- Venue
- Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
- Location
- United States
This is how Yerba Buena Arts Center in downtown San Francisco describes this show: The Way That We Rhyme showcases the politically charged work of a new generation of women. Emphasizing performativity, collaboration and coalition building, the works are influenced by the feminist ideologies and activist movements of the past, while also speaking loudly and clearly to the issues facing women right now. Adhering to the notion that there is strength in numbers, the show culls together work from women of differing backgrounds and disciplines to highlight the common goals of their practices.
There is, unfortunately, no resemblance to this statement within what this show offers: rather with a few exceptions The Way That We Thyme is marginal, disappointing and in the light of numerous recent shows dedicated to new strands in recent feminist art and retrospectives indicating its history, offers few new insights, offer few challenges. It meets the expectations of the audience head on: there must be the porn room, there must be the anger room, there must be the craft room, there must be the archive and there they are all laid out room after room. A secondary general statement the show propels around is activism and action outside of the gallery: interventions, appropriations, devices to stall and engage, power zones and male uniforms (military, police, authority, media) punched through with a more feminine, enraged, defiant shade. Here they are documents and become pale and meaningless (I don’t figure that the gallery, this gallery is appropriate to present work that is happening outside, that has to happen outside of its privileged, vaulting spaces). The women here attack not only male-dominated media, but also other segregated, marginalized groups, principally gay make culture and also in a whirlwind of internalized misogyny other women: the artist Vanessa Beecroft comes in for a particular spiteful thrashing, because she has the audacity to present performances that feature naked women. The porn room and the Gloria Holes featurette is a simply a direct attack on gay male culture, dissatisfied with its languages, behaviours, forms and codes of presentation, the artists adopt roles they see within this culture and its fetish, its fantasies, its sexualized characteristics, like glory holes in restroom stalls and try to Queer them with Lesbian sensibilities, shaming lesbian identity as a second-rate inferior sexual characteristic; meanwhile the rage present in the mainly gay male porn room accuses gay men of abhorrent acts against women. Pictures of gay men getting it on isn’t marginalizing women, its just guys who like this stuff get off. (I think. Do women feel this is a real issue for them? Is there no room here for arguments about equal pay, glass ceilings, justice for rape, domestic abuse, pornography, access to rights, notions about representation and the beauty industry; clearly not, disregarding any of this we have, crocheted Chanel handbags, crocheted Gucci purses, underscoring again the potency of these symbols in informing women of their susceptibility to media, beauty, surface imagery, their glamour gullibility; not a particularly empowering reflection on recent activities in contemporary female art and we only have to go to New Langton’s recent show ‘Small Things End Great Things Endure’ to fulfil desires to engage with a more meaty take on this arena of work.)
There are though utter gems in this exhibition, principally in video, using the media to evoke and involve using deliberate strategies of resistance, reinterpretation and transference. Aleksandra Mir’s video The First Woman on the Moon, 1999, transforms a beach in Holland into a lunar landscape, the soundtrack is NASA noise, as a series of female artists/astronauts, Mir included, conquer this terrestrial/lunar space, with the heroism (heroine-ism?), patriotism, futurism of the original Armstrong adventure. Here she takes on the media’s authority, its spectacle, its screen and playfully dismantles it, disintegrates it to articulate its voids, its absences of female contribution; its earth-bound kitchen-sink definition of women’s participation.
Laurel Nakadate’s Beg for Your Life, 2006, shows a series of vignette dramas, screening her engagements and relationships with older men, as they attempt to overpower her with innuendo and corruption all the while the camera becomes her weapon of visibility, her operation of evidence. Another interesting contribution comes from Nao Bustamante, who uses performance, decoration, disfigurement, media archetypes, full-on suffering and projections onto as experimental processes into and onto feminist art and its strategies; she starts from the bottom up, investigating its functions, its attitude. Jessica Tully’s video Our Allies are Everywhere, 2006 and its film about the Santa Cruz Cardinal Regiment, employs pageantry and pomp as devices for containment and liberation; Andrea Bowers 2004 double screen film about Non Violent Disobedience Training is an interesting vehicle about the gulf between power and dissent, taking the form of a lecture and physical gymnasia instructions, it speaks about learning how to first engage with politics and to participate in its interrogation and disparity.
The remainder of the work on show are mostly literal, obvious takes on restrictions, appropriations of male identities and art, actions on aggravation, disturbances, conquests to achieve representation and archives of invitation-only participation. Its final suggestion is its containment of these ideas; the walls, glass windows of the gallery fixing, gluing it entirely within: the possibility of association externally rendered as imprisoned as with Suzanne Lacy’s wall of archival material: made of inhospitable, closed, rigid boxes.
