September 4 to November 3, 2018
11th Avenue and 59th Street
New York City, shivagallery.org

The #MeToo movement has focused urgent national and global recognition on the problem of sexual abuse, rape and violence against women. Attention is also being paid in the art world. A significant exhibition, curated by Monika Fabijanska, took place this fall at the Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. THE UN-HEROIC ACT: Representations of Rape in Contemporary Women’s Art in the U.S., presenting the work of twenty female artists, closed November 3. [See artcritical’s interview with Fabijanska by Karen E. Jones.]

The exhibition’s title references and inverts a chapter heading, ‘The Myth of the Heroic Rapist,’ in Susan Brownmiller’s landmark 1975 study, “Against Our Will: Men, Women And Rape.”While Brownmiller explores a “direct connection between manhood, achievement, conquest and rape,” citing Genghis Khan’s notion of “women as warrior’s booty, taken like their proud horses.” Fabijanska sets out to demonstrate the “un-heroic” reality of rape by focusing “on the lasting psychological devastation of the victim.” Located on the ground floor of John Jay College, the gallery affords floor-to-ceiling windows onto Eleventh Avenue creating a dramatic effect even from the street, with the exhibition’s title boldly stenciled on the wall.  The first two works you encounter portray rape in a classical mode, though cunningly subverted.

Susanna and the Elders, Restored with x-ray, 1998, by Kathleen Gilje, originally part of a diptych, riffs on the famous 1610 painting by Artemisia Gentileschi, presenting in pentimento Gentileschi herself as Susanna. With stroboscopic effect, a violent motion transforms themute and defenseless Susanna into a screaming Susanna struggling furiously against physical violation. Carolee Thea’s installation, Sabine Woman, 1991, adjacent to Gilje’s piece, is a recreation of the 1998 Central Park Jogger rape incident. Depicting five men gang raping a woman (as the crime was understood to have taken place at that time), the figures, crafted from chicken wire, are hauntingly spot lit by overhead lights that cast an eerie reflective sheen over the grisly scene. The installation has a looped, tape recording of the artist reading “fragments of news reports” of rape incidents, seeming to emanate from behind curtains as she speaks in a low, slightly inaudible tone, forcing the viewer into quiet witness in order to grasp what is being said. Gilje and Thea provided substantive historical context as an exercise in power, laying the groundwork for the rest of the exhibition.

Fabijanska groups the assembled sculptures, photographs, fabric installations, text-based wall panels, films, paintings and drawings into subject categories. But key works like Guerilla Girls’ Broadband poster and Ana Mendieta’s five “performance documentation” photographs constituting Rape Scene, though categorized under “College Rape Culture,” are situated, oddly, at opposite ends of the gallery. This sort of inconsistent placement happens frequently enough throughout the show to confuse and distract anyone seeking to explore how the exhibited works thematically interact.

Guarded Secrets, 2015, a sculpture by Sonya Kelliher-Combs, based on “Iñupiaq walrus tusk trim designs,” consists of semi-translucent phalluses of varying lengths made from sheep’s rawhide and punctured by porcupine quills. Posed in a random manner, some closed at both ends, others opened at one end, and with quills protruding on all sides of each piece, they are ready to pierce the skin of any wandering hand. Peering into the open end of one of the penis sculptures I spied an interior maze, consistent with the idea of a hidden, inaccessible and thus unknowable secret, even as the forms clearly portrayed penile rape as a crude, quite unmysterious and grisly form of torture.

In a small walled-off screening room the film, First Person Plural, by Lynn Hershman Leeson, deals with “things she was told not to speak about as a child” that one eavesdrops through headphones, The film montages images of the Holocaust, physically abused children, and other signifiers of atrocity and helplessness

A second film, “RAPE”, by Yoko Ono, seems not to be about rape per se but rather how physical harassment and constant attention can illicit and heighten a person’s sense of fear and paranoia. Categorized under Gender and Abuse of Power the film shows a woman flattered by the attentions of a camera-wielding man, but as the lens follows her to the point where she falls down from intimidation and the invasive threat of physical violence that such constant attention can suggest, the theme of intrusive attention morphs into a metaphor for rape.

