Ridykeulous. The Advantages of Being a Lesbian Woman Artist, 2007; silkscreen on newsprint. Courtesy of Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery.

Turning polite, palatable “feminine” behavior on its head with rebellious, even anarchist abandon, Daughter of Bad Girls aims to pick up where predecessors like Riot Grrrls and Kathe Burkhart left off. Xaviera Simmons, in a large-scale photographic self-portrait, presents herself sprawled horizontally on a striped picnic rug, masturbating in broad daylight. The noisy collaborative duo Ridykeulous, made up of A.L. Steiner and Nicole Eisenman, defaces a printed copy of the Guerrilla Girls’ famous poster The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist (1989), which laid out in stark terms the appalling state of female representation in the visual arts. Eighteen years on, Ridykeulous’s brazen revision of this key text, The Advantages of Being a Lesbian Woman Artist (2007), suggests feminist offspring unafraid of cannibalizing their revolutionary forebears. According to Ridykeulous’ vandalizing scribbles, “Working without the pressure of success” becomes “Working without the pressure of sucking dick.”

Sucking dick is exactly what Ann Hirsch proposes in her video work Here For You (Or My Brief Love Affair with Frank Maresca), a delicious send-up of VH1’s The Bachelor, in which preened, perma-tan girls vie for the attentions of a calendar-boy hunk. Hirsch herself joins a cohort of contestants, countering their banal platitudes and on-cue peals of vapid laughter with antics that include twerking in a bikini for her audition tape and regaling the bachelor with an obscene song in which she tells him everything she wants to do to him.

Ann Hirsch. Here For You (Or My Brief Love Affair with Frank Maresca), 2011; single channel video. Courtesy of Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery.

Other works in the show are quieter but no less transgressive. Alice Mackler’s wan ceramic figure, a misshapen, depraved-looking blob (nonetheless recognizable as female), is absorbingly touching and human, as is her sketchy, infantile acrylic-, gouache-, and ink-on-paper drawing of two distorted figures composed of swollen sexual organs and orifices. Sue Williams’ maelstroms of cartoonish, sexualized imagery come to mind. Mackler’s two works present the female as hybrid, ungendered, and manifesting a powerful presence of mind. It’s easy to see why the artist, an octogenarian and lifetime New Yorker, is currently receiving a wave of belated acclaim. Vaginal Davis, the intersex, gender-queer artist whose name pays homage to the former Black Panther and West Coast activist Angela Davis, presents a series of childishly drawn female heads painted onto letterhead paper and displayed as a grid. They recall the reverent, innocent fascination of young girls with older, glamorous women.

Alice Mackler. Untitled, 2014; glazed ceramic. Courtesy of Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery.

The strength of Daughter of Bad Girls lies in its nuanced and eclectic grouping of female artists, representing a range of generations, races, and sexual orientations, which offers a snapshot of what female artists—not all expressly feminist, but all with a feminist bent—are producing today. Individually, several of the works on view here are hilarious, incisive, and absorbing, but as a collective fuck-you to the male-dominated establishment, the exhibition cannot stack up to its namesake. This is partly a problem of scale. One can hardly compare an exhibition of nine artists in a tiny Lower East Side space against a sprawling museum show that featured forty-five artists, many of them now iconic—a “raucous caucus,” as Roberta Smith dubbed the cohort in her 1994 New York Times review. But beyond that, the “Bad Girls” trope seems worn thin. It lacks the punch it once had, especially in today’s era of Vice bloggers like Slutever. Female artists still have a mountain to climb when it comes to demanding equal representation in the visual arts and overcoming biases in society at large, but today’s conditions call for something more than a repackaging of ’90s-era feminist art. What would a fourth wave of feminist artists look like?

Daughter of Bad Girls is on view at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery through July 26, 2014.

Ridykeulous, The Advantages of Being a Woman Lesbian Artist, 2007. Photo courtesy of INVISIBLE-EXPORTS.

It’s par for the course for blue-chip galleries to mount so-called “museum quality” exhibitions, and hardly a surprise when they coincide with auctions and estate holdings. Readykeulous: The Hurtful Healer: The Correspondance Issue at INVISIBLE-EXPORTS is just as historically potent without being market driven. Founded in 2005 by artists Nicole Eisenman and A. L. Steiner, Ridykeulous has gained consistent momentum, and this is their strongest show yet. Part community action center, part archive, part open can of whoop ass, the show includes about forty artists and runs roughshod past The Venus of Willendorf, David Wojnarowicz and the Guerrilla Girls before landing squarely in the present.

