!Women Art Revolution

Today after work, I went to see the documentary !Women Art Revolution at the IFC Center. This is a really amazing piece of history, which is how I ended up there, really. From the postcard I picked up at the theater: "For more than 40 years, filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson has collected a plethora of interviews with her contemporaries--and shaped them into an intimate portrayal of their fight to break down barriers facing women both in the art world and society at large." Not only are these interviews in the film, but Lynn is putting them all online. I can't wait to check it out! (It's at the Standford University Libraries collection in a publicly accessible online archive...)

I've mentioned before that I work for an academic publisher, and at the end of the summer, we are publishing a book on Judy Chicago and the Feminist Art Program at CSU Fresno, which was the first program of its kind in the country, and produced Womanhouse, among other things. The author of that book is another amazing woman, who I'm both completely exasperated by (as her editor) and inspired by (as a younger woman looking for feminist role models). Anyway, this author is completely devoted to the book she's just put together, and when she found out the movie was screening at the IFC center, she emailed me and my assistant, and the marketing manager, and asked if we could possibly put some flyers at the theater. I was just going to make the marketing person do it, but then I started reading about the film. Spanky was working, so I thought, well, I'll just go by myself. No one else wanted to go.

Y'all, this film made me think so much that my freaking head hurts. I am a feminist. I say that with pride and defiance, and I will always stand up for women's rights. I don't know much about art, but I do know a bit about the women's movement in the 1970s. So it was amazing to see those two things come together. Those artists did some wacky, out-there things. A lot of it was performance based, because as Judy Chicago said in the film, it was easier for her students to get to the real truth and heavy themes of their art through performance rather than through traditional art media. And they interviewed a couple of young woman artists coming up today who had no idea about the legacy of feminist art that came before them, and I think it was kind of a shock to some of them to realize they were re-treading where they thought they were blazing trails. But you can so clearly trace what happened at the Feminist Art Program up through the 80s and into today. There are many more successful woman artists today than there were, and there are certainly women teaching in university art departments as well as curating at the galleries and museums of major metropolitan areas. But not in the same numbers as men. And I'm sure the woman artists are still hearing the same bullshit as their sisters did thirty years ago.

But the thing that struck me the most was the sense of community that these women from the 1970s had with each other. They worked together to transform an abandoned house into Womanhouse, and they worked together to open A.I.R., and perhaps when the people in the audience asked "Where did all that energy go? What happened?" that is what the answer is... There is not the same sort of feminist collectivization that there was back then. Hell, there is not as much political activism in many groups at all anymore, which is ironic, when we live in an age with so much instantaneous communication. These women did it all manually, with their own journals that they cut and pasted together, flyers advertising shows, consciousness-raising groups, and political activism like the Guerrilla Girls. People don't work together anymore. There's not the sense of trust that there used to be. I think this happened sometime during the ME ME ME 1980s, but the focus stopped being the collective and became the individual.

Anyway, I'd welcome some discussion about what it means to be a feminist nowadays, and collective vs. individual action, and visibility for female artists, and so forth. I'm not an artist myself, but I do enjoy art, and when I saw The Dinner Party for myself, it was one of those transformative, mind-blowing moments. I recommend a trip to the Brooklyn Museum to see it (it's the centerpiece of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art there) for anyone traveling to NYC for other reasons. If you're going to Brooklyn, you really should just skip Williamsburg, and go to the Brooklyn Museum (and Brooklyn General, but that's another post!)

I want to go back and see the film again. This weekend, some of the women interviewed in the film will be speaking afterwards as well, including Faith Ringgold and a couple of Guerrilla Girls. Spanky says she'll go with me on Sunday (for B. Ruby Rich who was one of my favorite people from the film!). If you're in NYC and you identify as a feminist, you should definitely go see this film. And if you're not in NYC, I hope you try to see it if it comes to your town. Whether you're into art or not, it's a piece of feminist history. I'm so glad that I got a chance to see it. And to think, I could have stayed at work late, or come home and watched some stupid tv.