f the likely places to host a feminist art exhibition, the Dallas Contemporary doesn’t immediately come to mind. Texas is the state of GOP presidential hopeful Senator Ted Cruz, where battles over women’s reproductive rights have moved to the supreme court
as recently as November. Enter the Dallas Contemporary’s latest exhibition Black Sheep Feminism: the Art of Sexual Politics, open now. Curated by Alison Gingeras, the exhibition aims to explore the works of artists Joan Semmel, Anita Steckel, Betty Tompkins andCosey Fanni Tutti, who were pushed to the outer edges of second-wave feminism and largely ignored.
Influenced by her own research on the genealogy of Jeff Koons, Gingeras realized Koons’s notorious series Made in Heaven – which depicted him and his future wife, porn star Ilona Staller, having sex in explicit detail – was influenced by “a matrilineage of feminist artists”, on the edges of what is now understood to be the feminist art movement. Looking at Koons’s portraits, it is not difficult to find the influences of Semmel and Tompkins: where Semmel explicitly portrayed heterosexual intercourse in her first and second erotic series, Tompkins based her paintings on photographs from pornographic magazines, centering on the act of heterosexual penetration in her series Fuck Paintings.
At first glance, there is nothing terribly shocking about the art of any of these women. Tompkins’ paintings are so up-close that context is nearly removed, and Steckel’s series Giant Woman, comprised of silkscreen landscapes of nude women standing alongside the phallic New York City skyline, are not a matter of outrage. Tutti’s sex work and poses in pornographic magazines – which she then displayed as her own art – would be greeted with applause now. But it is 2016, and we are in the fourth wave of feminism. The anti-pornographic movements of second-wave feminism seem antiquated. Perhaps the greatest testament of Black Sheep Feminism’s power is that the outrage is irrelevant now for young
feminists; sex positivity is the order of the day.
And yet, even in 2007 when Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art put together the encyclopedic exhibition Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution, only Semmel and Tutti were included, though Steckel received mention in art historian Richard Meyer’s essay for the exhibition’s catalogue. It’s this sort of exclusion that initially turned Gingeras off to feminism as a college student.
“I felt a little disconnected or ambivalent about that label of feminism because it didn’t feel that it applied to my generation’s challenges. We took for granted all the advancements that the women’s liberation movement made,” she tells the Guardian. “My generation was taught by people who were directly part of second-wave feminism, and I felt like there was a lot of self-policing within feminism. It was OK to think this, but not that. It felt very stilted.”.
Even among Steckel’s group Fight Censorship, self-policing was in action: Betty Tompkins was not invited to join. “She was a lightning rod for her peers, and she was completely excluded,” Gingeras explained. “She knew all the artists in the Fight Censorship group, and she wasn’t invited to join their group because they objected to the source material.” The nature of Tompkins’ work – sourced from pornography – is complicated by the fact that the sale of any pornographic imagery was illegal at the time in the United States.
And while there still is shock value to Tompkins’ work, the ease with which anyone with a computer can access pornography detracts from the outrage. It’s the far-sighted quality of Tompkins’ work – and of all the artists in the exhibition that Gingeras believes will resonate most with audiences now.
“They were very much ahead of their time, and as a consequence, they really resonate with the zeitgeist of a new generation returning to feminism and vindicating that term without any ambivalence or any shame.”
As feminism sheds the at-times stilted quality of its second wave, Black Sheep Feminism stands alongside works like Roxane Gay’s 2014 essay collection Bad Feminist that examine how feminism continues to change and grow into the 21st century. It’s part of a larger moment of embracing all the possibilities of feminism that couldn’t have come at a more crucial time in Texas and the United States at large. While Gingeras isn’t certain of the reaction her exhibit will receive, she is prepared either way. At the very least, the public-at-large may have a chance to become better acquainted with the names of the artists in it. Maybe, perhaps, Cruz will even have his consciousness raised by it.
- Black Sheep Feminism is at Dallas Contemporary until 20 March. Details here
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