A table has been set

“WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution,” the Los Angeles exhibition surveying feminist art from the 1970s, might make Southern California seem the center of feminist art discourse right now. But the Brooklyn Museum’s new Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art brings a major East Coast entry into the discussion, which by all evidence is global. Like those in “WACK!,” its offerings are hit-and-miss but overall exciting.

Not the least aspect of this new wing’s mission is to permanently display what had been one of the West Coast’s most iconic and controversial feminist works. Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party,” which had been searching for a home since its 1979 completion, now resides in the Sackler’s sanctum sanctorum. Even to house a major installation, the architecture here seems overblown -- austere yet grandiose. But much ado as it may be, it is not about nothing.

“The Dinner Party” is a triangular table for a fantasy gathering of 39 great women of history and myth. Each has a custom setting incorporating embroidery and hand-decorated plates, legendary for their not so vaguely vaginal motifs. The names of 999 more women are inscribed on the tile floor beneath.

This career-defining work by the artist who founded the Feminist Art Program at Fresno State University and co-founded a similar program at CalArts is also a case study in feminist preoccupations -- revising history, challenging patriarchy, reconsidering roles, highlighting arts devalued as women’s handicrafts and inquiring into feminine aesthetics and a feminine essence. That web of intentions has made the work as controversial among feminists as to a broader audience, and it remains marvelously problematic.

For the Sackler’s opening, however, the center has also mounted its first major temporary exhibition, to be on view through July 1. Called “Global Feminisms,” it contains works by more than 80 mostly young artists from 50 countries, gathered by in-house curator Maura Reilly and art historian Linda Nochlin.

What the artists in “WACK!” began, these artists continue. Sometimes this is to a fault. No doubt past feminist art left unfinished business, and certainly some themes warrant and withstand repeated variation. But on more than a few occasions here, you find something you could swear you saw yesteryear made by someone else.

Much of the fresher work does delve into familiar feminist territory -- explorations of the body captured on video -- but comes up with something newly engaging and likely to last. “Barbed Hula” by Sigalit Landau of Israel, for example, records a concise, silly, seductive and cringe-inducing mortification of the flesh carried out on the seashore with a hula hoop no less harmless than a razor-wire fence or crown of thorns.

Similarly pared down is “A Kiss,” by the Spaniard Ana Carceller and the Frenchwoman Helena Cabello, which crops an encounter between the two down to a mesmerizing black-and-white moving image of mashing mouths, chins and necks. Equally hypnotic and simultaneously abstract and explicit is “Fountain” by Canan Senol of Turkey, a video of two breasts, isolated via cropping and costuming, dripping milk.

What notably separates numerous artists in this exhibition from their predecessors is their frequent embrace of previously eschewed forms, including sculpture, figure painting and portraiture. Among these works, American Amy Cutler’s delicate gouache “Army of Me” pictures a young woman looking tentative while trying to appear authoritative before a horde of her own Lilliputian clones, and it’s both resonant and endearing.

British painter Jenny Saville, for her part, messes with your head with a transgendered or hermaphroditic nude and another composition compressing three rotund women into a single mass suffocating the picture plane. Saville doubles the discomfort of her imagery with visceral, confident paint handling that is what really makes her work seem so embarrassingly frank.

Brazilian Adriana Varejao’s handmade architectural fragment, “Corner Jerked-Beef Ruin,” is like a remnant of two walls stuffed with meat -- a visceral call to read between surfaces as we do between lines. And speaking of reading and surfaces, even if you don’t know the story of Saartjie Baartman, who toured 19th century Europe as the “Hottentot Venus,” you’ll get the gist of South African Tracy Rose’s color photograph “Venus Baartman,” which riffs on essentialism and exoticism with an image of Rose herself posing as the African woman in the wild imagined from a European point of view.

Like the best work in the exhibition, and like Chicago’s “Dinner Party,” this “Venus” stands out as the result less of a problem-solving agenda than of the will to produce work that will be profoundly, beautifully or even romantically disquieting.