Выставка активистки Андреа Бауэрс в музее Glenstone вызвала у зрителей разочарование

Undoubtedly, the Andrea Bowers exhibition at the Glenstone Museum in Maryland is meant to get people excited. Bowers is a far-left artist and activist, and her art is intended to stir us to social action. From the museum guide: For over three decades, Andrea Bowers has spotlighted social injustices and inequalities through her work, addressing systemic inequities and amplifying global uprisings and political movements. Her artistic practice is rooted in a longstanding commitment to activism. Finished artworks span a variety of media, including installation, drawing, video, text, ribbons, and prints. Bowers takes inspiration from decades of personal participation in protests, archival research, and community interviews. She translates advocacy and resistance into artworks that empower and inform her audience while simultaneously bringing solidarity into exhibition spaces. Still, the effect of seeing Andrea Bowers’ art was mostly enervation. This kind of angry political art is by now very old hat. Take the first room one enters at the exhibit. In Wall of Letters: Necessary Reminders from the Past for a Future of Choice, Bowers has simply reproduced dozens of letters of women seeking abortions, as well as guides on how to perform abortions, blown them up to poster size, and wallpapered a huge white room with them. This performative exercise might have shocked people a few decades ago, but by now the public has already absorbed and passed its judgment on the nonsense of artists like Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano. We have moved on. A hectoring and didactic display meant to incite insurrection in defense of abortion is old news. I mean, I was around to see Karen Finley smear herself with chocolate! Bowers does better in the other rooms at Glenstone, which feature her pieces The Body is Not a Thing, It’s a Situation and Women and the Earth Have to Tolerate a Lot. Bowers has reproduced book illustrations, both from 1896, on square panels of cardboard. The illustrations themselves are quite beautiful, lovely representations of women in flowing Victorian dresses bodies intertwined. The original drawings were meant to illuminate women as deeply powerful and fertile beings with a seamless and metaphysical connection to nature. Then there are the works Ecofeminist Sycamore Branches: Women Have Always Thought Like Mountains, which feature tree branches illuminated with neon. The irony, of course, is that Bowers is using imagery evocative of the sensual and generative power of women to argue for killing babies.