The Cindy-Shermanesque (but She’s the Real Thing) (2005) presents a cluster of images drawn from Zoe Crosher’s
on-going project, The Reconsidered Archive of Michelle du Bois. The archive comprises hundreds of images Crosher
inherited from du Bois, an American woman who worked as an escort as she traveled through Pacific Rim countries
during the 1970s and 80s, photographing herself every step of the way. In ordinary snapshot style, du Bois poses for
the camera, primps before the mirror, lounges in evening wear, or hams it up in cowgirl get-up. Du Bois appears in
such a great variety of costumes and hairstyles (including Farrah Fawcett’s famous flip hairstyle, a Dorothy Hamill
wedge, and an off-kilter brown wig) that she bears comparison with Cindy Sherman, the artist who famously dressed
in the guise of clichéd Hollywood heroines in her Untitled Film Stills of the late 1970s. If Sherman’s work suggested
that femininity is a kind of masquerade, rather than a natural or inherent set of attributes, Crosher and du Bois up
the ante. In The Cindy-Shermanesque (but She’s the Real Thing), “femininity” is seen to be the site of multiple and
conflicting fantasies relating to sexuality, exoticism, mass media, and capitalist exchange. “She’s the Real Thing,”
Crosher’s title tells us, yet du Bois reminds us that the everyday self, like femininity, is a fiction.
-MARIA DEL CARMEN CARRION & JILL DAWSEY, CURATORS
In the contemporary imagination, modern feminism is thought to be lodged firmly in the 1970s, bracketed by
post-’68 “bra-burners” and 1980s backlash. Recently major museum retrospectives, collaborative initiatives,
and symposia on feminist art (especially in Los Angeles and New York) have conferred an almost fashionable
status on the subject. Does institutional interest in feminism signal the movement’s continuing relevance, or
does it relegate it to the historical past, announcing its demise? Small Things End, Great Things Endure
demonstrates that artists continue to insist feminism—its histories, its theories, its politics— is unfinished business.
Far from a fleeting fashion, feminist art practice has gathered momentum.
Feminism is a movement that began long ago and has yet to hit its stride. As a form of politics and as a body
of thought, it has been characterized by an uneven development: its messages have spread in slow and unruly
ways, frequently hindered by lines of class and geography, by periods of backlash and denial, and by moments
of revivalism quickly co-opted by the marketplace (riot grrrl to bad girl to spice girl). Visionary science fiction
author Ursula K. Le Guin once observed that the women’s movement can be said to have gone on for over one
hundred and fifty years or nearly six hundred years, depending on whether one started with Seneca Fall (the
first women’s rights convention in the United States) or Christine de Pizan (that medieval harbinger of the woman’s
movement), but it has yet to last continuously beyond on generation. Today we see evidence to the contrary in the
emergence of an “expanded field” of feminist art practice, with feminsit thought opening onto a host of related concerns.
Historical conciousness, for example, is foregrounded in the work of Anna Maltz, Ali Naschke-Messing, Jen Smith,
and Mathilde ter Heijne, all of whom revist key figures or moments from the feminist past, retracing it as a means
to counteract our culture’s pervasive state of historical amnesia. Eve Fowler, Emily Roysdon, and Jonathan Solo
deploy the queer and transgender perspectives of discourses historically indebted to feminisim, staking a claim
for the visibility of “non-normative” bodies in the public sphere. In this works, such claims are inflected by a palpable
sense of pleasure that comes from eschewing norms and creating counter-narratives. Reflections on the mediated
body and feminine performativity are found in works by Zoe Crosher and Wynne Greenwood. Investigations into
social roles, the laboring body, and gendered institutions are trenchantly explored in the video works of Andrea Bowers,
Maja Bajevic, and Akosua Adoma Owusu.
Small Things End, Great Things Endure surveys emerging art now, aiming to take the pulse of a new generation’s
feminist activity. The exhibition proposes ways in which multiple and even contradictory models of feminism coexist
in this expanded field of feminist art production. Approaching feminism art not as glossary of stylistics concerns, or
as an archival moment embedded our recent history, Small Things End, Great Things Endure names an ongoing
political quest.
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