Jason Farago
When the Museum of Modern Art in New York opens its retrospective of
the pioneering German sculptor Isa Genzken later this month, it will
be a momentous event for more reasons than one. Genzken, a creator of
cryptic, grungy assemblages that employ found objects and commercial
materials, is one of the most formidable artists in Europe but has
never had an exhibition of this size in the United States. She has
been especially influential for younger artists, on both sides of the
Atlantic, and this show will introduce her perplexing sculpture to a
whole new audience.
But the massive Genzken show (which tours in 2014 to Chicago and
Dallas) carries even more weight than usual, because when it opens it
will be one of the only full-scale exhibitions by a female artist at
any of New York’s most important museums. Thanks to a combination of
scheduling accidents and garden-variety sexism, male artists are
occupying pretty much every major exhibition space in town, from
Christopher Wool at the Guggenheim to Chris Burden at the New Museum
and Balthus at the Met.
None of those artists is objectionable on their own. But when
considered all together, the New York museum landscape feels like an
art world version of a frat house. “This is an art season that could
make you think the feminist movement never happened,” the critic
Deborah Solomon lamented a few weeks ago.
MoMA’s boys: It is ironic that MoMA is the museum offering relief from
New York’s boys’ club, because its track record with women’s art has
been, to put it mildly, unimpressive. Since November 2004, when MoMA
moved into its new building – a $858m behemoth that barely increased
the amount of usable exhibition space – the museum has devoted its
principal galleries on the sixth floor to women artists only four
times: for the painters Elizabeth Murray and Marlene Dumas, the
performance artist Marina Abramović, and the photographer Cindy
Sherman. (Other women have received smaller exhibitions elsewhere in
the museum, and the Brazilian artist Mira Schendel was featured in a
two-artist show.)
If four shows in nine years sounds low to you, and it should,
recognise that for MoMA this actually counts as progress. The museum’s
department of painting and sculpture, its largest and most prestigious
division, went 16 years without mounting a solo show of a woman
artist: before Murray, the last woman to get a proper MoMA
retrospective was Helen Frankenthaler in 1989. Things get worse when
you head downstairs to the painting and sculpture collection, where
fewer than 10% of the art in the gallery’s by-the-numbers tale of 20th
Century art is made by women. “It amounts to apartheid,” Jerry Saltz
wrote a few years back; one art blog recently envisioned suing the
museum for discrimination.
It would be one thing if MoMA were an outlier, but in fact it reflects
a larger and more enduring inequity. In the 1970s and early 1980s,
when the feminist movement was in full swing, artists and scholars
mounted a sustained critique of museums and galleries, demonstrating
that what looked like a meritocracy in fact belied rampant sexism. The
critique stuck – but the action to change that situation has been
delayed for decades.
In the market, women remain severely undervalued, with the most
successful women just a tenth as expensive as the most successful men.
As Sarah Thornton has noted, “depictions of women often command the
highest prices, whereas works by them do not.” Women also rarely
feature in group shows in sufficient numbers, and sometimes their
presence is laughably thin. At Gagosian in London right now, a show
purporting to tell the history of painting of the last two decades
includes 35 artists – of whom an obscene 34 are men. (The 35th, if you
are keeping score, is Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth.) Dionysiac, an
anarchic exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 2005, featured
fourteen artists, and every single one of them was male.
Women’s representation in the art world remains so bad that, on the
rare occasions that a show of contemporary art hits gender parity, it
actually counts as a news story. The Whitney Biennial of 2010,
organized by the Italian curator Francesco Bonami, included 55
artists, of whom just over half were women. It was instantly
proclaimed ‘the women’s biennial,’ complete with awkward discussions
of allegedly feminine characteristics of painting and sculpture, not
to mention a glossy photo shoot in The New York Times’ fashion
magazine. But as Bonami correctly insisted, a ‘women’s biennial’ would
be one that was 100% women. To include men and women in approximately
equal numbers is simply doing one’s job.
Toward equality: Why do women still get so little attention and
credibility at the top echelons of the art world? To answer that
question, it helps to untangle historical concerns and contemporary
ones. Art was a man’s affair for most of Western art history, and the
paucity of women artists in earlier eras ingrained a conception that
the artistic disposition is naturally male, while women will always be
the exception. Yet in her landmark 1971 essay Why Have There Been No
Great Women Artists?, the art historian Linda Nochlin demolished the
misconception that women lack the artist gene. She showed that from
the Renaissance until the turn of the last century, it was
“institutionally impossible” for women to become artists of the first
rank. Women were not admitted to art academies and denied
apprenticeships. They were excluded from social circles that led to
advancement or patronage. They were also unable to participate in life
drawing classes until the 19th Century; even after that the models had
to be draped. All of that has ended – but the image of the artist as a
solitary male genius that arose from those circumstances is still with
us.
MoMA, to its credit, knows it has a problem, and it has been trying
harder. It recently published a major catalogue, Modern Women,
accompanied by a feminist symposium at which the Guerrilla Girls
appeared. Its photography department mounted an excellent exhibition,
Pictures by Women, which charted the history of the medium through
over 200 images. In the last year the museum has put on small shows of
Alina Szapocznikow, Carol Bove, and Dorothea Rockburne, and next year
will see a delayed, extremely exciting retrospective of Lygia Clark,
the Brazilian sculptor. Even the donors want to see change: the Modern
Women’s Fund, established in 2005, was endowed by a museum trustee to
encourage new research and exhibitions.
All of this is welcome. But a much larger shift is required before
MoMA, and all of our institutions, can start building a culture that
reflects the whole of society. More exhibitions and more books are a
start, but they aren’t enough. More fundamentally, we have to break
out of the chokehold that maintains art as naturally a man’s domain.
The best way to do that, I would say, is to spend as much time as
possible with the art of someone like Isa Genzken, whose mishmashes of
high and low, elegance and trash, come closer to capturing our
contemporary moment than any other artist I can name. Such affecting,
disturbing, disorienting sculpture cannot stand on the margins of art
history. – BBC Entertainment
