The Guerrilla Girls Would Be Proud

Saturday night I checked out the Global Feminisms exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum.
The exhibit had some very powerful pieces, including Judy Chicago's "The Dinner Party".  Check out some of the works here.  All forms of media are represented.    The NY Times had an interesting review of the exhibit.  Read about it here.
The pieces I found most compelling use pain as a means of getting the point across.  Mary Coble does this with her piece "Binding Ritual" in which she takes duct tape and binds her breasts herself and removes the tape and repeats the whole process.  She does this over and over for about 11 minutes.  Coble shows absolutely no emotion while doing this, even though you can see how painful it is just by looking at the raw, redness of her breasts.  Her eyes just look empty.  I don't really know what it was about this piece in particular that I found so thought provoking.  Was it the lack of emotion?  Was it the intense pain?  Was it being confronted with the everyday struggle that a transgender person goes through in order to make themselves feel presentable to society?  Go check it out and let me know what you think.
I will say the one thing I truly found upsetting were the number of women who felt that the exhibit was too alarming, shocking, disturbing, and angry for them.  I guess these women live very sheltered lives and are never forced to deal with unsettling images.   It is a feminist art exhibit.  It isn't going to be about puppies, bunnies, jellybeans, and Prada bags.  Most feminist artists are not interested in creating happy works of art.  The don't want to paint flowers and children playing in a field.  They want you to think and feel something.  Believe me I saw works there that I found to be very unsettling to my psyche, but I'm glad I went.  These artists have a voice which needs to be heard.
Go on over and check it out.  As an added bonus there is all types of "eye candy" there.   Girly girls, bois, piercings, tattoos, militant baby dykes who think they can change the world.  Whatever your flava is you can find it at the Brooklyn Museum.