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Judy Chicago ends her retrospective with other women. It could hardly be otherwise, when her best-known work, The Dinner Party, relied on the assistance of four hundred. With its place settings for thirty-nine more, it sought to span recorded history as well.

No surprise, then, if she devotes a full floor of her retrospective to women across the centuries and across the arts, at the New Museum. It could hardly be otherwise, when she titles it “Herstory,” through March 3. And yes, it is shameful that I am posting this late, but at least the review in full was always online.

For her, a women’s history is not just recovered but created again each time, and so is art—not as a male saga of lone genius, but as a collaboration. She reserves a place for goddesses as well as humans as well. She keeps coming back, too, to acts of birth. Will women still recognize it as their own? I have my doubts. If you ask me, art and activism need not more primordial women, but fewer male gods.

New York was not new to her in 1980, when The Dinner Party reached the Brooklyn Museum. (It later found a permanent home at the museum, as anchor to its Sackler Center for Feminist Art.) She and her first husband had hitchhiked to New York in the 1960s, living briefly in Greenwich Village. Still, she felt new to New York. She left a personal stamp on feminism, one that not everyone could accept but many have loved—one rooted in primordial beings and present-day sex organs. For a fuller answer, I work a longer version of this review together with a recent earlier report on Shahzia Sikander as my latest upload.

I have my qualms about questioning either one. It aligns me with conservative critics like Hilton Kramer of The New York Times, who trashed her back then along with pretty much all postwar American art. It puts me, a white male, in the position of speaking for feminism when I hope to support it. And Chicago’s retrospective does offer a greater diversity, including the glassware, ceramics, and embroidery of those place settings. She deserves credit, too, for founding the Feminist Art Project at Cal State Fresno and later, with Miriam Schapiro, at Cal Arts. Still, whatever her history or herstory, she is always at its center.

Banners hang over The City of Women, that floor-scale installation, with one in particular flying high, What If Women Ruled the World? And here they do rule, but at a cost. You will spot paintings by Hilma af Klint, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and Georgia O’Keeffe, amid less-compelling models for Symbolism and Abstraction. You will spot those who refuse to be reduced to “significant others,” like Dora Maar (for Pablo Picasso), Frida Kahlo (for Diego Rivera), Leonora Carrington (for Max Ernst). You will spot Käthe Kollwitz next to Martha Graham, with an eye to how women pose, and painters near books and photographs of writers, with labels you may never find. For all its wonders, it eradicates differences and reduces everyone.

Even so, Chicago keeps demanding more. She took the Feminist Art Project seriously. Her classes became Womanhouse—collaborations with her chosen students, with their everyday lives as performance art, and she credits the resulting film and photographs to them and not to herself. She does not abandon spray paint and lacquer, now on vinyl on canvas. Still, in adopting a radial motif and at times ceramics, she is well on her way to the strengths and weaknesses of The Dinner Party. I may not like it, but it anchors the Sackler Center and the feminist revolution to this day.

Embroidery and collaboration carry over to the Birth Project of the early 1980s, with at least one hundred fifty women to execute the needlepoint. Colors darken, but not for long. Men get their project, too, but with articulated musculature and grimaces that had me grimacing as well. Still, she adopts the translucency of stained glass for her Rainbow Shabbat of 1992. She also collaborates with her present husband, Donald Woodman, on a larger Holocaust project and, in New Mexico, a co-ed follow-up to Womanhouse. Women’s roles have become gender roles in a racially torn America.

Chicago gets all three principal floors, including the last for her city of art and women. If you happen to begin there, so much the better. It makes clear how much her hopes do not depend on birthing. She herself never bothered with motherhood. As she told The Guardian, “There was no way on this earth I could have had children and the career I’ve had.” Her work is still tacky, sentimental, and reductive, but she gave it her all.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Well, okay, one more review that somehow slipped through the cracks this fall. Mire Lee does everything she can to turn you away. Elevator doors at the New Museum opened not long ago onto barely enough room to exit and the face of a seemingly unfinished wall.

On my first attempt to get past, a curatorial assistant turned me away. She said that the installation was not quite ready, and it does depend on a messy assemblage of motors and materials to set it in motion. Still, could it have fooled even her? Lee has many more deceptions in store, and she is out quite literally to take you in, with Black Sun through September 27.

Just for starters, what looked like bare Sheetrock and metal studs is anything but. It is complete enough, thank you, and of materials better suited to retain raw feelings, moisture, and the smell. What promised a partition, waiting to display and beyond it to disclose her art, is just one wall of a tarnished shelter filling much of the museum’s top floor. It has ample room for museum visitors, but it is stifling enough all the same. The skylit floor that so opened up last year for Kapwani Kiwanga has become confining, doubling the museum walls and then some. Just entering, through two sets of vertical plastic blinds, should let you know.

Once inside, you may have an overpowering urge to leave. Two pits in the floor hold the very blood and guts of art. One sculpture, like her Endless House at the Venice Biennale, looks like oversized intestines starved for a meal. It really might take you in. The other could be a whole body, threateningly large, but flayed and left to die. I thought that I could make out a penis, but after that you are on your own.

