"Now" (1973) by Lynda Benglis
Multiplex: Directions in Art, 1970 to Now
MoMA
Nov. 21, 2007 – July 28, 2008
The MoMA in particular has been criticized for overlooking and excluding art made by women. Memorably, Jerry Saltz has tackled the issue, most recently last November, finding female representation at the museum well under 10 percent (he counted 15 percent at the Whitney, and 1 percent at the Frick).
MoMA's new contemporary show seems to attempt a corrective. I count 38 men and 29 women (43 percent!), and the show's curated by a woman, Deborah Wye, the museum's chief curator of prints and books. There also seems to be more wall text dedicated to women.
And a talented group of women it is, with marquee names like Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holtzer, Lisa Yuskavage, Elizabeth Murray, Louise Bourgeois and Kiki Smith.
Exhibited in the museum's second-floor contemporary art galleries, the show, culled from MoMA's collection, stakes a claim to define contemporary art, stating that it began in 1970. Why 1970? What happened that killed capital-M Modern art?
This show hints at the answer by presenting several different currents in contemporary art. Awkwardly titled Multiplex (don't think Loews, think different wavelengths on one frequency), it's loosely divided into three sections: Abstractions, Mutability and Provocation. Overall, it's about plurality and multiplicity.
Unlike, modernism, which was, ahem, more rigid.
Which leads us to a tongue-in-cheek floor sculpture by Lynda Benglis called "Modern Art Number 1" depicting two blobs -- one aluminum and one bronze. We're to assume it's two modern sculptures (by men) melted down.
So, maybe it's the women. After all, 1970 was prime time for feminism. Benglis herself was a pioneer, challenging gender norms in her work, which includes video performances. She may be best remembered for by posing nude with a dildo in mid-70s Art Forum.
In fact, it's possible to see a good deal of feminist art at this show. From the 70s, there's explicitly political work by Benglis, Ree Morton and Nancy Spero, the latter whose "Notes in Time" -- a large paper work depicting women's struggles throughout history -- is given its own room. (Incidentally, you can see Spero's work in mural form at the Lincoln Center subway stop.) From the 1980s, there's Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger. More recently, and less explicitly feminist is Lisa Yuskavage, whose painting "Wrist Corsage" depicts an nude woman with a massive derrière, done in a soft-focus children's storybook style. Work by noteworthy newcomers Sarah Lucas and Rachael Harrison also deals with gender issues.
Maybe my favorite work by a woman artist in the show is by Louise Bourgeois. (Ms. Wye is an authority on her work.) "Articulated Lair" (2006) is a circular room created using folding panels. Inside is a space marked by ambiguous, slightly ominous and slightly phallic rubber shapes hanging from the wall like evil surrealist sausages. Strongly informed by Freudian psychoanalysis, Bourgeois creates in this installation an interplay between feelings of safety and refuge and violence and repression.
In an interesting small show upstairs, the MoMA more explicitly casts a critical eye on itself. 75 Years of Architecture at MoMA addresses the history of the museum's take on architecture, noting that Philip Johnson and Henry Russell Hitchcock's monumental MoMA exhibit and book, which defined the steel and glass International Style in 1932, actually excluded many other modernisms.
One of these other modernisms is the so-called organicism of Buckminster Fuller and Frank Lloyd Wright.
The show goes on to tell how, in the 60s and 70s, Johnson and Hitchcock's successor, Arthur Drexler, moved away from the sterile International Style, putting on shows about urbanism and the Beaux-Arts movement.
The exhibit has a nice collection of architectural drawings and models, including a wall dedicated to drawings by acid-drenched 60s "visionary architects" like Peter Cook and Haus Hollein.
But as far as I could tell, not a single female architect! No Denise Scott Brown, Susana Torre or Zaha Hadid.
One last thing, I stupidly missed the Martin Puryear show, but his large-scale sculptural works in the big second-floor space are stunning. There's a giant wagon wheel and a latter to the sky called "Ladder for Booker T. Washington."
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