mercy of an obnoxious, sweaty barber who morphs into a vile, red-faced devil as standup comedian. In another, the same child is chased around a creaky attic by a ghoulish Virgin Mary, while he screams “I want to wake up!” Originally designed as a live 24-hour installation, Kelley hoped to eventually film 365 tapes, a monumental unrealized undertaking.

An entire gallery is devoted to From My Institution to Yours (1987/2003), an installation that incorporates the artist’s Loading Dock Drawings from 1984. For the work, Kelley reproduced flyers that feature naughty cartoons or institutional gripes circulated among administrators at CalArts via fax. The wall facing the drawings features a stenciled fist in representation of workers’ solidarity, while a carrot dangles from the ceiling as the clichéd symbol of futile incentive. The relationship of the fist to the goofy cartoons speaks to the potential of these administrators to organize, even if only through shared grievances and blue humor. Originally, red tape was intended to connect the installation to the administrative offices of the institution in which it was presented. At MoCA, a door which reads “employees only” has been built alongside, a testament (albeit less impactful something the artist might have come up with) to Kelley’s original ideological intent.

A number of Kelley’s installation-cum-shrines are featured prominently, composed of plush toys, felt and afghan rugs which reinforce the artist’s complicated investment in childhood, memory and spirituality. Also on view is a selection of ephemera from early collaborative performance works — tape recorders, megaphones and whoopee cushions — which feel a bit precious in their given context. Perhaps the most compelling installation in the show is made up of Kelley’s monumental Kandors series of (1999 – 2007, 2009, and 2011), which taps a quality of failure that pervades the whole exhibition — not of pessimism so much as a sense of sympathy for inadequacy, the underdog, or the misunderstood. Kandors reproduces Superman’s fictional home planet of Krypton, shrunken by his arch nemesis Brainiac, in a series of hyperbaric bell jars that sputter, smoke, and glow neon. Each is reproduced according to the graphic history of the comic at different historical moments as closely as possible. Again, the complicated relationship of Superman to his home, the nostalgia for childhood and an attempt to fill gaps in memory left blank are central components to the piece. In the wake of Kelley’s untimely death, his monumental retrospective encourages us to come to terms with the complicated experience of childhood, imparting a sense of trepidation, wonderment and hopefulness.

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Paris-Delhi-Bombay: India through the eyes of Indian and French Artists at the Centre Pompidou, 25 May – 19 September 2011

Hal Foster’s extremely influential anthology The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays in Postmodern Culture (1983) argued that art breaking down the traditional modernist distinction between verbal and visual experience provided aggressive cultural critique. No longer, he urged, could or should artists make merely seductive visual artifacts. Taking up that way of thinking, this ambitious exhibition of almost fifty Indian artists and French artists who are interested in India, deals with six grand themes: politics, urbanism and the environment, religion, the home, identity and arts and crafts. A weighty French-only catalogue (a much shortened version is available in English) presents the context for ORLAN’s Indian and French flags made from sequins, Krishnaraj Chonat’s recycled waste electronic materials, N. S. Harsha’s playful contemporary reworkings of Indian miniatures, Alain Declercq’s photographs of the militarized border between India and Pakistan and Sunil Gawde’s garlands of flowers, made from painted razor blades. There are essays on Western ideas about India; about the role of the sacred art in that country and its museums; and about Indian modernism. And one section is devoted to a variety of points of view about Indian culture, and its relationship to the West. Seeking to learn “qu’est-ce que l’Inde aujourd’hui?,” the curators seek to promote a dialogue between France and India, developing “new and lasting links between our two cultures.”

