THERE are many appealing aspects to "WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution," the sprawling and critically well-received exhibition chronicling the global emergence of feminist art practice in the 1970s. One is its sheer size.
At MOCA's Geffen Contemporary (through July 16), the show features 430 works by 119 artists. Given the abundance of film and video -- Chantal Ackerman's work alone has a running time of just under five hours -- it is doubtful that even the most diligent visitor will actually see the whole show, multiple visits or not. Surveys of this size are usually a bad idea; one wants curatorial discrimination. But this time the magnitude emphasizes the monumental scope of the shift in thinking, which artists with a feminist perspective labored to bring about. Revolutions are rarely modest.
The size also fits the global sprawl of today's art, which has no single production center. Gone is the Modernist idea of a cultural capital, replaced by a Postmodern web of networks. It's tempting to think that feminism had something to do with that change too.
One effect is that "WACK!" breaks down into three general categories of work. There's art I was quite familiar with, art I knew about but hadn't experienced in any depth and, finally, art I'd never heard of. Sometimes familiarity breeds contempt, while discovery can point toward yet more uncharted paths.
Here are three works I encountered at the Geffen Contemporary that illustrate that soul-satisfying range. They are not meant to represent the best or worst of the show, but they are emblematic of what makes it so compelling:
1. The human stain
MARY KELLY'S "Post-Partum Document" (1973-79) upset a lot of people when the first of its several sections were shown at London's Institute of Contemporary Art in 1976. In the manner of a pseudo-scientific study, it inspects the relationship between a mother (the artist) and her newborn son during his first years of life. The subject is common enough in the last thousand years of Western art, thanks to the Madonna and Child. (Kelly went to Catholic colleges before she chose art school.) But the connection between them had never been considered quite like this.
Part 1 of the multipart work -- "Analyzed Fecal Stains and Feeding Charts" -- is probably its most infamous segment, as the subtitle might suggest. Think Dr. Spock crossed with Dr. Freud. Flanked by graphs and tables, the work comprises 28 framed paper diapers chronicling the month of February 1974. A list of what Kelly's baby consumed each day -- 2 teaspoons cereal, 1 teaspoon carrots, 1 ounce water, etc. -- is carefully typed on each diaper. The list is a caption just beneath a ghostly brown or yellow stain.
Seeing these charts is very different from reading about them in a book, where Kelly's work is invariably discussed in psychoanalytic and other academic language. Those terms are surely legitimate. But they don't come close to conveying how flat-out funny the piece is nor how one's risible reaction to it is essential to its larger meanings.
"Eeewww!" is not an appropriate academic response, but it certainly applies when you're nose-to-the-glass scrutinizing baby poop. (Don't even think about the conservation issues facing the Art Gallery of Ontario, which owns the daily record of infant excretions.) After Italian Conceptual artist Piero Manzoni's notorious 1961 packed and sealed cans containing 30 grams of his own excrement, Kelly's work does come with a built-in artistic lineage. And there's always Freud, who wrote that children recognize feces, as matter that comes from within, as their very first creations.
What makes the work funny is the relationship between Kelly's art and the collapsing edifice of formalist aesthetic interpretation in the 1970s. Formalism had latched onto the slight innovation in Helen Frankenthaler's big abstract painting "Mountains and Sea" (1952) as the engine meant to drive the next big wave of Modernist art into the end of the 20th century. She made her paintings by staining raw canvas with thinned and fluid pigments, creating diaphanous veils of transparent color. Kelly's diapers, by contrast, were "stain paintings" of a rather different order.
Marcel Duchamp might well have admired their visceral critique of art's traditional foundation in visual perception, since Kelly's paintings literally make you look away. And given Frankenthaler's notorious political conservatism, the fact that the younger artist's feminist criticism is spoken in her elder's formalist language offers its own particular pleasure.
Since the 1980s, enjoyment has returned as a motive for looking at paintings -- and happily so. But the "Post-Partum Document" is a notable tear in art's fabric.
2. Help from the audience