Readykeulous, The Hurtful Healer: The Correspondence Issue. Installation view. Photo courtesy of INVISIBLE-EXPORTS.

Even though the show comprises mostly written correspondence, those accustomed to the visual swagger of a typical Ridykeulous affair will not be disappointed. By including work from the 70s forward, it’s almost as if Ridykeulous is upping the ante on a previous generation’s discontent. A rather calm and verbose letter by David Wojnarowicz floridly articulates his disappointment with not getting public funding. A Carolee Schneemann letter from 1978 bluntly asks a foundation to pay her $25 to donate her archive, but she writes in a fairly civil tone. In contrast, Crystal Catastrophe, 2011, a letter/image by Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue begins, “DEAR ASSHOLE”.  Eisenman and Steiner pull a bit of one upwomanship on the famed Guerrilla Girls in The Advantages of Being a Woman Lesbian Artist, 2007, which hilariously updates and defaces the Guerrilla Girls’ The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist from 1989. Compared to the self-assured irreverence of many of the artists in this show, Guerrilla Girls, once formidable, now seem kind of cartoonish and tame.

Zoe Leonard, I Want a President (detail), 1992. Photo courtesy of INVISIBLE-EXPORTS.

But there’s a lot more to this exhibition than in-your-face rage. Many of the letters on view are potential paradigm shifters. Zoe Leonard’s I Want a President, 1992, in which she hopes for more humane criteria for presidential candidacy is both heartbreaking and poignant. Kara Walker’s writing stares into the core of her artistic intentions without the visual drama of her trademark silhouettes. Nicola Tyson transforms a letter to a male harasser into sculpture by hanging it on a noose. When a passive aggressive audience member writes to Nao Bustamante, feigning concern for a participant in one of her performances, the artist wryly replies, “This is like emailing a magician after an illusion and seeing if the girl died from being sawed in half.”

Kathe Burkhart, Suck My Dick: from the Liz Taylor Series (Candid shot), 2004. Photo courtesy of INVISIBLE-EXPORTS.

Admit it—when artists write about their work, its often pretentious, boring and has little to do with the actual art. Thankfully, in this show, the artists’ candid thoughts and impassioned rebuttals are the art. And no one’s trying to hide or act nice for the art market. As K8 Hardy says in Dear Reena Spaulings, “I don’t care if my shit is unprofessional or tacky. My work does not come from a fucking wallet.” Nothing is more direct than Kathe Burkhart’s Suck My Dick: from the Liz Taylor series (candid shot), 2004. Big black dildo protrusion aside, the work is composed of a lifetime’s-worth of partially burned rejection letters, some of which get fairly mean. One from Metro Pictures simply reads, “not our cup of tea.”

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Eva Adolf Braun Hitler, 2002.

Despite the high volume of malcontent on display, the real power behind this show is humor. The exhibition is essentially positive and inclusive, and it maintains a visually dynamic installation amidst all the reading and display cases. Wall scrawls, collages, and tacked-up photocopies create a swift pace that counters the slowed-down experience of reading. Cut outs of ancient goddess figures help punch up a case full of letters. A frieze of book covers from Valerie Solanas’ Scum Manifesto guards the entrance to the video corridor, where a folder labeled “Man Art” (samples include dinosaurs, a Lisa Yuskavage ad, and other offenders) lies on top of a searing video by Genesis Breyer P. Orridge. In the back gallery, a wall case has been punked out with flyers and drawings, like the coolest public library display ever. The gallery is smallish in size, yet this installation manages to pull off a balance of slapdash improv and thoughtful placement.

Ridykeulous Archives 2005 - 2011. Photo courtesy of INVISIBLE-EXPORTS.

A lot of shows tiptoe around ideas of protest, but they tend to feature artists who rarely get into the trenches. These days it can even seem like making political art is a mannerism—an excuse to make cool posters and use typography that rarely sacrifices marketability. Ridykeulous doesn’t pull punches. They understand that if you don’t like the art world you’ve been given, you’ve got to make your own. And they don’t fucking apologize for it afterward.