I was amused by Jitish Kallat’s Ignitaurus (2008), a hybrid motorbike-bull sculpture; by the painted photographs derived from popular Indian images by Pierre & Gilles; by Atul Dodiya’s Devi and the Sink (2004), a painting derived from a Bollywood cinematic comedy; and by Ravinder Reddy’s Tara (2004), a large scale golden sculpture of an Indian woman, mounted at the center of the display. I enjoyed Stéphane Calais’s large Indian ink drawings referring to the Thugee sect that robbed and strangled travelers; Riyas Komu’s Beyond Gods (2011), a massive wood sculpture of eleven footballers’ legs; and Pushpamala N’s photographic take-offs on nineteenth-century French painting. And I was intrigued by the erotic art of Tejal Shah, of Kader Attia and of Thukral & Tagra, who set classical Indian erotic sculptures in contemporary bourgeois bedrooms.

But to be honest, everything here seemed obviously and hopelessly derivative, too much so to inspire sustained interest. I sometimes ask myself: what would I take home from the exhibition? From this show, nothing. Subodh Gupta’s Ali Baba (2011), a dense overflowing display of stainless steel tableware, is a version of Allan McCollum’s 1980s exercises in repetition; the photographs of urban waste by Vivan Sundaram and Atul Bhalla’s documentation of water distribution in New Delhi a variation on familiar political themes; and the sculptures of Anita Dube which link blood and sexual identity, tropes on clichéd Chelsea displays. Joseph Masheck’s Point 1: Art Visuals/Visual Arts. Smart Art (1984), a lively, now too little known survey of Lower East Side art, which deserves the attention of art historians, summarizes in more visual detail than Foster’s The Anti-Aesthetic the state of trendy American art of that period. These Indians and their French colleagues have uncritically adopted this now dated Western style. This is stale art that has not withstood the test of time.

Sometimes you learn a lot about an exhibition by going to other nearby museums. A short walk East from the Pompidou Center takes you to the Louvre. The aesthetic paintings of Nicolas Poussin, Antoine Watteau and Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin provide a varied, but surely not comprehensive image of old regime France. Why believe, then, that these contemporary works of art at the Pompidou which all are so self-consciously indebted to Western precedents can provide the best way of understanding present day India?  Can the multifaceted cultures of Delhi and Bombay be adequately presented by this exhibition? I think not. But here we get to the inescapable political problems.  The well intentioned, politically correct Pompidou curators seek to represent India on its own terms.  They want to tell us how the Indians (and sympathetic French visitors) think about economic inequality, politics, and sex. And they seek to identify the distance between art in that distant culture and in the West. But how is it possible to do that when in this exhibition all of the art borrows so transparently from contemporary Western visual culture?  How, I am critically asking, can the Indians represent themselves? Can the Western museum show the Indian women and men as they really are, without reductively reducing employing Eurocentric ways of thinking? This ambitious exhibition posed but did not answer that question, which I hope that other curators in other cultures inside and outside of the West will take up. But here we get to the inescapable political problems.  The well intentioned, politically correct Pompidou curators seek to represent India on its own terms.  They want to tell us how the Indians (and sympathetic French visitors) think about economic inequality, politics, and sex. And they seek to identify the distance between art in that distant culture and in the West. But how is it possible to do that when in this exhibition all of the art borrows so transparently from contemporary Western visual culture?  How, I am critically asking, can the Indians represent themselves? Can the Western museum show Indian women and men as they really are, without reductively employing Eurocentric ways of thinking? This ambitious exhibition posed but did not answer that question, which I hope that other curators in other cultures inside and outside of the West will take up.

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elles@centrepompidou: Women Artists in the Collection of the Musée National d’Art Moderne

May 27, 2010 to February 21, 2011
Place Georges Pompidou
75004 Paris, +33 (0)1 44 78 12 33

France has a long history of women artists and of organizations supporting their work.  Partly as a result of that tradition, the National Museum of Modern Art owns works by more than 800 mostly European women artists.  Approximately twenty-five percent of these are represented in elles@centrepompidou, an exhibition that runs through February of next year with occasional substitutions of additional works.  Occupying the extensive fourth floor of the Pompidou Center, elles is divided into nine categories: “Pioneering Women,” “Fire at Will,” “The Body Slogan,” “Eccentric Abstraction,” “A Room of One’s Own,” “Words at Work,” “Immaterials,” “elles@design,” and “Architecture and Feminism?”  This thematic approach enabled curator Camille Moreau to organize some 500 works in provocative groupings.  Her purpose was “to present the public with a hanging that appears to offer a good history of twentieth-century art.  The goal is to show that representation of women versus men is, ultimately, no longer important.”  But she goes on to say, “Proving it is another matter.”

