Recently, re-evaluations of the feminist contribution to post-modernist art have begun to emerge. One particular feminist strategy, frequently employed in the 80’s and 90’s, seems ripe for revisiting. During that period many women artists were driven to appropriate specific artworks by so-called “modern masters.” Usually these male artists were at least a generation older than the appropriators: Rachel Lachowitz and Carl Andre, Deborah Kass and Andy Warhol, Bonnie Rychlak and Donald Judd, Sue Williams and Richard Prince. Occasionally the gap was wider: Sherrie Levine and Marcel Duchamp, Kathy Grove and Andre Kertez, Janine Antoni and Jospeph Bueys. In all cases, however, some mixture of impudence, affection and/or desperate anger fueled these sometimes daring, sometimes sly “thefts.” Now that much has changed for women artists, it is perhaps important to review a moment when women felt the need to confront particularly iconic male artists—“feminina a mano,”that is to say, combat with a woman’s touch.

Some of these projects may have expressed a desire to “correct” an overtly or subtly sexist image. Richard Prince’s “dirty jokes,” themselves appropriated, played deliberately around the edges of offense; Sue Williams’caricatures rudely refused the ambiguity, making the victimization both clear and burlesqued. In a similar move towards exaggeration , Deborah Kass took the hints of misogyny and anti-semitism in Warhol’s before and after rhinoplasty to the extreme rebuttal: Barbara Streisand’s triumphant refusal to alter her most tellingly “jewish” feature.

Often, faced with an unrelentingly macho strain in miminalist sculpture, the urge to “feminize” choice examples of the same was overwhelming. Thus Bonnie Rychlak’s decision to perpetrate the unspeakable on Donald Judd’s withholding boxes. Buttons, bows, and cushions desecrate the minimalist cube, rendered additionally “soft” by Rychlak’s wax facture. Rachel Lachowitz’s lipstick replacement of Andre’s heavy metal squares functioned similarly.

Claims to transcendental powers were equally challenged. By associating Bueys’ mythically restorative fat with ritualistc eating and regurgitating of her materials—fat, chocolate, soap—Janine Antoni inflects her tub of lard with issues of anorexia and bulimia.

For Sherrie Levine and Kathy Grove appropriation was not simply a tactic but the informing principle of all their work. In removing the female figure from countless “masterpieces” of western art, Grove effectively demonstrated its lynchpin role—the voyeuristic impulse at the heart of an entire visual tradition. Her Kertez extraction is no exception but the everyday familiarity of its black and white modernity heightens the eeriness of this particularly seamless removal. And when Levine recasts a Duchamp mallic mold in frosted glass and sets it inside a pristine vitrine the reversals are evident: prurience turns frigid and the implied violence of Duchamp’s cracked class is disarmed, the work’s much-revered iconclasm made into a bijou.

This exhibition will explore the differing relationships between appropriator and appropriated. Pickpocket or flatterer? Sneak or rebel? Admiring alcolyte or pissed-off competitor? Like a mime who shadows us on a public street, these “copies” invoke the same uneasy mixture of amusement, anger, flattery, embarrassment, and insight.

A few selected images:

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