Guerrilla Girls: Art in Action at Pomona College Museum of Art
January 20 to May 17, 2015
333 N College Way
Claremont, CA, 909 621 8283

Alien She at the Orange County Museum of Art
February 15 to May 24, 2015
850 San Clemente Dr
Newport Beach, CA, 949 759 1122
traveling to the Pacific Northwest College of Art and Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland

SOGTFO at François Ghebaly
February 28 to April 4, 2015
2245 E Washington Blvd
Los Angeles, CA, 323 282 5187

What is the value of a woman’s work?

I find myself contemplating this question after spending a total of four unpaid hours learning to edit Wikipedia in the service of helping resolve its gender imbalance.

Only 13% of Wikipedia editors are women, according to a 2011 census, a statistic that prompted the Art+Feminism group to spearhead and sponsor worldwide “edit-a-thons” to encourage the creation and expansion of Wikipedia content related to women and feminism in the arts. I took part in a local chapter at Whittier College where I and a handful of students and faculty members learned best practices, notability guidelines, and how to create, edit, and cite on the world’s most-used reference website.

In four hours I managed to add one little paragraph of text to Hannah Höch’s Wikipedia page. Accounting for the learning curve and the chatter in the room, this isn’t really as inefficient as it sounds, but it did prompt me to question the value of my time and work — as a woman, and as a writer.

Not that I would have been doing anything different. Were it not for the edit-a-thon I would have devoted that time to writing this article for artcritical, an article that I’d promised my editor would survey a number of exhibitions featuring women artists in the greater Los Angeles area. There’s an exhibition of Guerrilla Girls ephemera at the Pomona College Museum of Art, a survey of the influence of the Riot Grrl movement on visual arts at the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) in Newport Beach, as well as a recent exhibition of female sculptors at François Ghebaly Gallery in Downtown L.A. What unites these exhibitions is not only the gender of their participants, but the insistence on gender as a uniting principle.

A month ago, in Pomona, two black-clad, gorilla-masked activists greeted an auditorium with armfuls of bananas, tossing them out to the crowd before mounting the stage and presenting a lecture/performance/artist talk on the Guerrilla Girls’ objectives and activities. One of them, using the pseudonym Käthe Kollwitz, a founding member, has devoted a career to anonymously fighting for equal representation of art by women and people of color. The anonymity here serves to “keep the focus on the issues” rather than on the personalities of those who bring the issues to the table. But, I wonder, who is it behind the mask, who has toiled for 30 years with no credit, no personal recognition for such incremental concessions to the overall state of the arts? What is the value of this work, this lifetime of work? Certainly there are speaker’s fees, which are how the Guerrilla Girls fund their activism, but meager remuneration isn’t what gives value to this work, it is simply what enables it. The value of her work, rather, could be seen in the faces of the hundreds of young women in the audience — young artists and curators, ready to embark on their careers in an environment that is steadily getting better, more inclusive, but not perfect yet. The value is in the transmission of the message, in the hopes that more people will help carry the torch, keep the tallies, and expose disparity.

The message can be transmitted in other ways, in the case of Riot Grrl through music and mail order. The walls are lined with zines at the beginning of the fascinating and engrossing “Alien She” exhibition at OCMA: cheaply photocopied-and-stapled rants, poems, and comics, on topics from punk rock, to coming out, to resisting rape. Like pre-Internet proto-Tumblrs, zines were distributed through independent channels just like underground music, via independent record labels, in small bookstores, record stores, by direct mail, and at punk shows. Miranda July’s Big Miss Moviola project (1995-2003, later known as Joanie 4 Jackie) connected female filmmakers through a “video chainletter” distributing each work, each artist to one another. Born out of the frustration July experienced trying to get her work into male-dominated film festivals, Moviola cost only $5 to participate, was advertised in teen magazines like Sassy and Seventeen, and completely circumvented all the usual channels of distribution, production, and display, sidestepping “mainstream” audiences, and building instead a small community comprised only of likeminded female filmmakers. The value of this work is in the network, and in the recognition that you can create it yourself. Who cares what the boys think?

The exhibition “SOGTFO” (“Sculpture Or Get The Fuck Out”) at François Ghebaly, a grouping of five early- to mid-career female sculptors — Amanda Ross-Ho, Andrea Zittel, Kelly Akashi, Kathleen Ryan, and Nevine Mahmoud — paradoxically makes a bid to “undo the gendered vernacular” while using gender as a lens through which to observe sculpture and culture in practice. (The title is a play on the phrase, commonly found on male-dominated web forums, “TOGTFO”: [show photos of your] Tits Or Get The Fuck Out [of the discussion].) The young artists Akashi, Ryan, and Mahmoud are absolute revelations in this show: their forms, both light and heavy at the same time, slump, drip, curl, perch, and sway in the space. The show opens ideas and concerns beyond gender. Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer’s essay in the accompanying single-sheet catalogue, “Sculpture…,” perfectly encapsulates the condition of constant questioning that comes with the desire to see beyond gender while recognizing the effects of the gender gap: “Being sick of crude binaries, false oppositions, extrinsic responsibilities and coerced competition,” she writes, “She wants a break from options phrased as this ‘or’ that.” Most pointedly she writes, “…or bypass phallogocentrism altogether! I’m so over it. SCUM says, ‘What will liberate women, therefore, from male control is the total elimination of the money-work system, not the attainment of economic equality with men within it.’” Amen.

