Nani & Meeru

 

Brooklyn Museum - Elizabeth A. Sackler center for Feminist Art

I visited the Brooklyn Museum's center for Feminist art, the exhibit was Global Feminisms. Brooklyn Museum of Art unveiled this weekend an 8,300 square foot space dedicated to feminist art. New York Newsday describes it here.

An 8,300-square-foot space specifically dedicated to examining the impact of feminism in the art world, the first museum space of its kind, is taking up residence at the Brooklyn Museum. The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art opens to the public Friday with a full schedule of talks and performances for the opening weekend.

This is a huge, important global event," feminist icon Gloria Steinem said at a media preview on Thursday. "This center is going to change many lives."

The center is the brainchild of Sackler, who originally had thought about creating a freestanding museum for feminist art before approaching the Brooklyn Museum to host the space.

When "I think of feminist values, I think of equality, equity, justice," Sackler told The Associated Press a few days before the opening. "I see those values in feminism; those are part of what feminist artis.

Here is a brief history
and background of this art.

Feminists point out that throughout most of recorded history males have imposed patriarchal (father-centered) social systems (in which they have dominated females). Although it is not the goal of this article to recount the development of feminist theory in full, the history of feminist art cannot be understood apart from it. Feminist theory must take into account the circumstances of most women's lives as mothers, household workers, and caregivers, in addition to the pervasive misconception that women are genetically inferior to men. Feminist art notes that significant in the dominant (meaning especially Western) culture's patriarchal heritage is the preponderance of art made by males, and for male audiences, sometimes transgressing against females. Men have maintained a studio system which has excluded women from training as artists, a gallery system that has kept them from exhibiting and selling their work, as well as from being collected by museums albeit somewhat less in recent years than before.

The center piece of the show is Judy Chicago’s installation “dinner party”, which portrays a last supper for women that made a difference throughtout European and American history. The plates had vaginal patterns, and each tablecloth/runner represented the particular historical period that the women were born in. The first woman was the primordial goddess and the last one was Georgia o’keefe.

Tufts Daily describes Judy Chicago's installation here.

The iconic early feminist piece by Judy Chicago, "Dinner Party" (1979), has been given a permanent home in the space. This large-scale work is meant to portray a Last Supper for famous women throughout history. The triangular dinner table is set with ceramic plates shaped into a diverse array of vaginal forms for thirty-nine famous women whose names are intricately woven into their tablecloth settings. Hundreds of additional women are represented on tiles of the floor of the space.

The Brooklyn Museum was the first place to display the work in 1980, when the piece was still new. Now, it is established with a room designed for it surrounded by a triangular glass structure that slants inward in a darkened room so as to preserve it. An adjoining gallery was created to allow the work to adhere to its didactic function by featuring biographical information about the women represented at dinner.

While the message can be seen as outdated to many contemporary viewers, the work can be appreciated for its historical value, its momentous presence and its intricate details.

The Global Feminisms exhibit was divided thematically along the lines of life cycles, identities, politcs and emotions. Fifty countries were represented, the exhibits were mostly video and photographs. At the life cycles section, there was a wonderful image of a Japanese grandma with pink hair, riding on a motorcycle with a much younger partner, with a sense of joy and freedom It was from the Yuka Series by Miwa Yanagi, My grandmother. There was a photograph next to Yanagi’s piece of a naked older woman looking up at the sky and clouds, with a sense of calm and peace.

There was poignant humor to the piece by British artist Sarah Lucas, titled “The Sperm Thing,” of a soccer ball, steel bucket, and pantyhose. It was so basic, simple and understated.

Another very powerful piece, Thanatometamorphosis, by Iskra Dimitrova was of death or the state of Bardo, that was recreated with the dark void stillness, pungent smell of death, accompanied by a low hum, as the human body decomposed back into water.

The South Asian contingent was represented by Dayanita Singh’s photograph of the Hijra Mona and her daughter Ayesha, Shazia Sikander's drawing and Ambreen Butt’s minatures were shown. But the video installation of Sonia Khurana, influenced by Trinh Min Ha’s politics and filmaking was impressive. She juxtaposed her own sense of dislocation by describing her grandmother’s sense of loss and displacement after the partion of India and Pakistan in 1947. Mequita Ahuja's painting Boogie Woogie was interesting. She is Asian Indian and African American.

The exhibit was powerful, uncomfortable, gross, empowering, challenging, humourous and one left feeling pain at the power that these images attempted to create. From suicide, to cutting to reproduction by much older woman, to milk dropping from a woman’s breast, to rape and death and much more. The Feminist center is a wonderful addition to the cultural landscape of New York, and the fact that it began with a global focus is wonderful.

The New Yorker has a critical review of it here.

