The Dinner Party a church supper?
views, Exchange of
als, their natural constituency, but with conservatives, precisely the wrong group, since compromise is not in their political vocabulary. In this time of troubles for both neoconservatives and...
...Fifth, who cares that three, count them, three men worked on the show...
...The nature of Gifford's bias is evident in her reference to feminist critic Lucy Lippard's sycophancy ("Dazzled, I couldn't take it all in...
...Mullarkey's own, or was it shared by others...
...Judith's knife reads better as a symbol of justice and vengeance, of those powers of transcendence that derive from no man--just the object for Chicago to have made much of...
...That question, which has been with us in modem art since the turn of the century, is no less vexing to the American women's movement than it was for the Russian Constructivists of Berlin's Dadaists...
...Gender inclusivity...
...The creation, conception and the huge amount of work behind the exhibition is woman-dominated to the point of sacrifice...
...If Ms...
...To the Editors: "I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and you wrote about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower--and I don't...
...The vulgar herd stroll through the rooms and pronounce the pictures "nice" or "splendid...
...Third, Mullarkey's distaste for the symbol of the vagina is so strong as to lead her into the patently ridiculous equation of the symbol with the person represented...
...John Richardson's description of The Dinner Party in the New York Review of Books as so much Tupperware was wonderfully apt on various levels...
...Neither Gifford nor Hopke offers any material that might oppose my original contention that the dexterity and visual glamour of The Dinner Party merit less interest than the phenomenon of its popularity...
...Example: In two successive complete sentences, Ms...
...I dismissed it because it was simpering, banal and, no, not all that different from misogynistic male representations...
...III IIIIIII I II II I Cancel my sub Somerville, Mass...
...Both permit indignation to loosen their grip on the issues that do apply...
...Talk about political hair-splitting...
...Gifford's anxiety lest she be counted among the folk results in name-dropping that is off the mark...
...Are we to believe that entrepreneuring in the arts is less exploitative than in merchandising because Art is more spiritual than Commerce...
...Robert Hopke clearly considers his own letter a hot tomato--witness that flourish for a signature...
...A stated aim of the exhibition was to bridge that divide...
...I acknowledged the technical expertise ("high craftsmanship") without expending undue attention on it...
...The moment at which all these resemblances undoubtedly came too close for Bacall's comfort was the one, shortly after she finished work on The Fan, when Mark David Chapman shot and killed Dakota neighbor John Lennon right in the building's entrance...
...Out of the hundreds who worked on The Dinner Party at their own expense, there were only four paid linch-pins, three of whom were men...
...All it could find were unpaid female workers...
...Though not, in every case, exactly as it was meant to: I overheard one woman say, "Isn't it marvelous...
...Not so...
...The character of Hopke's complaint--opening with reference to my sexuality and closing with comment on my presumed background--leaves me thinking here is a man sorely threatened by impiety as well as by the sexual content of The Dinner Party...
...Instead of trying to turn chapter headings from Kandinsky into statements of her own, Gifford would do better to simply apply his key observation to The Dinner Party and its promotional material: Connoisseurs admire the "skill" (as one admires a tightrope walker), enjoy the "quality of painting" (as one enjoys a pastry...
...Chicago's misemphasis on female sexuality, as if it were the dayspring of nongenital achievement, I did not dismiss the sexual content of the work because it was sexual...
...Neither, for that matter, was the iconography (are you listening, Hopke...
...Mullarky, whose description of the exhibition itself was meager, and selective along the lines of her strong prejudices...
...ROBERT H. HOPCKE Anatomy lesson Bridgewater, Ct...
...Mullarkey did your readers a disservice, first, in failing to allow The Dinner Party to speak for itself...
...Did the enthusiastic support for the show, which she cites with such evident scorn, come only from the "folkish" sort whom she describes so condescendingly (e.g., "The women who file worshipfully past this cunnilingus-as-communion table 9 Ms Mullarkey protests the "preachiness" of the show, but the preachiness of her own diatribe is readily apparent if one returns to read the Art in America review of The Dinner Party (Apr...
...2. What form might the "language" of art take if it were to become genderinclusive...
...The Dinner Party is womandominated to the point of sacrifice...
...There is a market for this kind of soup...
...was a disciple of Red Emma...
...sometimes it dangles by the hair from Judith's fist...
...In the unlikely event that I ever achieve fame, I should not like to be represented as a vulva on a dinner plate--any more than I should like to be represented as an appendix in a soup bowl...
...That The Dinner Party has been hailed by feminist academics is enough to warrant sour thoughts about the intellectual honesty and acumen of feminist criticism and its adherents...
...Chicago claims merely to contribute one cultural symbol for women starved for positive symbols of their sexuality in this sick culture...
