The next big thing

BIG ideas in contemporary art are in short supply, but the Museum of Contemporary Art is about to spring a whopper. “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution” -- a global survey of a messy, contentious, perpetually controversial art movement -- opens today at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, the museum’s cavernous showcase in Little Tokyo.

“My ambition for ‘WACK!’ is to make the case that feminism’s impact on art of the 1970s constitutes the most influential international ‘movement’ of any during the postwar period,” curator Cornelia Butler states in the exhibition’s hefty catalog. Although feminist art is often thought to be a ragged footnote of art history, she contends that the feminist social movement fundamentally changed the practice of art, exerting a stronger impact on artists than any other force in the last half-century.

Based on the conviction that entrenched social and cultural systems favor men, hard-core feminist art often takes the form of protest, and it can be extremely strident. But feminist ideas also have propelled relatively subtle reconsiderations of how art is made, where it is shown and what it has to say. Butler, on staff at MOCA for 10 years before her recent move to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, has grappled with a huge range of material.

Eight years in the making, the exhibition fills 22,500 square feet of exhibition space with about 450 works -- sculpture, painting, photography, film, video and performance -- by 119 artists from 21 countries. The title, “WACK!,” is a made-up word, inspired by acronyms adopted by activist groups and political communities that concentrated on women’s issues and cultural projects in the 1970s.

From its punchy moniker to its lineup of works recalling feminist art’s glory days, the show is intended to be noticed, and there’s little doubt about that. Together with the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, to be inaugurated in three weeks, “WACK!” already has inspired a nationwide bonanza of feminist exhibitions, symposia and performances, many of them in Southern California.

With all that action, feminist art is likely to become a much more substantial component of art history.

But that’s what MOCA does. One of the museum’s primary claims to fame is its resume of big, complicated, thematic exhibitions that shine a bright, scholarly light on contemporary art movements, slices of history and seminal moments. It has organized surveys of Minimalism, Conceptualism and performance art and explored subjects such as “At the End of the Century: One Hundred Years of Architecture,” “Art and Film Since 1945: Hall of Mirrors” and “Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900.” “Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s” took the pulse of the city’s vibrant scene; “Ecstasy: In and About Altered States” explored art’s relationship to drug culture.

“One of the defining and differentiating aspects of MOCA’s program is that we have always taken on large thematic and historical topics,” says Jeremy Strick, director of the museum. “I think MOCA is the only museum that consistently has this as part of its program. It’s something everyone here feels is very important. We are a museum of contemporary art. We are about presenting the most significant art of our time and placing it and contextualizing it.

“One element of that is the individual artist and the monographic show, but individual artists come out of a historical context, a context of ideas and practices. It doesn’t do to simply show their work in isolation. To present the big ideas that have really animated the development of contemporary art is what we are here to do. It’s our mission.”

Paul Schimmel, MOCA’s chief curator, attributes the tradition partly to “the destiny of the Geffen,” a vast, bare-bones industrial building that lends itself to creative thinking on a grand scale, and to the early leadership and vision of the late Pontus Hulten, the museum’s founding director, and Richard Koshalek, his successor.

“Right from the beginning, there was a certain kind of ambition that you don’t see everywhere,” says Schimmel, who organized “Helter Skelter,” “Ecstasy” and “Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979.” “The Automobile and Culture,” one of the first exhibitions to fill the Geffen (then called the Temporary Contemporary), was a crowd pleaser largely dismissed by critics. But the 1984-85 extravaganza set the stage for more rigorous art historical projects.

“Each one of these epic shows is something somebody has been thinking about for a long time,” Schimmel says. “We all have ideas, and it’s a process of discussing what works best, what we are most passionate and knowledgeable about.”

As curator Ann Goldstein puts it: “You have to feel a crushing need to do these shows. They are not about snapshots; they are about another kind of process. They can be bears to work on, but they are incredibly gratifying. And they have an interesting relationship to each other, like a fabric.” Her big exhibitions, “A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation,” “Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965-1975” and “A Minimal Future?: Art as Object 1958-1968,” grew out of one another. “Each one was somehow tracing the roots of its predecessor, like a series of prequels.”

