I recently saw the film !Women Art Revolution by Lynn Hershman Leeson during TIFF. !WAR is a compilation of over 40 years of film taken by Hershman Leeson, an artist herself (image above), and features candid interviews with fellow peers including Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, Marcia Tucker, Guerrilla Girls, Miranda July, Mike Kelley, Hannah Wilke (image below) and Yvonne Rainer among others.
The film's focus, which I'm sure is painfully obvious, is the exclusion of females from the art historical canon. The film's bigger picture however tracks the progress, or rather lack thereof, of the feminist movement.

!WAR is fascinating, not only because it contains never-before-seen personal footage or that it's filled with women discussing women (besides Mike Kelley and what could've been Eric Fishl who had been filmed, I found out in the Q&A, but asked that it not be included...), but also because it balanced the oppression of women with some inspiring humour, found in the Guerrilla Girls and the inimitable Marcia Tucker.

Speaking of, some of my favourite moments of the film were when Tucker. Tucker, who held positions with the Whitney and help found the New Museum, maintained an unusual sense of humour in trying times, including having had a lower salary than her male counterparts throughout her career and later being suddenly let go at the Whitney.


The women of !WAR also discussed the untimely passing of Ana Mendieta. Mendieta's work, like much of the work by the artists included in the film, dealt with body politics and gender constructs. Her outdoor installations seemed to have appeared from the artist pressing her entire body into the earth as if to create these superficial graves (image above). Filling them with water, fire, bones and blood, curators have situated her work into Kristeva's (another incredible female figure in art history) matrix of abject theory. Her marriage to sculptor Carl Andre, the events surrounding her death, and the splitting in opinion of the community is like a microcosm of the doc's at large.

The artwork from the women of !WAR wasn't necessarily easy to digest, but it's that there were so few opportunities for public consumption of the work. !WAR thereby provides a fascinating summary of some of the overlooked female artists (not Frida, O'Keefe, Morisot or Cassatt) that punctuated feminist history since the sixties.