The Brooklyn Rail

Abounding with paradisiacal mise en scène and sculptural artificial wombs, Amy Ruhl’s We shall not miss it proposes a feminist social experiment in sexual and reproductive liberation. The installation responds to radical feminist Shulamith Firestone (1945–2012), whose 1970 book, The Dialectic of Sex, performs a gender-based reinterpretation of Marxist theory and advocates female emancipation from procreative servitude. Firestone’s ideal society is one in which artificial reproduction severs familial blood ties in favor of chosen communities and erotic disinhibition leads to new relational forms. Ruhl channels Firestone’s prophetic voice with a wry twist, reassembling the older feminist’s lost cybernetic utopia while patching omissions and recasting The Dialectic through a contemporary lens.

Upon entering the gallery, viewers are greeted by a voice that emanates from a microphone, its circular platform suggestive of an embodied absence. From this miniature amplifier, Ruhl whispers like a philosophizing dominatrix, commingling quotes from The Dialectic of Sex with her own acerbic wit. In arch tones, the artist reasons that “the womb is the origin point of oppression” and calls for a “temporary dictatorship of the cervical class.” Regarding the occupational hazards of reproductive labor, Ruhl quips, “If I come in with a cunt and out with a trunk, I want some worker’s compensation.”

Scenographic details throughout the installation subtly refer to the milieu in which second wave feminism arose, while inserting reminders of today’s technological advancements. Behind the murmuring microphone, a twining daisy adorns a baby-boy-blue partial wall, petals projecting in relief and fanning out from the sheetrock edge. A nearby slide projection slots through AI-altered color field frames. Wall and slides draw directly from set pieces used in Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, a televised variety show that premiered in 1968 and parodied social, technological, and political revolutions of the day. Its title riffing on protest and hippie parlance (“sit-in,” “love-in”), the show betrayed a faint misogyny; the pilot episode featured a skit on the fictional wife-o-tron (“the very latest in labor-saving devices”). Taking a different kind of cue from Laugh-In, Ruhl’s microphonic monologue embraces humor as a parallel to psychoanalysis—a space in which fears and ambitions can be voiced in the guise of a joke.

Opposite the microphone, a video projection toggles between art historical, diagrammatic, and animated visions of a radical feminist future. Bookending the video, AI-adaptations of classical paintings—including Auguste Levêque’s Bacchanalia (n.d.) and Cornelis Van Haarlem’s Feast of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15-11-13) (1615)—devolve in panoramic doom scrolls from orgiastic cornucopia to machinic misinterpretations of the human body. The left-to-right propulsion of these scenes mirrors the temporal progression of an animated diagram that gradually populates with text throughout the video. Originating in a histogram of hierarchical relationships from The Dialectic of Sex, Ruhl’s revision emphasizes the intersectional links between sex, race, and state power, inserting a lineage of Western colonialism from antiquity to recent settler states, and incorporating slavery and present-day capitalism into Firestone’s register of class injustices. The chart dissolves to divulge a third modality: a vectored landscape where an undulating vaginal canal glides through blue skies in search of its Garden of Eden. The next shot reveals an iridescent force field in which artificial wombs float and bob above a fertile orchard. These hovering forms echo inflatable shapes suspended and propped throughout the gallery. Evocative of the hooked sinuous contours of vibrators, the womb-sculptures point to technological reproduction, as well as the polymorphous sexual freedom that Firestone envisaged. The exhibition will conclude with a performance that activates every aspect of the installation and cycles between personas all enacted by Ruhl herself: Firestone’s acerbic tone, borrowed from the microphone work; a stand-up comedian, reflecting on her financial and emotional hang-ups around having kids; and an academic, reading from a “forthcoming book of essays” on feminist histories.

The timing of Ruhl’s exhibition is no accident. Declining birth rates have prompted pro-natalist stances from progressive and conservative sources alike. In the US, we’ve seen the rollback of protections around abortion that threaten women’s rights over their own bodies. Yet these developments are concurrent with progress in reproductive technology; artificial insemination is common and genetic screening can prevent hereditary disease. In Ruhl’s exhibition, the AI touches that hover backstage seem to ask what all this gadgetry is for, if not something as radical as Firestone’s goals. Ruhl places a revised version of Firestone’s idyll before our eyes as a beacon and injunction, a possible future in which human survival is not predicated on the enslavement of women to their biological processes.