MOCA is far from the only museum that tackles big contemporary art projects. In Los Angeles, the County Museum of Art presented “Beyond Geometry: Experiments in Form, 1940s-70s,” a survey of post-World War II abstract art, in 2004, when MOCA presented its survey of Minimalism, and the Hammer Museum scored a hit in 2005 with “Thing: New Sculpture From Los Angeles.”

But MOCA seems to have carved out a distinctive niche.

“Is there another museum in the country that organizes surveys as well or as regularly as MOCA?” asks John Walsh, former director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “I don’t know of any.”

Hugh Davies, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, praises L.A.’s MOCA for “tackling broad topics with intellectual rigor. At a time when the Museum of Modern Art in New York offers a steady diet of one-person shows and the Walker Art Center, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and other contemporary institutions are shying away from challenging theme exhibitions, MOCA owns this turf and is very much the leader in this country.”

A feminist who’s who

FOR Butler, who arrived at MOCA in 1996, the big idea to be explored was feminist art.

“When I looked at what MOCA had done and what probably wouldn’t be done, it seemed to me that the feminist piece was a major gap. I thought it made sense to do it in Los Angeles because of the history of the movement here,” she says, referring to the creation of CalArts’ Feminist Art Program and the downtown L.A. Woman’s Building in the early 1970s. “With MOCA’s commitment to doing exhibitions that take on important chunks of postwar history and the space at the Geffen, there were a lot of reasons I thought it could happen here.”

But not easily.

“One of the things I did first, with Jenny Sorkin, who was then a Bard student working with me,” Butler says, “was to say, ‘OK, if the show was tomorrow, who would it be?’ We had a list of about 60 canonical women who had to be in. Then we went into archives to make as wide a pool as we could. We came up with a sort of A, B and C list. A was the canonical figures. C was where we had a name and knew nothing about the work. B was somewhere between. Some people on the C list moved up when we did the research. With others, it was impossible to find anything.

“Instead of working in the conventional way, where you begin with a narrative, I wanted to work from the outside in,” she says. “That was really important because of the feminist subject. We had to rethink it and make a real effort to be more inclusive. But from the beginning I also knew the show had to look absolutely powerful and compelling. People would ask, ‘What are you going to do with all the bad art?’ The show had to overcome that.”

Her concept of a show that would encompass a wide range of work -- including conceptual art, community-based projects and collective art-making -- remained constant. Arranged in thematic groups, there are collages of magazine advertisements by Martha Rosler, oil-on-canvas portraits by Alice Neel, an abstract woven sculpture by Magdalena Abakanowicz, a leather-covered wood head by Nancy Grossman, a crocheted environment by Faith Wilding and a video projection of a face in transition by Katharina Sieverding. But the geographical scope of the exhibition shifted from American to international and the time frame vacillated before she settled on the period in and around the 1970s.

“One question that came up was whether or not to include men,” Butler says. “In the beginning, it didn’t even occur to me. But when I talked to Catherine de Zegher, who organized a show called ‘Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of 20th Century Art in, of, and from the Feminine’ for the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the first thing she said was, ‘If I had it to do all over, I would include men.’ I got excited about that, but if you include men, that’s like 20 women you can’t have. I thought this show had to happen first.”

Is it a revisionist interpretation?

“It is and it isn’t,” she says. “It isn’t, because there hasn’t been this show yet. While pieces of the history have been written, we are still writing the history in all its complexity. The show is only one take on that. The revisionist part is the international component and an expanded definition of what feminist practice can be. There is a kind of academic feminism in the exhibition, the canonical list of people like Judy Chicago, Mimi Schapiro and Nancy Spiro, people we associate with feminist art and a certain kind of personal, biographical content. But then I’m trying to make the case that certain kinds of abstraction, like the work of Mary Heilman, Sylvia Plimack Mangold and Eva Hesse, can be included.”

All this adds up to “a show that’s really big and sprawling and speculative,” she says. “To think that an institution would put its weight behind this and see the blockbuster potential of something like feminist art is amazing. That, somehow, is MOCA. I really can’t think of another place that would have done it in the same way.”

suzanne.muchnic@latimes.com