“Sense and Sensibility: Women Artists and Minimalism in the Nineties” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
June 16–September 11, 1994
More and more, artists today encompass less and less. The sum of their concerns amounts to little more than the banal, the trivial, and the puerile, as the works they produce speak of imaginative horizons shrunken to pinpoint size.
The latest example of this trend is “Sense and Sensibility: Women Artists and Minimalism in the Nineties,” now on view at MOMA. The object of the exhibition, which features work by seven artists—Polly Apfelbaum, Mona Hatoum, Rachel Lachowicz, Jac Leirner, Claudia Matzko, Rachel Whiteread, and Andrea Zittel—is to show how Minimalism’s vocabulary of the grid, repetitive forms, and geometric structure has been annexed to the expression of feminist ideas.
The first thing to note about the show is how appallingly jejune and numbingly boring its contents are: rows of museum shopping bags; a “color chart” made from eye-shadow containers; wire-mesh lockers arranged around a bare light bulb; six suspended bird cages covered in lipstick; the plaster cast of a room; stained material on the floor. Minimalist, to be sure: little ideas, taken nowhere.
Lynn Zelevansky, the show’s curator, would not agree with this assessment, but then her views are suspect.
Lynn Zelevansky, the show’s curator, would not agree with this assessment, but then her views are suspect. Like virtually every rising museum person these days (she is a curatorial assistant in MOMA