Listen up Durango.
“Exploring Feminism: Beauty or Bondage?” the new exhibit at The Durango Art Center, admonishes viewers to pay attention to the subordination of women. Stiletto heels, head scarves and a lone pink corset lie in wait.
The show features work by three presenters: mixed-media visual artist Judy Hayes, poet-performer Pamela Nocerino, and conceptual photographer Savanna Goodman. Along with interactive stations where viewers can respond to Feminist posters, write a poem, or post a comment, there’s a short video about Suffragettes and the #MeToo movement.
The exhibition statement underscores the show’s purpose: “to intrigue and educate audiences to better understand the suffering, denigration and exploitation of women around the world.” That’s a tall order for one show at a community arts center.
“Beauty or Bondage” is a didactic exhibition with a mission. It comes down hard on American standards for beauty and status, but it falls short delivering a world view. Selecting well-known tropes like ancient Chinese foot binding or tribal neck stretching, the exhibit judges everything by today’s American standards. What’s missing is the perspective of cultural anthropology where global societies establish their own hierarchies, social markers, and standards. Your neck rings – our pierced ears. Your shaved eyebrows – our tattoos.
The show offers views from two generations of feminists. Hayes, who admits to an awakening in the 1970s, exhibits paintings and collages that burn into the present. Nocerino and Goodman ignite post-#MeToo revelations through poetry and stunning conceptual photographs.
Mixed together, the extremely different works would have benefited if presented in separate displays.
Hayes represents the Betty Friedan generation, particularly in her paintings about the imprint of a Catholic education infused with Western fairy tales. In dark, amorphous settings, her passive nudes contemplate various subjects from male hierarchies to literary tropes. Mixed-media constructions explore a few aesthetic practices like foot binding with references to culturally-sanctioned beauty requirements.
“You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby,” is Hayes’s strongest piece. A clockface carries images of high heels with a tiny pair of oriental slippers dangling below. A pair of earphones lets you listen to the music.
Nocerino’s poems are mounted as art objects. One playful installation activates one aspect of her practice. “Underneath” has two parts: wall-mounted underpants over a magnet board filled with words. Viewers are invited to create a poem about one’s relationship to undergarments. Nocerino’s latest chapbook is for sale on a book table: “A Palace of Waning.”
Goodman’s staged photographs provocatively reimagine current dilemmas. From the “When It’s You” series, a collaborative project spinning off the famous Holocaust poem by Martin Niemöller, Goodman targets book burning in “Fahrenheit 45-7,” the American health industry in “It’s all in your head,” and most satirically, the Supreme Court after reversing Roe V Wade in “When there are nine.” Nine women plus a female doctor surround a male patient who is strapped into stirrups on an examining table. Funny and frightening, it speculates on who has the right to choose and what to extract.
“Beauty or Bondage?” is an ambitious show. It’s also text-heavy, so plan time for reading explanatory cards and contributing your own thoughts at the interactive stations.
Something cultural anthropologists would suggest, and some feminist art exhibits have employed, a full-length mirror. One’s own reflection might balance American judgmentalism with an invitation to self-awareness. A mirror would invite viewers to check acquiescence to our own standards of beauty.
What are you wearing? Lipstick, makeup, eye liner? Jewelry? Pierced ears? Long “Melania” hair? Shoes? Tattoos?
All of the above are current markers for social class, status, age, and/or gender in the good old USA.
Judith Reynolds is an arts journalist and member of the American Theatre Critics Association.