Black Madonna.

BLACK MADONNA

HP Garcia Gallery | New York

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Be warned: "Black Madonna" has a lot of nudity, a raw intensity not typically seen in Chelsea. But the show's location in a gallery near Times Square offers a clue to what's really going on here, as does its signature image, Mark Wiener's Still Life in Red, a 1981 print of the nude pop star Madonna violently slashed with a red X. The nudity isn't only in the flesh once indigenous to this neighborhood, but principally derives from the no-holds-barred stance of curators Lisa Paul Streitfeld and H.P. Garcia.

With 41 international artists, the tight, multimedia show (through September 30) enters into a post-millennial discussion of feminism, where men are also included and tested. Another strength is its lively roster of participants, where the not so famous rub shoulders with established figures like Carolee Schneemann, Kate Millett, Martha Wilson, Mike Bidlo, Richard Move, and up-and-comers like Richard Humann and Heide Hatry. Humann's jaw-dropping sculpture Electrical Bumper Cars (2008), in reality miniature electric chairs presented as an amusement park ride, holds center court in the main gallery, while Hatry's characteristically brilliant video Maria (2009), a macabre talkingpig goth, looking a lot like Angelina Jolie, echoes the exhibition's underlying theme, "You don't understand."

The curators' background in sacred geometry, a visual form of mathematics, makes superb use of the gallery's elegant, cross-shaped space. Nowhere is this more evident than in Vincent Baldassano's gouache Nude on a Cross (2009), which replaces Christ with Mary Magdalene. A fairytale version of this theme appears in Russian artist Yuliya Lanina's numerous video, collage and assemblage works, in which the feminine always triumphs. In Exotic Dancer with Tumor and Twister (2002), D. Dominick Lombardi's pop post-apocalyptic females attain new life as gargoyles guarding the show's daring pose. Appropriately, Marshall Arisman's Rainbow Dancers (2004), a lushly painted oil and gold leaf triptych resembling the cave paintings at Altamira, stamps its timeless fusion of beast and human with the eponymous bow of colors.

Other exhibits relate a rich and complicated history of the feminine. In the diptych Falling Woman (2009), by Tatyana Stepanova, a free-floating woman appears as a thought emanating from the head of an Eastern-looking female mystic. Danielle St. Laurent's Andres Serrano in Oracle (2002), a portrait of the photographer, perfectly captures the bad-boy innocence that launched the culture wars. In his panoramic Age of Reason (2008), Michael Zansky sums up patriarchal projection with a demon dancing before a classical bust of Voltaire. Michael Manning's Mr. Jefferson (2008), whose painting style brings to mind Basquiat, addresses the third president's secret affair with Sally Hemings, one of his slaves. Another stroke of genius was the curators' decision to include Rick Prol's demonic females from 1982, painted in the very style that defined the early East Village movement.

Streitfeld, widely known for her writings on the avant-garde, has bravely included the boundary-smashing wunderkinds of dance--Karen Bernard, who runs the downtown Performance Mix Festival, and Richard Move, made famous as the "Underground Martha Graham." Here Move, in his first gallery show, presents his powerful documentary Bloodwork: The Story of Ana Mendieta (2009), the "fallen woman" of the art world. Pushing the dialogue further, the artist presents Red Cicciolina (2009), a photographic series taken from his public performance last summer. For those who forget, Cicciolina, once a porno star and Italian senator, is now mainly known as Jeff Koons's discarded ex-wife and muse.

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If "Black Madonna" is saying that it's time for a change, then it is also pointing the way to a new gender dialogue. Its uncompromising images honor the awakening serpent that Carolee Schneemann made famous in her Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions of 1963, where she merged her own body with the environment of her paintings/constructions. An arresting photograph of the artist appearing dead with a snake crawling up her stomach, documenting this seminal event, is poignantly placed beneath Iris Schieferstein's I can be who I want as long as I know (2008), an ambiguous photograph of the naked artist lying face down in a bathtub with a set of wings sprouting from her back. It could be suicide, because the water is red.

On the other hand, Martha Wilson's Suicide (1974) is a brutally satirical self-portrait complete with "suicide note." The resurrection of this iconic work after a 35-year self-imposed suppression brings up a crucial point--the necessity of time and space for the feminine to evolve beyond the all too common role of "victim." This is born out by Kate Millett's striking pair of 1995 text/drawings, Crazy and Waiting. Following the same trajectory, these speak to that forbidden realm--dominance and submission--pulling at all artists plundering these depths. Yet, in her uncanny photograph Rear Window (2007), Carla Gannis declares the "fallen woman" archetype a conscious choice at this critical crossroads. In each vignette, women are seen going about their private lives; one window shows two masked men about to throw a woman out, while below, a narrow predella features a young woman in an Arcadian setting--perhaps a stand-in for the artist herself--contemplating her next move.

A focal point of the show, taking up an entire wall, is Pentagram: Venus Revisited (2009). This collaboration between co-curator H.P. Garcia and artist Mark Wiener is bordered by the artist's Black Madonna Series (1982-2009)--painted photographs of Madonna, many of which contain sacred geometric symbols overlaying the human figure. The centrally placed inspirational black pentagram also contains ghostly symbolic markings, including a hexagram and serpentine wave. In this version, Venus returns as a holistic, post-patriarchal love goddess.

Speaking of evolution in the gender wars, the supreme delight of this show is the pairing of Sophie Matisse--who crosses boundaries of birthright as the great granddaughter of the modernist pioneer and Duchamp's step-granddaughter--with provocateur Mike Bidlo, who has painted his way through modernism via de Kooning's erasures. These two paintings, both titled Origin of the World, are hung one above the other. While each represents the abstracted female nude, Matisse--whose visual target is a lonely rumpled sheet, sans body--erases the female genitalia, leaving Bidlo to go in for the kill. Here the "cradle of the world" is stripped down to basics. Plagiarizing Gustave Courbet, who shocked contemporaries with his vagina painting, the Bidlo-Matisse pairing invokes a revolutionary kind of energy exchange between women and men. Is this likely? "Black Madonna" says yes, promising a very exciting road ahead for the sexes.