A third film, And Nothing Happened, by Naima Ramos Chapman forms, to my mind, a triptych with the work of two other artists, Suzanne Lacy and Ana Mendieta, hung close by. Lacy’s monumental wall piece, Three Weeks in May, is a map charted from Los Angeles Police Department reports in which crime scenes are stamped with the word, “RAPE.” One is struck by the irony of this piece appearing on one side of a wall on the other side of which Chapman’s film on the aftermath of a rape is projected.

Sixteen minutes long, Chapman plays a restless young woman unable to regain any sense of who she once was after being raped. We see her lying in bed in her parent’s home, unable to sleep, or masturbating to porn on her i-phone. Whether showering, taking medication, eating a meal with her mother or dressing to go out, she is barely able to function. We hear her talk to herself as she walks about the apartment, and like the voice of rape consciousness in Thea’s installation, she cannot exorcise the demon of her trauma, or advance forward into life. I found this film to be a powerful Illustration of the damage that rape inflicts upon a woman’s psyche.

Exiting the screening room, I went to look at Ana Mendieta Rape Scene. Created when a student at the University of Iowa, , Mendieta’s “performance documentation” was made in response to the brutal, highly publicized rape and killing of a nursing student, Sara Ann Otten, by another student in March 1973. Mendieta replicated the rape with herself posed as the victim, and her much repeated comment about this work, “I can’t see being theoretical about an issue like that,” has the power of a mantra. While curator considers Mendieta’s Rape Scene to be a pinnacle of rape imagining and the undoing of “classical art depictions of rape,” by comparing Gilje and Thea’s works with Mendieta’s images in her press release commentary she unwittingly defuses the power of some of her own choices for this show. There is absolutely nothing “theoretical” about Mendieta’s work, which stands alone and apart in its power, and seeking to connect them to other works only underscores the others’ academically reductive perspectives—none of which possess the authenticity of Mendieta’s.

Mendieta’s work is also curatorially paired with Jenny Holzer’s series of color images, Untitled (Selections from Lustmord). But Holzer’s work requires extensive textual exegis to be understood in a way that weakens its immediacy and power in comparison with Mendiata. Fourteen images of tattooed sayings on bare skin are so cryptic as to verge on meaninglessness. I could not fathom, say, how a slogan such as “I try to excite myself so I stay crazy,” inscribed on skin, is illustrative of the show’s “un-heroic” theme. And while Holzer’s images are categorized under Rape in Wartime, ” Lustmord” (lust-killing) is a specific form of sex crime – almost always between lovers – from a very particular historical period, the Weimar Republic.

Holzer’s use of the term to characterize the mass rape and genocidal slaughter of Muslim woman during the Bosnian war in the 1990s feels not only inaccurate but wrong. The murder of Muslims by Serbs and Croatians were not private lover murders but acts of ethnic cleansing. Simply put, the linkage makes no sense.

Kara Walker, whose career is built on depictions of rape in the context of themes of slavery and race, has the the last wordt in this exhibition with a drawing hung at the end of the gallery. A large graphic depiction of the rape of a twelve-year old girl, it explicitly presents and personalizes in the face and posture of its victim the atrocity of rape as few or none of the other works in this exhibition succeed in doing. Not even her accompanying, hand-written account has the force of this picture. Yet, in the context of the exhibition as a whole, this drawing is a visual anomaly because it both represents Brownmiller’s use of the phrase “heroic rape” as a soldier’s prize, while successfully illustrating “the un-heroic act” in the face of its victim and the sense of dread and shame that hangs over the entire drawing. Both act and aftermath coexist in this drawing. If anything, it seems to linger in some kind of limbo between the historical crime and stag magazine pornography, adding another layer of meaning to an already complex work.

While looking at and studying these works on and about rape, I was impressed by how Fabijianska’s curation showed the complexities that arise when art and atrocity meet against the urgent backdrop of current events. Broadly conceived and explanatory in its narrative design, this was a powerful show that rewarded repeat visits.

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February 5 to March 26, 2016
528 West 26th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 315 0470

Ana Mendieta’s exhibition of experimental films at Galerie Lelong brings 15 works created by Mendieta from circa 1971 to 1975: nine of them had never been exhibited before, just recently uncovered during a cataloguing process. Besides being new to the audience, these experimental films have been transferred from their originals to digital media, which has added a fresh look to them. As we step into the gallery, our eyes are immediately captivated by an image of Mendieta’s face at the back of the main room. In Sweating Blood (1973), Mendieta’s serene semblance appears to be floating in the surrounding darkness. Her hair vanishes amid both the film’s pitch-black background and the walls. While Sweating Blood and Dripwall (1973) face spectators who enter the gallery, six other films have been distributed around the room on the left and right walls. In an adjacent gallery, we can see five more films, two series of photographs, and ephemera from Mendieta’s Estate, such as film reels, cassette tapes, and a notebook with a sketch for Sweating Blood.

