The Women, Part 2: The Female Gaze: Women Look at Women at Cheim & Read

The Women: Part 1: "Daughters . . ." at Pavel Zoubok

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If I exhaled at Daughters of the Revolution, I was positively breathless at The Female Gaze, so welcome was it to see so much work by women in just two shows in Chelsea at the same time.
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The curatorial conceit at Cheim & Read is to counter the notion of the male gaze by providing a group of works in which "the artist and subject do not relate as 'voyeur' and 'object' but as woman and woman.' " In this beautifully curated show, which spans over a century, 40 female artists--many from their own roster--turn the conventional male gaze inside out. Here there's pleasure in equality versus the longstanding idea of power over passivity.

What you see when you enter, above: a small cut-paper work by Kara Walker, Untitled, 1995 (foreground, under the exhibition title); and Deborah Kass, Double Red Barbara (The Jewish Jackie Series), 1993. The two photographic portraits below are also in this room

Starting chronologically with the sad and shadowed visage of May Prinsep and the confrontational stare of a very butch Mme. Theodore Van Rysselberghe, the exhibition delivers a range of expression and emotion. The bodies are strong and beautiful, or fleshy and imperfect. The sex comes in several different flavors and positions. There's mystery, eroticism, humor, pain. In short, life. The installation delivers these from every angle.

Left: Berenice Abbott, Mme. Theodore Van Rysselberghe, 1926-30, vintage gelatin silver print, 10 x 8 inches; right: Julia Margaret Cameron, May Prinsep (Head of Saint John), 1866, albumen print, 13 x 10 1/2 inches. Both images from the gallery website

Back in the foyer: another view of Kara Walker's silhouette and, over the desk, Mickalene Thomas, A-E-I-O-U and Sometimes Y, 2009, rhinestone, acrylic and enamel on panel, 24 x 20 inches (each); full view below. Both images from the gallery website

The three images below are what you see when you enter the main gallery. The vitrine with a Louise Bourgeois sculpture will orient you as we turn counterclockwise around the room. You can see these and all the works on the gallery's checklist. (These three images are mine; the gallery has many more.)

Sex, sex and sex: Louise Bourgeois, Couple, 2004, fabric and stainless steel, 11 x 28 x 14 1/2 inche, in the vitrine; behind that, Joan Semmel, Flip-Flop, 1971, oil on canvas, 68 x 138 inches .To the right: Lisa Yuskavage (hate it)

Below: Bourgeois's Couple

Above: Bourgeois, Shirin Neshat, Sarah Lucas, Jenny Holzer, Maria Lassnig

Below: Kathe Burkhart, Bourgeois, Marilyn Minter, Katy Grannan, Lucas

In the smaller back gallery, from left: Hannah van Bart, Vanessa Beecroft, Lynda Benglis, Tracey Emin. Image from the gallery website

Below: Capture from Lynda Benglis, Female Sensibility, 1973, video tape loop

With the video to your back, here's another view of the same back gallery: Victoria Civera, Judith Eisler, Beecroft, Ghada Amer. Image from the gallery website

Below: Vanessa Beecroft, Blonde Figure Lying, 2008, water resin coated with beeswax, human hair, 77 x 36 x 10 inches [when I saw this work in Miami it was not as yellow as it appears here; maybe it's an edition and this is a different work?]

Ghada Amer, The Woman Who Failed To Be Shehrazade, 2008, acrylic, embroidery and gel medium on canvas, 62 x 68 inches

With Beecroft and Amer in the distance, we have now entered a third gallery looking at work by Ellen Gallagher, Hellen van Meene, and a large nude by—surprise—a young Joan Mitchell. Who knew this master of the lyrical mass painted such forthright figures early in her career? Image from the gallery website

Above: Gallagher, van Meene, Mitchell. Image from the gallery website

Below: Ellen Gallagher, Bouffant Pride, 2003, handmade collage, cutout, painting and photogravure on rag paper, 13.5 x 10.5 inches

Moving around the gallery we see a painting by Alice Neel similar in size to the Mitchell. Between them are photographs by Zoe Leonard (also below) and Catherine Opie.

Joan Mitchell (1925-1992), Untitled, circa 1945, oil on canvas, 54 x 35.75 inches; Alice Neel, (1990-1894), Olivia, 1975, oil on canvas, 54 x 34 inches. Image from the gallery website

From the third gallery looking back into the main space, with the Bourgeois vitrine to orient you. On the wall: Zoe Leonard, Untitled, 1988-90, gelatin silver prints, 6 x 9 inches each

The Female Gaze , is up through September 19 at Cheim & Read, 547 W. 25th. Go gaze.

If you can't make it to New York between now and then, the gallery website contains great installation shots, some of which I pulled and posted here (with attribution) and an image of every work in the show. My blog buddy Steven Alexander has written about the show, too.