The sculptures, on their part, seem unbounded by such questions, despite the sad fact that, in all likelihood, given the art market’s enduring skew, these works will ultimately hold less value at auction than works by male sculptors (not to mention less attention in the press, in galleries, in museums, and in all the other parts of the arts apparatus). What is their value then? What is value, in monetary terms at least, if it’s so arbitrarily granted to some works and not to others? Certainly it’s not inherent in the work itself, so how do you measure it, and, more importantly, who gets to do so?

Like women’s work and artists’ work, art writing involves the transmission of a message, is likely to be viewed only by a small network of devotees, and is of questionable value. Composing tweets for a corporation or public figure pays better than writing art reviews, but writing for bigger audiences often pays nothing at all.

In the end, I suppose I should find a way to tell you that no matter the value, it’s somehow all worth it. I’m not sure exactly why or how, but I can confirm that by adding one paragraph to Wikipedia about Hannah Höch’s relationship with the insidiously abusive Raoul Hausmann, I was offered some slight feeling of catharsis (and a rather startling and grand experience writing for the mass audience of Wikipedia). Perhaps it’s a similar feeling to what Höch must have felt when she published, in 1920, shortly before leaving Hausmann, a biting short story parodying her lover and his hypocritical stance on “women’s emancipation.” Publishing it probably didn’t pay all that much, but no doubt she received tenfold dividends in satisfaction alone.

The post Women’s Work: Considering Feminist Art Through Three Recent Shows appeared first on artcritical.

Joining Moderator David Cohen to review shows of Diana Al-Hadid at Marianne Boesky Gallery, Mernet Larsen at Vogt Gallery, Gerhard Richter at Marian Goodman Galley and Andrea Zittel at Andrea Rosen Gallery

The post September 2012: Ariella Budick, Roberta Smith and Marjorie Welish with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.

I guess it is time to eat some words.  In a welcome extended to Frieze Art Fair New York that was measured to the point of being somewhat surly, in which as it happens a culinary comparison figured, our editorial promised that “artcritical will do its duty and report on what it finds.”  Well, what was found is, simply put, the best art fair this writer has visited in America.

At least, that is, in terms of creature comforts.  The general level of art on show was respectable, in relation to other fairs, but not significantly or demonstrably higher than such rivals as the Armory Show or Art Basel Miami. And, by and large, this was not a fair of seriously high-end, blue-chip offerings.  Instead there was a focus on younger artists, with an emphasis on collectible objects – with a predominance of painting and domestically scaled sculpture and not much by way of installation or video.  Frieze seems to attract a classier, savvier average exhibitor perhaps on account of the very fact that it settled on a leaner roster of participants than its humungous, sprawling rivals; under one roof, it was in more than one sense contained.

And beautifully managed. The snaking tent is a triumph of design, affording a blessing rare enough alas in museums and almost unheard-of in North American fairs: natural, diffuse, overhead light.  (This was perhaps a tad over-augmented the Sunday of my last visit with harsh artificial light to compensate for an overcast start to the day.)  The curved layout  avoids the oppressions of the grid so that as the viewer moves through the space there is a sense of progress, of arriving at a new bend in the curve.  Spaces are neat but individualized and sight lines nicely varied.  According to David Nolan of David Nolan Gallery, the organizers managed to “get rid of the politics” that is the art fair norm.  The management told him “not one gallery complained about placement.”  There is ample space between sections, booths are big, the floor is strictly a uniform, gray wood paneling – rather than the oppressive concrete, cheap carpeting and pretentious cacophony of individual booth flooring solutions that mar the fair going experience at convention centers and armories.

And because they had struck out with their own temporary structure at Randall’s Island, Frieze didn’t have to work with the catering contracts and intransigent unions of these venues.  This meant invitations to top-notch eateries like The Fat Radish and the late Leo Castelli’s watering hole, Saint Ambrœus, and it meant relaxed, friendly staff.  The perceived remoteness of the location and the steep entrance fee of $40 meant an absence of crowds.  Exhibitors I spoke to do not regret the selected volume of attendees as it meant a more committed (read “likely to spend”) kind of viewer had a better time of it.  According to Frieze exhibitor Alexander Gray, of Alexander Gray Associates, who has never exhibited at the rival Armory Show but has had challenging experiences shepherding collectors around the piers, “Art is an aspirational market; if the surroundings fail to inspire and engage, then some people are not going to bother.”

Other dealers I spoke with were candid about sales.  A mid-level class of collector was identified who might have “blown their wad” for the year at the March fairs.  Sales were “decent but not great” according to another trusted source.  As word gets out of the superior visitor experience (for collectors and professionals if not the average enthusiast) that might change in 2013.  But there is no question, whoever comes out top in sales figures, that the British invaders have raised the bar in the fair going experience.

Frieze continues Monday, May 7 through 6pm, with reduced tickets from 1pm (last entry at 5pm)

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