...Those implications can be drawn quite candidly without unwieldy musings on the status of crafts, the fight relation between art and society, the nature of creativity or the alienation of work...
...Chapman is somebody made in the image Commonweal: 434...
...Mullarkey found that it failed to do so, could she tell us in what ways it failed...
...Why all this...
...Less of this sort of crabby nonsense, and more good art thinking please...
...10 ]. Please cancel my subscription--I shall not renew...
...Inadvertent gender references...
...That question builds on the entire modem history, since Kandinsky's "On the Spiritual in Art" (since Goethe, if you wish), of reaching for a rhetoric of color and form, and expands that history to encompass present efforts to understand and come to terms with the inadvertent gender references embedded in language...
...She does not claim that the vagina is the only symbol of womanhood possible, nor does she demand allegiance to the symbol...
...That is an aesthetic judgment against which neither Gifford nor Hopke offer anything in contradiction...
...My article was not concerned with definitions or boundaries between "high" and "low" art and the quotation marks were used for a reason...
...2. Was the sense of an antagonism between intellect and feeling Ms...
...and sadder, I think, that unpaid, anonymous women lent themselves to Chicago's enterprise...
...Hence, we do not have Emily Dickinson "bottoms-up" but merely Chicago's symbol for Dickinson's womanhood and sexuality on display...
...From this about-face I can only deduce that she knows quite well that The Dinner Party is something more than "one art exhibition in a Brooklyn museum...
...To have done so would have resulted in a diversionary tour de force...
...The same could have been said of John Wanamaker's career...
...NELL GIFFORD Serving vitriol Reading, Pa...
...Then she whirls around and drops Chicago into a kettle steaming with Big Catch from Picasso to Bauhaus...
...Neither one is able to draw on a single independent reference to the work which might indicate that they are in command of their complaints...
...What was taken to task was the shaping sensibility, the quality of mind expressed in the project as a whole...
...MAUREEN MULLARKEY ~1 ~ I I Screen III I - II1 IIII II [I L ROOMS AT THE TOP A DISCONCERTING FAN DANCE T HE CLOSENESS with which The Fan parallels events in the real world must give the film's star, Lauren Bacall, the heebie-jeebies...
...two, their'accusations of bias on my part are a smokescreen to cover their irritation at having had their prejudices challenged...
...The party game of commenting on a show one has not seen, which experienced a great increase in popularity during The Dinner Party's run, was given no brakes by Ms...
...BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON Vaginal ogre Berkeley, Calif...
...We may not want to repeat all of those experiments, but we have learned from them...
...10 ] was terrific, hands down the best thing I've seen on it...
...I'm sure Ms...
...The Dinner party does all of that...
...I thought the whole point of the Women's Movement was that a woman was more than the sum of her private parts...
...Those who could speak have said nothing, those who could hear have heard nothing...
...Georgia O'Keeffe's protest against selective appreciation of her polymorphic work could properly be applied to the review in which it is quoted, Ms...
...I argued that it is debased art, silly art, and that the claims made for it--esthetic, political, moral, historical--were sadly inflated...
...This leads me to two conclusions: one, neither of them saw the show firsthand (or if, by chance, they did, it was with the same selective inattention they brought to my review...
...Is one art exhibition substantial enough to bear the weight of such vast, synthetic rejection, or should this widely-cast Hofstadterian net be reserved for bigger fish...
...Scriptwriters Priscilla Chapman and John Hartwell have adapted a Bob Randall novel so that it fits Bacall's career...
...And I speak not as a gloating man, but as a cradle feminist reared by a mother who...
...FRANCES J. DOHERTY Sum of her parts Brooklyn, N.Y...
...Besides, no matter the supposed intention behind Chicago's thumb-sized knife, the effect--and art is nothing if not rigged for effect--is to trivialize and make laughable the act that it represents...
...Sometimes it rests vulnerable and unsuspecting on a pillow...
...So caught up in a rather obvious obsessiondenial syndrome concerning her own sexuality, Mullarkey seems incapable of reading and experiencing Chicago's statement at all accurately...
...Genitalia are as amenable to artistic intepretation as a hand or a clavicle...
...The implication here is that I've turned up my nose at Chicago because she has her hands in clay...
...Gifford begins by suggesting that perhaps Chicago is not such a big fish after all...
...At the risk of seeming to hint darkly, I must note that Hopke finds phallic symbols where there are none and misses the business...
...In this time of troubles for both neoconservatives and liberals, they should look to each other for aid and support and should eschew false and politically unrealistic alliances with fanatics...
...In terms of notoriety, however, Chicago is profiting nicely--while the women, who worked on it are still anonymous...
...To the Editors: Read your article by Maureen Mullarkey -- "The Dinner Party is a church supper...
...If no one is getting rich on The Dinner Party it is because of the gigantic costs of assembling, disassembling, crating, shipping and storing such a mammoth piece...
