BIG ideas in contemporary art are in short supply, but the Museum of Contemporary Art is about to spring a whopper. "WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution" -- a global survey of a messy, contentious, perpetually controversial art movement -- opens today at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, the museum's cavernous showcase in Little Tokyo.
"My ambition for 'WACK!' is to make the case that feminism's impact on art of the 1970s constitutes the most influential international 'movement' of any during the postwar period," curator Cornelia Butler states in the exhibition's hefty catalog. Although feminist art is often thought to be a ragged footnote of art history, she contends that the feminist social movement fundamentally changed the practice of art, exerting a stronger impact on artists than any other force in the last half-century.
Based on the conviction that entrenched social and cultural systems favor men, hard-core feminist art often takes the form of protest, and it can be extremely strident. But feminist ideas also have propelled relatively subtle reconsiderations of how art is made, where it is shown and what it has to say. Butler, on staff at MOCA for 10 years before her recent move to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, has grappled with a huge range of material.
Eight years in the making, the exhibition fills 22,500 square feet of exhibition space with about 450 works -- sculpture, painting, photography, film, video and performance -- by 119 artists from 21 countries. The title, "WACK!," is a made-up word, inspired by acronyms adopted by activist groups and political communities that concentrated on women's issues and cultural projects in the 1970s.
From its punchy moniker to its lineup of works recalling feminist art's glory days, the show is intended to be noticed, and there's little doubt about that. Together with the Brooklyn Museum's Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, to be inaugurated in three weeks, "WACK!" already has inspired a nationwide bonanza of feminist exhibitions, symposia and performances, many of them in Southern California.
With all that action, feminist art is likely to become a much more substantial component of art history.
