Women's Work.(Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art presents Global Feminisms)

"Global Feminisms" is a big, high-minded, intermittently enjoyable show of about a hundred mostly young and lesser-known female artists from about fifty countries. It inaugurates the Brooklyn Museum's Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, in a suite of galleries anchored by the permanent installation of Judy Chicago's much travelled "Dinner Party" (1974-79). The show includes some painting and sculpture, but photography and video dominate. Considering the varied national backgrounds of the participants, the ensemble looks and feels remarkably homogeneous. The reason is only partly thematic. What is feminism today? A lot of things, the show's title gingerly asserts. What is feminist art? The cocurators--the Sackler Center's curator Maura Reilly and the distinguished art historian Linda Nochlin (who helped organize a landmark exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, "Women Artists: 1550-1950," in 1976)--are chary of definitions. They discount the "essentialist" view, of women as a unitary and eternal species, which inspired Judy Chicago's vast, schmaltzy table with vagina-patterned place settings for mythical and historical heroines. Nor do they endorse the opposing opinion, advanced in a good deal of theory-driven art since the nineteen-seventies, that femininity is a socially tailored delusion. "Openness, multiculturalism, and variety are the names of the game," they write in their preface to the show's catalogue. They claim, for the art on display, only a shared "sense of work as critique, involving gender issues not necessarily overt but underlying." Feminist art is in the eye of the feminist, apparently. How to look at it in that way--winkling out "gender issues" with a rooting interest in their resolution--and simultaneously as art, an object of experience in and of itself, is not addressed. This kind of problem is not new.

What really unifies "Global Feminisms," for a viewer, is the redolence of an almighty cultural agency that overleaps borders, blurs personalities, and purees ideas: the art school. Most of the artists embrace conceptualist strategies that have reigned as an academic lingua franca for three decades. Be they American, Egyptian, or Indonesian, the artists tend to hail from interchangeable sites of a pedagogical archipelago. They have studied some of the same forebears and have read (or been lectured to by people who have read) some of the same critical texts. Their works suggest mastery in the signal product of recent art education, which is, rather than art, the artist's statement. The impression given, of standard forms embodying tendentious sentiments, is Victorian: an international (or "transnational," the curators' favored term) regime of busy stasis. There is no disgrace in this. The show is an exercise in networking on behalf of artists who may or, in some countries, dramatically do face career disadvantages, or worse, because they are women. Accordingly, the prevailing institutional network is projected as a state of nature. The price paid is a jejune savor in presumptively radical gestures that recall past radical gestures and anticipate radical gestures to come, clickety-clack.

The titles of the show's four sections--"Life Cycles," "Identities," "Politics," and "Emotions"--broadcast what you're in for: respectively, bared bodies, jiggered cliches, protested abuses, and, well, emotions, variously angry and exuberant. The best artists help us forget where we are, even as they may snugly fit a category. My personal favorite is the Spanish performance artist Pilar Albarracin, who has two simple videos in "Identities." In one, she is a costumed flamenco singer, seated with a young male guitarist. They expertly render an impassioned plaint, at the end of which Albarracin stabs herself in the chest, releasing a gush of stage blood, and gets up and walks away. In the other, she is an elegant, taciturn woman in a canary-yellow coat and dark glasses, followed through the populous streets of Madrid by a brass band loudly playing a paso doble. She walks faster, then runs; the musicians stick with her. The implied commentary on conditions of womanhood in Spain is both cartoonishly obvious and, in its aesthetic power, exhilarating. Albarracin's specificity and economy expose, by contrast, the coyness and prolixity of much other work in ...