Mendieta produced most of the films in the show during her pre-New York life, when she still lived in Iowa, where she had been exiled from Cuba since the age of 12. When she arrived with her sister, they lived at an orphanage. As a Latina, and outsider, she was ostracized and suffered prejudice. Later on, from 1969 to 1977, Mendieta completed two MFAs at the University of Iowa, the first in painting and the second in multimedia and video. She would move to New York only in 1978. Even though Mendieta participated in many progressive movements of her time, and she was definitely at the forefront of experimentation with the body and performance, it is hard not to feel traces of nostalgia in her work — something that she missed, perhaps due to her arduous life in Midwest, or perhaps as an omen of her tragic passing, her troubled marriage with artist Carl Andre. In the show, death is suggested, repelled and enacted: it begins with her speaking skull in X-Ray (ca. 1975), follows with Sweating Blood and Dripwall, and ends with Moffitt Building Piece (1973).

Sweating Blood, one of the most famous films in the show, is hard to ignore. The work lasts only three minutes, but it feels as if it’s way longer than that. Mendieta’s face, young and beautiful, with her closed eyes, is depicted as a self-portrait: we see her entire face, from the neck up. She does not move onscreen, but we can see when she swallows, or rolls her eyes underneath her eyelids, without opening them. At some point, her skin begins to change: the pores on the top of her forehead, where hair begins to grow, are emphasized, as if she just started to present pox, a rash. A red fluid appears on the top of her mid hairline and soon a drip of “blood” falls from her hair, just to find her left eyebrow. A second drop follows, running towards her left ear. The upper part of her forehead seems to be sweating blood.

In Dripwall (1973), three round holes appear on a white wall, coming from inside, one at a time. Red liquid leaks from them, dripping across the white plane. They reminded me of bullet holes. Moffitt Building Piece shows another of Mendieta’s experiments with blood. It was created in response to the murder of Sarah Ann Ottens, who was beaten, sexually assaulted, and killed in her dorm at the University of Iowa on March 13, 1973. In April of that year, Mendieta staged a violent rape scene in a performance at her apartment, later named Rape Scene, and then started her Moffitt Building Piece, which also responds to Ottens’s murder. Moffitt Building Piece begins with a view of the eponymous storefront in Iowa City. Mendieta is clandestine, filming from inside a car towards the façade of the building. A puddle of blood is seen on the sidewalk, in front of Moffitt’s door. After the camera gives a close-up on the puddle, we notice it’s lumpy, meat-like: Mendieta spilled an animal’s blood and meat on that sidewalk and then filmed the reactions of passersby, who look on the tableau with varying degrees of shock, concern, or disinterest.

While blood in Mendieta’s work has been labeled as “abject,” at Lelong, blood is empowering. Even though she created Moffitt Building Piece in reaction to the pervasive sexual violence against women, blood was not always a negative element for her. Instead, she used it as force, concomitant with her interest in Catholicism and the Afro-Caribbean religion Santería. In Sweating Blood, in Moffitt Building Piece and in Dripwall, blood evokes both presence and absence of a body: the power of blood to induce a trancelike state points to what happens beyond the body, a wall earns its “life” through bleeding like a body, and a woman’s death is exposed through the reminiscence of her corpse. These gestures are far from being abject; blood sanctions Mendieta’s body and creates bounds with our bodies, as spectators.

Magic is everywhere, as if these works were fragments of fairytales, or cautionary tales from a childhood in Latin America. In Dog (1974), filmed during a summer program in Mexico, Mendieta’s small silhouette is seen, moving far afield on an unpaved street in San Felipe, Oaxaca. As the camera focuses on her, we see she is on all fours, wearing a fur skin over her face and possibly naked body. She crawls. A man walks up the street, and ignores “the dog.” A woman and a boy pass next to her, no interaction. She still crawls, vulnerable, as if half-alive, recoiling, hesitant, woman, animal, and outsider.

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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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