Yesterday Tracy Lee and I went on a fieldtrip to the National Museum of Women in the Arts for an initial viewing of Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution. I need to do some reading and return to the exhibit because I didn’t recognize many of the artists or their work, and even with the pretty good explanatory labels I didn’t really understand a lot of the work or the curator’s thinking in including it in the show. On a sidenote, Barbara Pollack notes in her Washington Post review that there a difference between the show as it’s on display here as opposed to it’s debut at the Museum of Contemporary Art in L.A. is that now “…there are copious wall labels…”. That’s nice but I would argue that the show needs more labels and more context. Lots more context.

My biggest frustration with the exhibit (aside from the sub-arctic temperatures that left my aged and arthritic joints screaming in agony) is with the (artistic) media included in the exhibit.

I don’t have a problem with the accompanying audio files that you can call up with your cellphone. (You can also listen to them online by going to the highlights from the program link – probably not worksafe, unless you work somewhere where a woman talking about “vulvic space” is not going to be a problem). It’s very cool to stand in front of Carolee Schneemann’s “Interior Scroll” while looking at the action photos of her performing the piece while you listen to her explaining the origins of the work on your cellphone. I’m disappointed there aren’t more of these, actually, but that’s not my problem. My problem is with the display of the video pieces, and there are a delightfully large number of them presented. These are films or videos that are themselves the art pieces, to be clear these are not little explanatory pieces about the exhibit.

I know that presenting multi-media in a museum setting is a no-win proposition and so it’s hard for me to even decide how to frame this criticism. I’m certainly not certain how I’d solve the problem.

First of all, the museum seems to have heard Dr. Birdcage’s complaint that they display a lot of work too high for the average woman to view, because the monitors are probably at exactly the right height for viewers who are 5’2″ – anyone taller has to crane down to watch and anyone in a wheelchair is craning up.

There are very few monitors with chairs. Who wants to stand and watch videos that are 8 to 115 minutes long? If a video has sound, there’s one set of headphones available. I didn’t see jacks for additional personal headphones – although to be fair it didn’t occur to me to check until late in the exhibit so I didn’t look at every monitor.

Most monitors have 4 – 6 videos available. At each monitor they are numbered and labeled so it’s easy to make a selection, but that means only one video is available at a time. At one monitor you can choose between the work of 2 different artists. One documentary is 55:39 the other is 115. Either way, you have to stand, and only one person can listen.

If you put out more monitors and more seats, you take away room to display other artwork. If you move the monitors into seperate areas, are you marginalizing that work or taking it away from the context of the other work? How do you allow users to control where a piece starts, stops, pauses, rewinds, or fast forwards without messing around with the artist’s intent for the piece? Can the works be made available online as well as on the site – will the artists allow this?

It all makes your brain hurt, doesn’t it?

It’s a pretty big exhibit and I need to go back and have another go. We did swing through the exhibit of photos of Frida Kahlo, I thought I’d missed it entirely but it’s there until the 14th.