Genius and vileness can cohabit an artist’s soul as comfortably as mediocrity and rectitude. The Sackler Center faces incommensurable choices: to advance what women corporately want or to promote what a gifted élite of women does. It will opt both ways, probably, with attendant anguished debate.

IIC and Lalu

Interesting article in the HIndustan about the India International Center denying Lalu Prashad membership. It is one of the most exciting places architecturally, with intricate jaali work and the vast expanse of Lodhi Gardens as it's backdrop.

If you live outside of Delhi, then you may not understand the importance of the IIC to the capital’s intellectual life. I am the sort of person who is reluctant to apply for membership of any club. My father, who stubbornly refused to join any of Bombay’s so-called elite clubs, taught me that any organisation that presumes to judge your social acceptability on the basis of some burra sahib criteria is worthy only of derision and contempt.

But, over a dozen years ago, I made an exception for the IIC because it was the one club I knew of that operated on criteria my father would have approved of. It paid no attention to wealth or social standing but selected members only on the basis of intellectual attainments and their ability to contribute to the building of modern India.

Lal Masjid

Dawn, a newspaper in Pakistan describes the reemergence of the Taliban in Lal Masjid's administration. Scary stuff with a lot of repercussions in the subcontinent.

ISLAMABAD, April 6: Formally announcing the establishment of a parallel judicial system, the pro-Taliban Lal Masjid administration on Friday vowed to enforce Islamic laws in the federal capital and threatened to unleash a wave of suicide bombers if the government took any action to counter it.

“Our youth will commit suicide attacks, if the government impedes the enforcement of the Sharia and attacks Lal Masjid and its sister seminaries,” Maulana Abdul Aziz, the in-charge of the mosque said in his Friday sermon.

The fresh suicide bombing threat is stated to be the strongest given so far by the hard-line clerics of the Lal Masjid, intensifying fear among Islamabad residents.

President Gen Pervez Musharraf had recently stated that he knew that the Lal Masjid’s management wilfully harboured suicide bombers. He said that the suicide bomber who had attacked Islamabad’s Marriott Hotel in January 2007, had been seen near the mosque the same day.

Maulana Abdul Aziz announced the setting up of a Qazi court in his sermon that also marked the opening of a three-day ‘Nifaz Sharia-o-Azmat Jihad Conference’. A large number of supporters had reached the mosque.

Provoked

Julie Bindel writes in the Guardian about meeting Kiranjit Ahluwalia.

After suffering years of abuse, Kiranjit Ahluwalia killed her violent husband - and ended up in jail. When she was finally freed on appeal, her case changed the face of British justice. As a film based on her story is released, Julie Bindel meets her

Since coming out of prison, Ahluwalia says she has enjoyed "every minute" of her life. "I have gained so much. I am the queen of my house," she laughs. "No one talks to me with even the slightest bit of disrespect. I make all my own decisions, there is no slavery any more."

What remains most important for her is that women are inspired by her story of survival. "I want to show the women who are suffering that they are not weak," she says. "We are hard workers, we are strong. Women can do anything, and we can do it without men".

Angad on Holi

Day Care Wars

The NYT
has an article on a study conducted on the effects of day care on children''s behaviour. It is interesting that effect is so slight 1%, but the headlines, "poor behaviour is linked to time in day care" try to depict a much larger percentage. It's a great way to make working mothers feel guilty about sending their kids to day care. Not one of these articles has spoken about the high cost of day care, Bright Horizons for instance costs $1200 a month, making it unaffordable for most working parents Another concern that I have heard parents speak about is the high rate of infections susceptible infants pick up while at day care.

A much-anticipated report from the largest and longest-running study of American child care has found that keeping a preschooler in a day care center for a year or more increased the likelihood that the child would become disruptive in class — and that the effect persisted through the sixth grade.

The effect was slight, and well within the normal range for healthy children, the researchers found. And as expected, parents’ guidance and their genes had by far the strongest influence on how children behaved

The L.A. Times put it all in more perspective.

At least, that's the message I took from a recent USA Today article about "Alpha Moms" — "educated, tech-savvy, Type-A moms with a common goal: mommy excellence." The Alpha Mom "views motherhood as a job that can be mastered with diligent research." Who'd want to be a Beta or Gamma Mom when Alpha Momhood is within reach? So I dug deeper into the day-care story.

My scrutiny paid off. Way down in paragraph 15 of the Times story, we finally get to the nitty gritty: "Every year spent in [day-care] centers for at least 10 hours per week was associated with a 1% higher score on a standardized assessment of problem behaviors completed by teachers."

At first, I thought, 1%? 1%? That's a story?

But I quickly realized that I was thinking about things the wrong way. From the perspective of an Alpha Mom, that 1% difference in problem behaviors wouldn't be written off as within the margin of error. That 1% could be the critical difference between a kid who eventually goes to Harvard and a kid who ends up in juvenile lockup.