LOS ANGELES, CA.- The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA presents WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, on view through July 16, 2007. During the late 1960s and early ’70s, feminism fundamentally changed contemporary art practice, critiquing its assumptions and radically altering its structures and methodologies. WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution is predicated on the notion that gender was and remains fundamental to the organization of culture, and that a contemporary understanding of the feminist in art must necessarily look to the late 1960s and ‘70s. While the American feminist art movement coalesced in the late 1960s in the United States and is embedded within the exhibition, this international survey of 120 artists, activists, filmmakers, writers, teachers, and thinkers necessarily moves beyond the now-canonical list of American feminist artists to include women of other geographies, formal approaches, socio-political alliances, and critical and theoretical positions. This exhibition argues for simultaneous feminisms internationally that together and retrospectively can be viewed as the most influential movement in postwar contemporary art.

The exclamatory title of the exhibition is intended to recall the bold idealism that characterized the feminist movement during its second wave, as well as the acronyms of activist groups that protested institutions of all kinds beginning in the late 1960s. For many of the artists in WACK!, feminism often coexisted with political engagement on other fronts such as race, class, and sexual orientation that, at times, superseded feminism as the dominant discourse within which they preferred to situate their work. Many artists’ imagery is explicitly feminist in its foregrounding of the body, personal narrative, and biography. While some artists embraced a conceptual idiom, others explored family histories and narratives of subjugation; still others worked abstractly and obliquely exploring themes of gender. For artists working in cultural contexts where there was no language of feminism or feminist art, their work can retrospectively be read in feminist terms.

The themes that structure the exhibition and publication were imagined in various ways. Some function historically while others are formally inspired, some according to the ways that women artists organized in order to maximize the impact of the statements they were trying to make. This brochure is intended as a guide, providing one narrative through the exhibition and a tool for organizing the artwork you will see and experience

Goddess is one of the most pervasive articulations of the feminine; artists working from vastly different cultural referents have been empowered by ideas of earth, mother, and Amazon and inspired by their iconography. Magdalena Abakanowicz’s woven Abakan Red (1969) confronts the viewer with its mass and raw presence. The performances of ORLAN as well as the video performances and installations of Ulrike Rosenbach deploy representations of Amazon and Venus, and Ana Mendieta’s Siluetas investigate the mythic status of the female body in its incarnations as virgin, Madonna, and whore. Katharina Sieverding’s film Transformer (1973/74) interrogates the viewer’s subconscious ideas about the power of the embodied woman. And Niki de Saint Phalle’s sculpture Hon, realized only once at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 1966, epitomizes the goddess rendered larger than life, containing within her the institution of the museum. Lorraine O’Grady’s performances in the early 1980s as Mademoiselle Bourgeoise Noire, dressed in a gown made of gloves, disrupted openings at galleries and museums to call attention to issues of race and gender within the art world.