Each sculpture is also part of or subject to a machine. It drips its thick white goo into the pits, where small rods at the edges churn the mixture as best they can. It leaves its dark stains on the slick walls and its odor of gelatin, silicone, plaster, and oil in the air. It may have you in need of fresh air not because it is all that intense, but because it is gross. Then again, you may hesitate to leave, despite yourself. This is after all material for thought and for art.

Like Sue de Beer before her, the Korean artist takes her title from a book by Julia Kristeva that gives voice to depression, the French writer’s included. As a theorist with roots in psychoanalysis, she has much in common with Jacques Lacan, but with less post-structuralist jargon and a greater openness to art. Art, she writes, can “bypass complacency,” and beauty can be sad, because it “is inseparable from the ephemeral and hence from mourning.” (Think of the ephemeral in, say, the constant motion of a machine.) It returns her to the tradition of Sigmund Freud—for whom depression was “melancholia,” the body was inescapable, and disgust was a way of distancing oneself from desires and fears. Kristeva gives her longest chapter to the stark nudity of Hans Holbein and his Dead Christ in the Tomb.

Minimalism this is not, but it does have Post-Minimalism’s bodily presence and fears, from Eva Hesse to the present. Is this pretentious as well as disgusting? Maybe so, but the machine and the body take many forms. Off to the side, a video has abstract shapes, artificial materials, or bodily forms in motion, and I hesitate to say which. (I thought first of walruses.) But then I was inside, where the remaining were at least in part my own.

Lee’s environment is hardly paradise, but then what is? A seventy-foot mural in the lobby gallery shows Eden itself as an unruly place—enough to accommodate Lilith, Adam’s first wife in myth. A “she-demon” who raised his children while refusing to grant him supremacy, she has no place in the Bible, but she does turn up in The Original Riot, by Wynnie Mynerva. Born on the outskirts of Lima, in Peru, Mynerva relishes a spoiled paradise, with lush brushwork to match. Not that one can make out a story or, for that matter, count the characters. But, hey, it’s a jungle out there.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Once again, allow me to use a holiday week to catch up with some posts that never made it to the blog. It has been a busy fall.Tuan Andrew Nguyen knows for whom the bell tolls. He has sculpted an impressive one out of unexploded weaponry, the kind that still covers 80 percent of a province in Vietnam. Yet it tolls not death, but a healing note in Asian tradition—and who can say which will be his inheritance?

In “Inheritance” at the Whitney Museum, an artist’s inheritance is a simple matter of pride. How does that apply to a country after nearly fifty years of Communist rule and, before that, thirty years of colonial and civil wars? Nguyen still asks for healing in a divided nation. Born in Saigon in 1976, barely a year after the city fell to the north and the last Americans were airlifted out, he lives and works to this day in what is now Ho Chi Minh City. Yet he cannot forget what he himself never knew. It has become, in the exhibition’s title, his “Radiant Remembrance,” at the New Museum through this past September 27.

It is a show of shared memories and contested ground, going back to the first Indochina war, from 1946 to 1954, when the French conscripted men from its colonies in Senegal and Morocco as tirailleurs—riflemen, sharpshooters, or snipers. The word sounds ever so quaint for forced labor in a deadly modern war. The soldiers brought death to families like those in documentary photos covering a wall at the show’s entrance. Some still seek acceptance and forgiveness. To judge by Nguyen’s videos, it will come willingly but not easily. The very titles speak of little else, as The Specter of Ancestors Becoming, The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon, and Because No One Will Listen.

Taken together, the three add up to the length of a feature-length film, and one can only wander among them as across unexploded mines, wondering what one has missed and who will survive. In the longest, a man begs for a young woman’s understanding, and she herself comes under harsh questioning from others. In a four-channel video, speakers at a microphone speak for the resented and forgotten while rapt faces take in the broadcast. In the last, a woman recites a letter to her lost father, while the images speak to a treacherous landscape of soothing waters and bare, twisted trees. Not everyone would want to claim this inheritance. Many have no choice.

For Americans, the Vietnam War is something to forget. Back then, it was either a brave fight against world communism or the arrogance of a global empire, with little to say for the Vietnamese themselves. For Nguyen, America’s incursion was only a blip in a longer domestic conflict. His videos never once mention it, although its impact is everywhere. He is hardly the only one to have “repurposed” mines and bombs. As art, though, they take on unexpected resonance. They ring out with allusions to the United States.

Unexploded Resonance recalls the Liberty Bell in its scale and wood armature. It might also look at home at the Isamu Noguchi Museum were the found wood not so ornate. Other ordnance has become simulated Calder mobiles—or what Alexander Calder might have produced had he cared for polished metal and reflected light. Nguyen has an eye for beauty, just as he has an ear for shame. Is he also taking a shot at those Americans who never seem to know how to listen? Maybe, but he alludes to Vietnam as well.

As curated by Vivian Crockett with Ian Wallace, the sculpture could serve as props for the videos. They continue the story as well. The mobiles hint at celestial bodies, with titles like A Rising Moon Through the Smoke, Firebird, Rolling Thunder, and Starlite. A Buddhist god in carved wood has golden prostheses for Nguyen’s shattered arms. Can the bell really sound a healing note? Across from video, it is notable for its silence.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.