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whose cinematic spectacles are like proto-Matthew Barney. The overall installation, which twists through the hangarlike Geffen Center, has an arresting start in Magdalena Abakanowicz's 1969 "Abakan Red" [see photo]. A suspended fiber sculpture dyed a rich vermillion, it suggests a monumental vagina. Ona wall behind it, Nancy Spero's "Torture of Women" (1976), a set of five horizontal scrolls filled with graffitilike drawings, reads like a hallucinated record of human pain. So, right away, two intertwined themes, the body and politics, are in play.

They turn up in figure painting, of which there's a fair amount: from Judith F. Baca's surging mural of migrant workers, to Margaret Harrison's superhero shemales, to Joan Semmel's elephantine copulating nudes. An animated film self-portrait by the Austrian artist Maria Lassnig is of particular interest: she dehumanizes and rehumanizes herself repeatedly before our eyes. So are six feverishly executed "Angry Paintings" produced by Louise Fishman in 1973, partly in response to her conflicted feeling about feminism as a movement.

With the first names of specific women - Marilyn Monroe, the artist Yvonne Rainer, the dealer Paula Cooper - scrawled in large, slashing strokes on paper, the paintings have a distressed look well suited to their expressive content. Much of the show's sculpture - Senga Nengudi's nylon stockings weighted with sand, Harmony Hammond's ladder-shaped grids wrapped in bandagelike strips of cloth - is similarly unconventional.

Some of the most radical work of all, though, is in video and in the related medium of performance. And no combination of the two is more mesmerizing than "Mitchell's Death" (1978) by Linda M. Montano, in which the artist, her face bristling with acupuncture needles, delivers an account of her husband's violent end in the rhythms of Gregorian chant [see photo].

Another video is hard to shake in a different way. In the 1975 "Free, White and 21," Howardena Pindell plays the roles of a black woman talking about art-world racism and a white woman accusing her of paranoia. A glance at the show suggests how on the money Ms Pindell's polemic was. Along with Ms. Nengudi, Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, the filmmaker Camille