Update 8.19. 09: James Kalm's video report on You Tube

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Five Artists, One Film: "Our City Dreams"

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Click here for Oh, Maureen (with updates)

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OK, let's return to art, shall we?

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I just saw a lovely documentary by Chiara Clemente at Film Forum: Our City Dreams. Clemente (daughter of Francesco) profiles five women artists ages of various ages and cultures, each connected creatively to her native or adopted city, New York. Swoon (30) and Nancy Spero (80) are the youngest and oldest, bracketing Ghada Amer, Kiki Smith and Marina Abramovicz (40s, 50s and 60s, respectively).

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As a painter, I missed seeing artists who work with my medium, but given that films about artists are so few--and films about women artists fewer still--why nitpick? Watching Swoon rout plywood to create a large plate for her guerrilla prints, or Ghada Amer embroider her erotic women onto canvas, or Kiki Smith forming figures in clay offers a peek into each artist's studio and working process, and her commentary a pek into her life. If you've never seen Marina Abramovicz perform in person, even on film you realize how fearless she is. And Nancy Spero, still working as a frail 80-year-old, shows you that--ageism be damned!--art is timeless and so is its makers.

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The Film Forum run of Our City Dreams is only through the 17th, but the film's website lists a schedule of upcoming film festivals and theatrical engagements. (What it doesn't provide are pictures of the artists, so for this report I have pulled them from various sources and credited the images.)

Swoon

Image from theworldsbestever.com

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The film opens with the Brooklyn-based street artist making life-size prints on the floor of her kitchen. Swoon carves plywood with a router, inks the "plate," and then working barefoot, uses her feet to press a sheet of kraft paper into the plate. The images, of regular folks doing regular activities, are then trimmed and wheatpasted onto the walls of buildings around the city. There's more: her opening at Jeffrey Deitch a few years ago (a far cry from her tiny kitchen), a floating sculpture made with the help of friends.

"I was pressed way too hard up against the narrowness of the space," she says of painting. To her credit and our edification, she has created a wide-open terrain for herself.

Swoon on the street. Image from fatcap.com

Ghada Amer

Image from africultures.com

How does a Muslim woman from Cairo express herself? On the face of it, with 'women’s work'--embroidery. Looking more closely you see that her many overlapping layers of linear images explore the erotic life of women. The filmmaker and her subject toggle between Cairo and New York, showing Amer with her family there and in her studio here. "We are proud of her," says her father, a former diplomat--even if she makes "bad woman," as her mother calls them. The wilfully loose threads would seem to be a metaphor for women’s lives, unclipped and unfettered, as they should be lived in any culture.

Installation from Breathe Into Me, Amer's solo exhibition at Gagosian Gallery, 2006

Marina Abramovic

Image from emediawire.com

Using her body as her medium, Abramovic has pushed herself to extremes. She has starved herself and carved herself, subjected herself to fire and ice. While she has explored the limits of what a body can endure, she has at the same time simply ritualized the activities of everyday life, like cleaning. Abramovic, who was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, has had an international career. She now resides in New York.

There's a scene where we see Abramovic preparing for a performance, her hair in rollers and her makeup being applied. Given the extremes at which she operates, it's a bit of a shock to think of what she's doing as show business, and yet that is, in essence, what performance of any kind is. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

Marina Abramovic in performance. Image from New York Magazine

Kiki Smith
Image from the Walker Art Center

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"There are no images of middle-age women," says Smith during the course of her segment. Now squarely in her mid-50s, she calls 50 "a marker." She's been taking stock of where she's been and thinking about how she wants to live her life. "Now I want to make middle-age women." Given that her life's work is poetic, ethereal and allegorical, I suspect that the spirit will continue even if the flesh as rendered in clay or on paper appears slightly less firm.

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One of the things we see in Smith's segment is how much physical labor is required to make, pack, ship and install all that ethereal work. Of course she's at the stage of her career where there's help, and lots of it, but it's still a little miracle.

"Kiki Smith: A Gathering 1980-2005" at the Whitney Museum," with Yellow Moon (1998) and Bandage Girl (2002)

Nancy Spero

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After living in Paris with her husband, the artist Leon Golub, the two returned to New York in the Sixties with their children. Now 80 and in failing health, she reminisces about her life and career--a career that began before the women's movement, when she was working in the shadow of her more famous husband, when, she says, "I was dying for someone to ask me what I was working on," to the present, when she is rightfully recognized for the work she has made. Along the way she helped found A.I.R., the longest-running women's co-op gallery, raised a family, and established herself as an artist and art warrior, whose paintings, murals and works on paper are joyously sexual and fearlessly confrontational, spiritual and political in equal measure.

Spero's mosaic murals on the #1's 66th Street subway stop. (Ths stop for the Metropolitan Opera, if you're wondering about the images.) This image and the one of the artist from Art21
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