Hannah Gadsby’s “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby” exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum offers little insight on the Spanish artist. Instead, it plays on social justice themes by merely putting on display a small collection of eight art pieces, including paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, and adding mild quips by Gadsby on adjacent labels. The exhibition also features works of art made by women, with almost all made after Picasso’s death. Clips from Gadsby’s “Nanette” play on a loop in a vestibule. The whole exhibition is at the GIF level, and it fails to offer any feminist scholarship, unlike many other exhibitions that have repressed desire, phallic instability, or the lives of the women Picasso loved. The exhibition fails to assemble many things to look at and is largely plagued by adolescence and immaturity. It features unsigned texts in each gallery that provide basic invocations of gender discrimination in art museums, or the colonial legacy of European modern art. The objects react to reactions, and the exhibition contents itself with adding works by women from the Brooklyn Museum collection, including a lithograph by Käthe Kollwitz, a photograph by Ana Mendieta, an assemblage by Betye Saar, and Dara Birnbaum’s “Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman,” and more. The exhibition does not deliver on its promise of putting women artists on equal footing with Picasso.
With Hannah Gadsby’s ‘It’s Pablo-matic,’ the Joke’s on the Brooklyn Museum
