| Without a doubt, Sculpture Center’s early summer show, Decoys, Complexes, and Triggers: Feminism and Land Art in the 1970s, was an excellent exhibition of under-recognized work by female installation artists and sculptors of that decade. These exemplary artists—Alice Aycock, Mary Miss, and Nancy Holt, to name a few—created large-scale, abstract works of minimalist aesthetic that reconsidered the three-dimensional space around them and encouraged the viewer to do the same. Despite being groundbreaking in both scale and scope, many of these artists were passed over in the 70s in favor of their male contemporaries, like Donald Judd, Michael Heizer, and Robert Smithson, some of whom preferred to stay inside the gallery setting, a place that championed the white male artist. | 
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Éva Pelczer
Decoys, Complexes, and Triggers: Feminism and Land Art in the 1970s was on view at the Sculpture Center in July.
Photo credit: Jason Mandella. Courtesy of Sculpture Center and the artists, 2008.Without a doubt, Sculpture Center’s early summer show, Decoys, Complexes, and Triggers: Feminism and Land Art in the 1970s, was an excellent exhibition of under-recognized work by female installation artists and sculptors of that decade. These exemplary artists—Alice Aycock, Mary Miss, and Nancy Holt, to name a few—created large-scale, abstract works of minimalist aesthetic that reconsidered the three-dimensional space around them and encouraged the viewer to do the same. Despite being groundbreaking in both scale and scope, many of these artists were passed over in the 70s in favor of their male contemporaries, like Donald Judd, Michael Heizer, and Robert Smithson, some of whom preferred to stay inside the gallery setting, a place that championed the white male artist.
For this reason the renewed recognition given to the artists of Decoys, Complexes, and Triggers carries a lot of import. Insight into the work (some of which hasn’t been shown since their original exhibition) is given through photographs, interviews, and sketches. However, the slightly cluttered nature of presentation, as well as the exhibition of only a handful of actual works (several are represented only in photographs) lends the work an archaic air, as if what is seen should be appreciated more historically than artistically. This creates a potentially self-defeating version of feminism—if Decoys reduces its female artists to markers within a socio-political movement, where does that leave the art and the women themselves?
The exhibition’s main gallery contained several large-scale forms, the most immediately noticeable of which was Alice Aycock’s Stairs (These Stairs Can Be Climbed), a wide flight of stairs leading up to the dead end of the gallery ceiling. Humorously provocative in its demand of an exaggerated involvement from the viewer, it quite literally asked for a different view of the gallery, while exuding a sort of futility—the last few stairs were impossible to climb. Another compelling work was Screened Court, Mary Miss’s octagonal wood-and-steel creation, in which layers of mesh fanned out invitingly from an impenetrably layered core. The piece was at once open and, paradoxically, completely exclusive. Jackie Winsor’s Coil Piece and Cement Sphere, both aptly named, dominated nearby space; these objects, sitting serenely on the floor, conveyed a sense of strength, weight, and tactility with a restrained elegance.
Moving into the smaller room of the gallery space, one was confronted by four walls of photographs, some drawings, and two video monitors, showing loops of interviews with some of the artists featured on the walls. The photographs depicted, to varying degrees of thoroughness, at least six different outdoor installations by artists such as Alice Adams (Shorings) and Michelle Stuart (Niagara River Gorge Path Relocated). In contrast to the photographs in the main room (of Agnes Dene’s Wheatfield and Nancy Holt’s Views Through a Sand Dune and Sun Tunnels, for example) these images are black-and-white, and some works were represented by only one or two photographs, which deeply undercut their effectiveness (it was difficult enough to get a sense of a work through images alone).
Adding to the traffic on the walls were the two looping videos; the room was not quite large enough to isolate sound from either one, and so some very compelling looks into the artists’ viewpoints and processes were smothered (the lack of clear labels, always risky with the packing of six features onto one video, added to the confusion). However, the videos themselves were intriguing. Nancy Holt gave us an extended look into the creation of Dark Star Park (and the engineering and mechanics that dominated land art of this scale), and Mary Miss was one of several insightful interviews on the second monitor.
Land art, three decades ago, was not popularly considered “feminine” work. The women of Decoys, Complexes, and Triggers, however, forged new paths in redefining the limitations set on their work and their image as female artists. Curator Sarina Basta imparted a deep respect for these women, evident in both the scope of the exhibition and her approach to curating it: she asked the artists themselves to choose which works would best represent them in the show.
The issue surrounding such an exhibition is not, perhaps, fault on the curator’s end, but a more historically persistent problem: that of having to divide the women artists from those of the opposite gender in order to give them deserved recognition, and in so doing increasing the tendency to keep them in this group, removed, and oftentimes, labeled as a homogenous “kind” of art (“feminist,” or to some, “irrelevant”). Thus, even a politically-minded, or art-historical, approach is somewhat self-defeating. The organization of the back room of Decoys appeared to veer toward this end, in that it seemed more of a harried cobbling of female land art ephemera than a thorough documentation of the pieces, unlike the works shown in the main gallery.
These complicated problems are the result of both approach and circumstance, the latter of which cannot always be helped (availability of works and space, participation of artists). It is, however, telling, that we are seeing this collection of works (as well as other retrospectives of female artwork, such as WACK!) over three decades after their debut. Decoys had some successes and some failings—in some places its format succumbed to the pitfalls of tribute exhibitions of female artists, but the array of work and artists exhibited in the first place was inspired, and, in effect, truly significant.
