i hate to see pussy misunderstood

What do the Pussycat Dolls and, say, Martha Rosler have in common? Absolutely nothing. But you wouldn’t know that from reading Artnet’s Hunter Drohojowska-Philp’s dismissive review disguised as a “you go, girl” chant about ”WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution“, a recent exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA).

In Pussy Power, Drohojowska-Philp comments on the exhibit’s catalog cover, the legendary photomontage Body Beautiful: Beauty Knows No Pain: “When composed by Martha Rosler, it was a critique of representation. Today, it looks like an advertisement for The L Word.”

Exactly. 

Drohojowska-Philp doesn’t seem to realize the purpose of the exhibition was to examine the state of feminism and feminist art today. He doesn’t seem to realize his review has given us the answer. Yeah, beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but how can anyone “realize” that “many of the battles of the ‘70s, seen revving up in ‘WACK!,’ have been won.”? 

Like so many, he sees the sex and not the women in these images. ”It was the sexual liberation of the 1960s that fueled the women’s movement,” he writes, “even though the retrospective outlook tends towards wonkish news issues like equal rights, glass ceilings, child-rearing and dress codes. Back in the day, it was still about sex, and this exhibition does not shy away from that still-sizzling-hot bed. … Those seemingly scandalous Pussy Cat Dolls are watered-down derivatives compared to the real thing.”

When the NY Times’s Holland Cotter wrote “Martha Rosler’s collage is a valid work of art” but its “use on the cover somehow re-contextualizes it in a way that actually undermines the meaning of original work”, the creator of the MOCA cover, Lorraine Wild, who chose Rosler’s image, had this to say about its use: “I obviously fail to see how the use of her image on the cover of this particular book somehow deletes that power of Rosler’s work and its inherent critique. Is there something tainted about the space of the cover of a book that is separate from its context and contents?”

Again, doesn’t Cotter’s complaint, mirroring Drohojowska-Philp’s interpretation, show just how far feminism has NOT come? When we see so uncritically that we shrug off naked women as product and imagine that selling a fantasy of sexual service is empowerment, I’d say the Second Wave may have given women a voice, but only enough of one to interrupt, not to change, the Conversation.

Anyone who can look at the Body Beautiful cover and see some carnal buffet and not its critique of exploitation – even someone who does not know the history of the piece – is evidence of the current ubiquity of pornographic expression championed as free market or free speech. 

Maybe you missed the show, but you can still get the book.