...Ms...
...Such blindness is somewhat surprising for a woman and an art critic...
...and true to Sally's word, Bacall went into Woman of the Year on Broadway as soon as The Fan's shooting schedule was completed...
...Fourth, I am disappointed for Mullarkey that she missed the subtle eschewing, nay, put-down of male symbols of power regarding Chicago's treatment of Judith, the phallic sword reduced indeed to a piece of frippery, womanhood exalted at last after centuries of male reinterpretation...
...While I rejected ones that are there...
...The objective of Lippard's criticism runs parallel to what she states as Chicago's aim: "to make feminist culture not a subculture, but one of the streams in the mainstream...
...What makes Chicago just the fight fish for my Hofstadterian net (as opposed to, say, a Vasarian or Berensonian net) are the implications lurking in the allegiance The Dinner Party generates...
...First, Mullarkey's reductio ad absurdum method of dealing with Chicago's vagina symbol is unfair at best, and at worst, reprehensibly dull for a so-called art critic...
...Trying to graft old myths onto the structure of modern metaphors is sticky teer labor and a fixed core of salaried expertise...
...So is the sentimentalizing of a labor stratagem that utilizes piecework and a pool of female labor in much the same way that manufacturers of clothing and micro-electric components utilize unskilled women...
...Second, Mullarkey clearly does not see that a woman's representation of the vagina in a positive visual way, denigrated here obtusely as "pretty" and "vapid" only lines after an entire paragraph on the ponderousness fo the rhetoric surrounding the show, is miles away from a male representation of a vagina, as found in Playboy or Penthouse...
...The former is a way of women reclaiming for themselves the symbols, strength and beauty of their own sexuality...
...Hopke concentrates on the sexual aspect of the imagery to the exclusion of its other aspects...
...Chicago's medium was never faulted...
...Gifford's bent for mystification keeps getting in the way of good argument...
...I hope that space in other issues will not be wasted on such vitriol...
...BARBARAH ARRINGTON Beyond description New York, N.Y...
...sometimes, as in Botticelli's interpretation, it lies on a plate like a ham--an incomparable image of impotence, of power brought low...
...Maureen Mullarkey's review [Apr...
...So . . . phallic...
...I think her piece on the Judy Chicago anatomy lesson (or labial display) [Apr...
...What the man doesn't realize is that he is firing away with an unloaded gun...
...It's curious that a project purporting to celebrate the abilities of women couldn't find a live female potter or industrial designer or tapestry expert with sufficient knowhow to justify a salary...
...Feminist criticism is, too often, a variety of special pleading that attempts to make canonically prescriptive a partitular way of seeing...
...For those of us whose schooling in art history is more elementary than the reviewer's, that boundary has been questioned and crossed repeatedly over the centuries, by the Della Robbias, for example, by William Morris, by Bauhaus, Picasso, the Museum of Modem Art...
...yet this was not the crux of my major objection...
...It seems her own inability to reconcile her experience of oppression as a Catholic woman with a desire for freedom from male domination leads her to a fatal flaw in art criticism: not taking the piece on its own terms...
...I am surprised that Commonweal would publish such unexamined prejudices as commentary upon an exhibition that is never allowed to speak for itself...
...Hopke insists on ignoring the distincThe emblem of earthly (male, if you, tion between a transient body of volunlike) power in depictions of the Judith story is the head of Holofernes...
...Like the dance numbers in the movie, those Bacall does in the show consist primarily of her being trundled around the stage by chorus boys like Mae West on her couch...
...the latter is sexual domination, rape...
...At dinner with her ex-husband (James Garne0, Sally announcr "I've decided to do this cockamamie musical next...
...I did not ignore The Dinner Party's claim to be a work of art...
...Could it be that Hopke is afraid of being thought a prig or a chauvinist or a philistine if he refuses to swallow whole everything put to boil in the feminist pot...
...Sixth and last, the deliberate attempt that Mullarkey makes to tie together in function and nature Chicago's production and American huckster revivalism is shown to be grossly misdirected by her own words: "No one is getting rich off The Dinner Party...
...The review as a whole presents several troubling questions that find their source in the prejudices of the reviewer: 1. Where is the legitimate boundary between "high" and "low" art, and who has established it...
...The names of Della Robbia and company are linked by their association with ceramics and/or the modern crafts movement...
...Is work, further, necessarily alienating...
...To the Editors: I've been longing for a feminist art critic to tell us that the Emperor has no clothes--and I'm so glad Maureen Mullarkey had the courage, wit, and good sense to write such refreshingly undidactic prose about Judy Chicago's peachy-pretty-evangelical The Dinner Party [Apr...
...To the Editors: Maureen Mullarkey's "The Dinner Party is a church supper" [Apr...
