Word: 70s
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Nobody is saying the word equality yet, but a lot has changed since then, a lot of it thanks to women artists and scholars in the '70s who proved that art was women's work too and could go places the guys hadn't taken it. Nudes with a woman's point of view, works that use household arts like weaving, videos and photographs that ask what gender is all about in the first place--there's plenty of that around now, some of it even made by men, all of it indebted to the feminist explosion of three decades...
Chicago, who was born Judy Cohen in 1939, started out making big minimalist sculptures and hard-edged abstract paintings, some of them quite good. But in the early '70s, under the influence of feminist thinking about personal experience, she took a turn into work that was confessional, therapeutic and maudlin. In The Rejection Quintet from 1974, color drawings similar to the vaginal emblems she would use for The Dinner Party are combined with hand-lettered texts describing various personal humiliations. The drawing is adequate, the sentimentality nothing short of Victorian...
...Wack!," a hugely enjoyable show, immerses you in the plucky, unfettered atmosphere of '70s feminism. After centuries in which men had the last word on how women's bodies were seen in art, it was finally the turn of women to see what to make of themselves. So Ana Mendieta, a Cuban refugee, traveled around the U.S. and Mexico making deep impressions on the ground in the shape of her silhouette. These she filled with rocks or flowers, making feminist earthworks that used a woman's body, not the steam shovels favored by the guys, to connect with nature...
...nothing of Mike Kelley's stuffed-animal art. That's the point of the other big, smart new show "Global Feminisms" at the Brooklyn Museum. Organized by Maura Reilly and art historian Linda Nochlin, it concentrates on art made since 1990 and demonstrates that the concerns of the '70s have spread around the world. Jenny Saville's big nudes, for instance, with their masses of battered flesh, are descended from the questions women asked then about the abuse of women's bodies. There's even a residue of feminist thinking in Study of a Boy 1, a haunting photograph...
...thought to its key passages. Finally, it claims that the current civic climate makes it a "now more than ever" proposition. Says Stephen Prothero, chair of the Boston University religion department, whose new book, Religious Literacy (Harper SanFrancisco), presents a compelling argument for Bible-literacy courses: "In the late '70s, [students] knew nothing about religion, and it didn't matter. But then religion rushed into the public square. What purpose could it possibly serve for citizens to be ignorant of all that?" The "new consensus" for secular Bible study argues that knowledge of it is essential to being a full...