What Is Feminist Art?

There's no easy answer, just an effort to ask the question as potently as possible. In Tutti's art, as in work by her more famous peers Cindy Sherman and Martha Rosler, there's also a crucial questioning of how images of women function in society. This is a crucial precedent for the broader questioning of images that artists, of all stripes and both genders, have been doing ever since. It may be feminism's greatest contribution to the history of art.

The funny thing is, classic feminism's shadow may loom so large over contemporary female artists that it's hard for them to crawl out from under it. The artists in "Global Feminisms," a group show of recent feminist art that inaugurates the Sackler Center in Brooklyn, address many of the same themes their foremothers did, using the same media and strategies. But they mostly manage to make their work feel stylish, rather than genuinely risky. It's as though the passionate engagement that led the earlier feminists to make the work they did has become a superficial artistic device.

Political engagement and the media and imagery associated with it -- in feminist art, but also in most other kinds of artistic activism -- have become components in a with-it style, on par with playful abstraction or hipster cartooning. Which makes today's activist-inflected art a very different thing from what feminism turned out in the 1960s. According to Lucy Lippard, a veteran feminist who got a standing ovation at the MoMA feminism conference -- before her talk had even started -- women's art in its first 1970s flowering was built around "a value system, a revolutionary strategy, a way of life." It was "neither a style nor a movement."

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I can hear them already: Pencils being sharpened as readers get ready to write in about some artistic medium or approach that seems typical of feminism, but that was in fact used by one or another male artist before the women got to it. There was video art before the feminists made any. Performance was already well underway when Yoko Ono started doing her stuff. Though staged photography may make Cindy Sherman one of the most impressive figures in "Wack!," there had been plenty of it before she came along.

All that, however, misses a crucial point: Feminist art wasn't about the "either/or" of traditional art history, where one preening artist -- almost always male -- tries to assert his way of making art as the "next big thing," in part by elbowing rival artists and approaches out of the way. Feminism was about "both/and," in the service of coming to grips with a massive issue that was more than any one artist, or way of making art, could ever deal with. Where men had always jockeyed for place, feminists believed in rewriting the rules of the horse race.

Many of the works in "Wack!" don't have a single author; lots don't have any artistic "product" in the normal sense, beyond a few tattered records of some long-lost agitation. Artistic collectives, sometimes doubling as rock bands, are an especially hot property on the art scene now, but it's worth recognizing that feminists were ganging together and acting up, and out, before most of today's art stars were even born, and before collaboration was any kind of selling point.

Butler, who organized the L.A. show and is now at MoMA, talks about "feminist art's lofty and romantic striving for nothing less than a complete reorganization of cultural hierarchies." That, she says, is why she wanted "Wack!" to offer more than a small "canon" of feminist luminaries or a clear ranking of feminism's many different approaches to artmaking. As she puts it, "something about the subject of feminist art inspires a healthy sense of expansiveness, resistance and subversion."

That may be the most crucial way in which the feminist art of the 1960s and 1970s foreshadows where we are today: Feminism can be thought of as the crucial movement of the recent past because it could act as an umbrella for any number of approaches to making art. On the surface at least, that evenhandedness resembles the way the entire art world now functions. It encourages a vast range of attitudes and media and forms, with each one valued, in theory, for whatever point it's most suited to making -- but maybe, more accurately, for whatever market niche it fills. The art world may be sales-obsessed and socially complacent, but in its ideal vision of itself, what a work of art is made from or looks like is supposed to matter less than what it is about.

Feminism helped put such notions into play.