...Mullarkey makes the leap from her first imposed association (The Dinner Party i~nd religious jingoism) to encompass the entire feminist art movement and "the fundamentalist impulse in American Protestantism...
...The formal aspects of Chicago's art, examined in the light of their substance -- which is, after-all, what the art is about--turn out to be, in Kandinsky's phrase, "a vain squandering of artistic powers...
...18] is a bunch of malarkey...
...Apr...
...To the Editors: Seldom have I read a less insightful, more biased review of an artistic work than the one contained in the April 10 issue by Maureen Mullarkey on Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party...
...I simply pointed to the feminist art movement's own expressed interest in these terms as a way of placing Chicago in context...
...as an unbiased review...
...That's not my idea of hair-splitting...
...The existing language, flawed and fallen as it always has been, has a wealth of ordinary nonsexist (even gender inclusive, if you 31 July 1981:433 think about it) words--e.g., mass media, manipulation, suggestibility, selfdeception, pudenda, make-believe, trendiness--that are more to the point in talking about Chicago than hazy references to Germanic authorities...
...Namecalling may not be a constructive reply but the pettiness of her piece deserves no better...
...It is sad when an Event is seen as art...
...Actually, Bacall has been too true to Sally's word, for "cockamamie" is an apt description of her Tony-award-winning turkey...
...Neither of them pays as much attention to what was said as to what each prefers to think was said in order to maintain their own postures...
...I suppose one could overlook the clumsiness of her perception and the fuzziness of her thinking if it were not for this last mistake, but things being as they are, perhaps Mullarkey should concentrate less on art and more on American religious history, a Commonweal: 432 field in which she manifestly wants to show her expertise...
...Mullarkey says no one's getting rich on The Dinner Party--but one person is getting the glory...
...3. Is the creative process necessarily 31 July 1981:431 solitary and individualistic...
...1980) by Lucy R. Lippard, who proceeds from a full and unbiased description of the show itself to a consideration of some of the important questions raised by such an exhibition at this time: 1. What is or can be the relation between aesthetic and political purposes in art...
...EXCHANGE OF VIEWS I I II I The Dinner Party a church supper...
...Mullarkey's criticism will be interpreted, by many, as antifeminist-which will reflect, really, not on her, but on the desire to be trendy that informs people's sensibilities, and on the glibness of programmed reactions...
...The problem here is its inane solemnity...
...Neither was the execution of the work...
...At onepoint, for instance, the movie's title character, Douglas (Michael Biehn), complains in a fan letter that $ally's secretary (MauII II I l l l l I II I 9 reen Stapleton) keeps sending him the same old photograph of Sally, the one where she's atop the piano being played by Harry Truman...
...Well, perhaps...
...Thus, to call her art "fundamentalism of the vagina" is to use a faulty metaphor...
...To the Editors: Though I've never met or spoken to Maureen Mullarkey, l'm a great fan of hers...
...Instead of providing evidence of their own to support a counter-judgment, they settle for narrowing their eyes at my responses and casting about for issues that don't apply...
...Like Bacall, the film's Sally Ross is a star of stage and screen who lives in a West-Side Manhattan coop-Bacall is a resident of the famed Dakota--and Sally's apartment is full of Bacall's memorabilia...
...second, in ignoring its claim to be a work of art and thereby failing to appraise it in its own art-historical context.Finally, she failed herself and your readers by giving way to a degree of hyperbolic sarcasm that far exceeded the provocation of one art exhibition in a Brooklyn museum...
...The appeal of the The Dinner Party, and of the feminist art movement as a whole, lies in its stated desire to dissolve the boundaries between "high" and "low" art . . . . [incomplete sentence ] . . . The anti-hierarchical aims of IThe Dinner Party, its folkish desire to pit intellect against feeling and its willingness to play on the susceptibilities of its audience, is a continuation of the fundamentalist impulse in American Protestantism...
...I am left to guess whether or not Nell Gifford and Robert Hopke actually attended The Dinner Party...
...However, the final-blow to this misbegotten review will be my signature...
...10 ] of The Dinner Party, recently exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum...
...Goethe, even...
...A threatened male is just the kind I would expect to find toadying obediently to the (Dinner) Party line...
...Mullarkey certainly isn't, in neither artistic awareness nor in cultural breadth...
...10 ]. When I saw The Dinner Party at the Brooklyn Museum, it was of interest to me that women came prepared to love it--the hype, evidently, paid off...
...Though Mullarkey may disagree with Chicago's conception of Dickinson, Woolf, or O'Keeffe, one would think that an art critic should have a handle on how symbols work...
...SAUL MALOFF Tho author replies...
...But hungry souls go hungry away...
...The identifying note states that Mullarkey writes on art regularly...
Vol. 108 • July 1981 • No. 14