“Pioneering Women” encompasses the late 19th to the mid-20th century period.  Often described as pre-feminist, these women nevertheless engaged the male-dominated art world with wit and determination.  Lack of representation of these artists in galleries and museum collections was one of the issues prompting demonstrations and other actions by feminists during the 1960s and 1970s.  Because of their longevity, several pioneering women were still working during those decades, notably Louise Bourgeois, Sonia Delaunay, Joan Mitchell, Maria-Elena Vieira da Silva, and Dorothea Tanning.  In general, however, they did not identity themselves as feminists or participate in exhibitions open only to women artists.

Confrontational and deconstructionist approaches produced the dynamic pieces in “Fire at Will,” which includes print and video documentation of performance art by Valerie Export (exposed crotch and machine gun), Sigalit Landau (barded-wire hula hoop), and Charlotte Moorman (cello and camouflage uniform), along with Wendy Jacob’s eerie installation of inflated, animated blankets.  In materials as well as subject matter, artists in this section attacked assumptions pertaining to art production. The violence of war, viewed as a male domain, prompted this theme. From Zineb Sedira’s nostalgic photograph of an Algerian ruin to Annette Messager’s skewered protest, these artists dealt with war-scarred landscapes and psyches.  The female body as both canvas and subject in “The Body Slogan” addresses concepts of gender and identity, creating the most unified section of the exhibition. Jana Sterbak’s flesh dress of thinly sliced raw beef (completely dried by the time I saw it in June of 2010) resonates with the bloody visions of a nude Ana Mendieta holding a flapping, decapitated chicken.  Marina Abramovic, Sonia Khurana, and Carolee Schneemann dance to their different drummers, while Tania Brugera, Louise Bourgeois, and Cindy Sherman consider the self-portrait as an exploratory genre.

“Eccentric Abstraction,” with its unmistakable reference to the 1966 New York gallery exhibition curated by Lucy Lippard using the same title, functions as the lynchpin of elles.  If we consider that the final two sections of the show focus more on design than art per se, then “Eccentric Abstraction” can be seen as positioned near the center of the exhibition.  Our opinion of everything that we see before these pieces and after them becomes enhanced or reduced by the “craft” materials and offbeat treatment of shape and space in this section.  Besides the classically deviant sculpture of Lee Bontecou and Eva Hesse, works here emphasize the power of repetition, both inside and outside the grid.  The rhythm of marking, stacking, and stitching is claimed and perpetuated as essentially female within the context of this exhibition.

In “Immaterials,” eccentric abstraction morphs into post-minimalist dialectics, with light and white as recurring motifs. “A Room of One’s Own” strays from the rigorous curatorial focus in the rest of the show, with several works seemingly shoehorned into this category.  While Louise Nevelson’s sculptural installation, for example, may look like a wall unit for storage and display, its title Reflections of a Waterfall I suggests that the artist’s thoughts were elsewhere.  Although Mona Hatoum’s circular structure resembles a tiny room, the video seen on the floor invades and exposes the universal physicality of the human body.  The most ironic “room” is experienced in the 1975 video of Martha Rosler’s kitchen. “Words at Work,” while conflating text and visual narrative, nevertheless emphasizes the crucial component of language and storytelling within feminist art.  From the literal messages of Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger to Eleanor Antin’s liberated black boots, we are reminded not only that women have stories to tell, but also that women tell them best.

On seeing an exhibition of this magnitude focusing exclusively on women’s art, it is very hard to imagine how its curator could suggest that the “representation of women versus men is, ultimately, no longer important.”  Moreau’s show underscores the fact that museums have only just begun to demonstrate the advances in post-1960 women’s art, let alone to explore work  by early women modernists that explores their differences from male pioneers.

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