Earnestly exploring the world of women

WELLESLEY - I went into "Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art" all fired up: Here was a chance to see new work by dozens of women from around the world, grappling with issues of feminine identity, just the kind of thing I love.

I left the exhibit weary and irked.

The show is no snoozer - indeed, it's sometimes harrowing and occasionally funny. Overall, though, it's too earnest, scattered, often scolding, and dour. "Global Feminisms" has come to the Davis Museum at Wellesley College direct from the new Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. It was organized by that institution's curator, Maura Reilly, and Linda Nochlin, a feminist scholar at New York University who co-curated "Women Artists: 1550-1950," a pioneering exhibit in 1976.

That show helped break open the canon to women. This one aspires to look forward. Only artists born since 1960 have been included, and most of them do not come from the United States or Europe. There's a predominance of new-media art - especially photography and video - and less in the way of painting and sculpture. Sadly, too many of the themes are retreads.

In the last 20 years, feminist theory has come to embrace all issues of social justice, not just the oppression of women. The word "feminisms" in the show's title declares that everyone can have her own. That plurality, Reilly trumpets in her catalog essay, "aims to dismantle restrictive dichotomies (us/them, center/periphery, white/black) in favor of an examination of themes about the individual and collective experiences of women cross-culturally."

Good art often brings opposites together in startling ways, and some of the work here does that. Look at Moroccan photographer Latifa Echakhch's sweet yet defiant "Pin Up (Self-Portrait)" showing the artist as a sexually ambiguous Muslim youth seated on a prayer rug, touching her foot - a taboo act in those circumstances, according to the catalog.

The art is organized into categories such as multiculturalism, power and violence, sexuality and the body, and self-portraiture. Not enough of the exhibit focuses on empowered women. An exception is "Mahuika," a digital photo by New Zealand artist Lisa Reihana. The dramatic portrait of a regal old woman in a skirt glowing with reds celebrates the Maori goddess of fire.

More of the show revolves around victimization and the dichotomy of oppressed and oppressor. Worldwide, such social-justice issues need to be witnessed and remedied. Artists must approach them with rigor and wisdom, or else the work ends up shrill and one-note.

That's the case with Japanese photographer Ryoko Suzuki, who wrapped her head in twined pigskin soaked in blood. Wall text says she equates blood with female sexuality. While that makes a little sense, this violent image ignores all the wonderful things about women's sexuality. American Mary Coble's angry video "Binding Ritual, Daily Routine" evokes a cringe as the artist wraps duct tape around her bare breasts, then tears it off.

Serbian Milica Tomic's video "I am Milica Tomic" has the artist introducing herself in several languages; with each iteration, more wounds appear on her body. The piece, made in 1998-99, starkly rebukes policies against Serbians in Slobodan Milosevic's Yugoslavia. Unlike Suzuki and Coble, whose works scream with helpless rage, Tomic performs her chilling piece with dignity.

In all of these, women's bodies are the canvases upon which art is made. When Ana Mendieta did this in the 1970s, it was revolutionary, a reclaiming of the feminine form from the male artist's gaze. Thirty years on, female flesh is still objectified, only now the women are artists as well as models, and they're uttering a collective "Ouch!"

Aude du Pasquier Grall, a French video artist, turns that dynamic on its head with a delectable sliver from her subversive and funny "Male Cycle" series, in which the artist, off-camera, cajoles and verbally caresses a nude male model. Maybe a century from now, some damaged male artist will protest his plight by wrapping his face in bloody pigskin, but for now, the model in "Male Cycle" is evidently enjoying himself.

Since Judy Chicago served up vaginas in her legendary installation "The Dinner Party" in the 1970s, feminist art has often been transgressive. The supposedly outrageous work in "Global Feminisms" is just a dim echo of Chicago's work, attempting to bring out of the closet stuff that the art world has already been exploring for 25 years - including sexual violence, homosexuality, and gender confusion.

Catherine Opie's self-portrait nursing her son is touted in the catalog as transgressive, since Opie is an older lesbian mother with tattoos. Big whoop. Then there's Jenny Saville's untitled painting of a hermaphrodite, lolling nude with legs spread. It's an effective, alluring Expressionist painting, with a teaspoon of shock value.

Art made by women about their lives can move away from objectification into the subjective - the inner lives of women, the mundane details of their days, their narratives, which sometimes include violence and sometimes include love. "Global Feminisms" works best when it lets down its guard.

Indian photographer Dayanita Singh documented the life of a "self-castrated eunuch," Mona Ahmed, over several years; these heartfelt black-and-white images are some of the most compelling work here. American painter Amy Cutler's sweetly neurotic gouache-on-paper "Army of Me" depicts the artist towering over dozens of tiny, expectant Amys. Kate Beynon of Australia shuffles through several identities in a bright, incisive series of comic-book-style self-portraits, "Good Luck Collective."

Quiet works such as these do not clobber the viewer with defiance. They invite us in and make us think - and maybe laugh. Outside of the context of feminist art, many of the other pieces in "Global Feminisms" are strong. Lumped together like this, they're merely petulant.