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  • Exhibiting Genders
  • Kathryn Holland (bio)
elles@centrepompidou. Musée national d’art moderne (Centre Pompidou), Paris, 27 May 2009—21 February 2011. Curated by Camille Morineau with Associate Curators Quentin Bajac, Cécile Debray, Valérie Guillaume, and Emma Lavigne, assisted by Aurélien Lemonier and Étienne Sandrin.
elles@centrepompidou: Women Artists in the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre de Création Industrielle. Camille Morineau and Annalisa Rimmaudo, eds. Paris: Éditions Centre Pompidou, 2009. 329 illustrations. Pp. 384. $54.33 (paper) elles.centrepompidou.fr

An arresting figure presides over the Place Beaubourg at the Centre Pompidou. Set against a black background and shower of red sparks, a young woman stares into the distance; with only her head visible, she is cast in a bright orange light and framed by the fierce swirl of her hair. The image, a video still from À la belle étoile (2007) by installation artist Pipilotti Rist, appears in the primary billboard for elles@centrepompidou. As crowds’ first encounter with the exhibition, it makes an effectively explosive introduction.

The scope and structure of elles@centrepompidou are bold and provocative. Running from 27 May 2009 to 21 February 2011 with changes in January 2010, the multidisciplinary exhibition is the third thematic hang of the Musée national d’art moderne’s permanent collection, following Big Bang (2005–2006) and Le Mouvement des Images (2006–2007). It presents approximately 500 works of art by more than 200 women from the early-twentieth century to the present, placing works by established, lesser known, and emergent artists beside each [End Page 431] other. Like its two predecessors, elles eschews chronology in favor of conceptual orientations. Led by Camille Morineau, the curators’ focus on the permanent collection produces an incisive critical history of the museum’s aesthetic and ideological visions from its beginnings in 1947. The exhibition also prompts audiences to find fresh points of contact and divergences by lifting most of its works from their historical moments and juxtaposing them within such thematic groups as “The Activist Body,” “Eccentric Abstraction,” “Industrial,” and “Reflexive.” By showing pieces created outside and within feminist frameworks, elles extends the dialogues about later-twentiethcentury art and polemics recently stimulated by the establishment of the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art and by the touring exhibition, WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, launched by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

elles begins with later-twentieth-century and contemporary art, and the majority of the exhibition addresses the artistic and political shifts of these periods. It opens with Agnès Thurnauer’s Portraits Grandeur Nature (2007–2009), a series of twelve brightly colored, giant name badges that present eleven well-known male modern artists as women (Jeanne Nouvel, Miss van der Rohe, Marcelle Duchamp) and one, Louise Bourgeois, as a male Louis. Through its vibrant, irreverent style Thurnauer’s work becomes a companion to the Guerrilla Girls’ poster “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” (1989), which is part of the show’s first section and still retains its interrogative bite. Produced twenty years apart, the two pieces turn viewers’ attention to the persistently severe gender imbalances in art and art history, while they invite considerations of how the exhibition itself and the individual works within it alter those imbalances.

Filling most of the Pompidou’s fourth level, this section of elles is divided into six major themes, with four to ten rooms devoted to each theme. Starting with “Free Fire,” it continues with “The Activist Body,” “Eccentric Abstractions,” “A Room of One’s Own,” “Wordworks,” and “Immaterial.” The range of elles is quickly evident in “Free Fire,” which brings together works that critique sociopolitical concepts and events. They include Niki de Saint Phalle’s oversized papier-mache women from the mid-1960s; Sanja Iveković’s Personal Cuts video (1982); Annette Messager’s Les Piques (1992–1993), a cluster of spiked photographs and soft objects; Wendy Jacobs’s 1993 “breathing forms” fabric installation, The Somnambulist; and The Haunted House, Zineb Sedira’s 2006 photography of the Algerian seafront. Appropriately, “The Activist Body” follows “Free Fire.” This area emphasizes innovations by women in photography and video art...

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