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This exhibition opens amidst a recent surge in interest for feminist art largely generated by the breakthrough museum surveys, WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at MOCA LA1 and Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.2 Among the numerous accomplishments of these exhibitions is the confirmation that feminist strategies, approaches and methods of critique have played an integral role in the development of postmodern artistic practices and theory. WACK! provided long overdue critical attention to numerous well-known, as well as plenty of rarely seen, works by women from the mid 1960s to the 80s, while Global Feminisms connected those revolutionary expressions to recent works that argue for a multifaceted, diverse sense of feminism. Together, these major exhibitions have done much to encourage critical appreciations for works and artists that have been habitually ignored and disregarded by art institutions, critics and curators. Just as important, WACK!, Global Feminisms and the numerous exhibitions they’ve inspired, have sown imperative seeds for future considerations of feminist art.
Girly Show: Pin-Ups, Zines & the So-Called Third Wave fertilizes those planted seeds (pun intended) and dutifully extends the discourse where the MOCA and Brooklyn Museum surveys left off. However, in doing so, it is important to understand that Girly Show does not set out to define today’s feminisms. Indeed, a guiding principle of this project has been that such a campaign is nearly impossible, and frankly undesirable. Instead, this exhibition asserts that
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feminism is an ever evolving and critically complex movement that has always refused a tidy definition. Indeed, it is precisely that feminist resolve to remain broadminded and therefore indefinite (evident in the artworks and zines brought together in Girly Show) that make them such compelling expressions of the contemporary call for equity.
The Third Wave
This project also aims to complicate current historical (perhaps even hysterical) models that declare a generational divide between feminists and feminisms. For the sake of convenience, and to the chagrin of many active in the movement, a wave model is used to provide a tidy metaphor for understanding the layered history of feminism in the United States. The model proposes three separate periods of feminist activity beginning in the mid 19th century and waxing and waning to present time. Unfortunately, this model implies that women only recently began to argue their value as humans and suggests that they have often lost interest in that fight for equality. (For a more detailed examination of feminist history, please see the related article on this site.)
One of the most frustrating aspects of the wave paradigm is that it constructs a titillating and everlasting feminist cat fight between the two living (and not necessarily different) generations of feminists – those born between 1930 and 1960 against those born after 1970 - that serves to further instill already misleading stereotypes of each group.
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