Feminst Art
Regarding the Paleolithic nature of Bush Era America and how it might have come about, Maureen Dowd once wrote, “The Womens’ Movement only lasted a moment, but the backlash has lasted three decades.” Dowd was not writing about art, but her point about feminism is a valid one. Feminism has, outside progressive circles, gotten a bad rap since its heyday in the 1970s, and the social baggage associated with the language of feminism could lead some poor, ignorant soul to diminish the contribution of the feminist artists of the 1970s.
I’m no gender warrior, so lets cast issues of gender, sexuality, equality and rights completely to the side, and still the feminist contribution to contemporary art is practically unparalleled. Reviewer Holland Cotter has zeroed in on the true legacy of the Feminist Art Movement in today’s New York Times. In a review of “Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution,” a retrospective of the art of this period at MoCA in Los Angeles, Cotter says
Without it identity-based art, crafts-derived art, performance art and much political art would not exist in the form it does, if it existed at all. Much of what we call postmodern art has feminist art at its source.
This relates very directly to a post on the Magnum blog that got me all fired up yesterday, which was National Women’s Day. The post posed this question, which strikes me as being completely without substance or value:
What has been the greatest female contribution to photography?
Photographers spent the first part of this century trying to prove their mettle as artists. In the 70s, the women’s movement came along and redefined art so thoroughly that nobody can ever think about issues of representation, form and content the same way again. So far there is only one comment on that Magnum post, and it’s from me.