Nancy Grossman

Some may see Nancy Grossman’s current exhibition as a move in accord with MoMA’s pledge for gender parity, a five-year initiative that began in 2005 with the establishment of the Modern Women’s Project and concluded with the publication of the 2010 tome Modern Women. (Curiously, not one of its 512 pages mentions Grossman). Organized by Klaus Biesenbach and Christopher Y. Lew, “Heads” is a decisive presentation of Grossman’s most well-known work, which was seen in the extensive survey of early feminist art “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution,” which took over MoMA PS1 in 2008. A selection of sculptures made between 1968 and 1980 from the bawdy series features hand-carved wooden heads wearing leather bondage masks that have been sewn, nailed, and zipped together. The works evince an unsettling mix of ebullient pride and painful embarrassment that is only heightened by the implementation of decorative chains, straps, studs, horns, and other trappings of the s/m aesthetic. With only fourteen of these dungeon effigies on view, the exhibition is stunningly sparse, creating a thrilling tension between the presented and the presentation. A solemn procession of busts confronts the viewer at eye level from atop a central plinth as four additional works keep silent guard in the gallery corners. Here, with the absence of the body there is room for introspection, entertainment, or both.

The often whimsical psychosexual totems evoke the bearable doses of submission and domination one encounters in everyday life, as well as the very human desire to inflict and receive pain and pleasure. Grossman, like her similarly rediscovered peers Lee Lozano and Judith Bernstein, does little to hide her own taste for torment; each sculpture requires a torturous year of labor. “Heads,” not simply an act of recovery, preserves Grossman’s thorny take on the human condition while hoisting her freak flag high. It is an overdue salute to the undersung artist.