by Jon Lackman | 5 May 2009 | Contemporary, Museums
Lee Rosenbaum attended the press preview for Pictures Generation, “the Metropolitan Museum’s much discussed, uncharacteristically risk-taking theme show.” The preview was convened by Douglas Eklund, the Met’s associate curator for photography, but she found herself more interested in the thoughts of Douglas Crimp, also in attendance, whose 1977 “Pictures” exhibition at Artists Space “provided the seed from which the Met’s show grew … [with its] display of five artists—Robert Longo, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Troy Brauntuch and Philip Smith.” Crimp tells Rosenbaum, among other things, that
[Eklund] gave a certain amount of attention to the importance of women and I think that has to be really emphasized. In his first wall text, he mentions feminism but then he goes on to define the influence of feminism as something like, “It doesn’t matter what the gender of the artist is.” [The wall text stated that feminism "made it possible for woman artists to define themselves as artists who happened to be women."]
I think that’s NOT the lesson of feminism. The lesson of feminism is in the kind of art that’s being made and the kinds or propositions that were being made through the art—the critique of originality, for example, which is something I already argued for early on with respect to Sherrie Levine and Cindy Sherman. I think that’s a feminist perspective and that is a crucial aspect of this formation of artists. I didn’t recognize that at the time.
I don’t think that the work of Louise Lawler—probably the artist I feel closest to, in relation to my subsequent work—can be understood without taking account of second-wave feminism.
