Judy Chicagoland
CATTON, PIA
Judy Chicagoland By Pia Catton Judy Chicago has written her second autobiography, Beyond the Flower (Viking, 282 pages, $27.95). If you missed the first, don’t worry; Beyond the Flower...
...When The Dinner Party failed to win the anticipated acceptance from the art establishment, Chicago set out on a new endeavor, called The Birth Project, a series of needlework images of women giving birth...
...during the debate Rep...
...The Dinner Party is a table featuring place settings for 39 women, running the gamut from significant historical figures like Mary Wollstonecraft to mythical creations of feminist ideology like “Primordial Goddess...
...By design, everyday women will be able to understand the message of feminist art, that message being one of victimization and oppression...
...And Chicago proves her error with a vignette in Beyond the Flower...
...Maybe, like those unwillingly ?ginvited?h to Judy Chicago?fs ?gdinner party,?h they resist being reduced to a vulva with a political agenda...
...Each woman is commemorated by a ceramic plate and cloth runner...
...Is it an honor to lock Sappho in the same jail of male oppression as Anne Hutchinson, to put Judith on an equal footing with Sojourner Truth, to set Ethel Smyth (who...
...they are the art world...
...As dealers, critics, historians, and curators, they are deluded into thinking they have real power...
...They vary from the truly influential— Queen Elizabeth I—to the truly obscure—Natalie Barney, a turn-ofthecentury lesbian who established a gay-friendly salon in Paris...
...From her perch far above the rest of us peons, who can only dream of spending our days painting and sculpting, she sees oppression in the demands of ordinary life...
...And each plate contains an image Chicago feels is the “physically defining characteristic of woman in an almost metaphysical sense”—an image of the vulva...
...It is doubtful that women would actually use the voice Chicago provides for them...
...The criticism confuses Chicago, who claims to have coined the phrase Feminist Art— “a term that didn’t exist until I invented it...
...In Beyond the Flower, Chicago writes of her frustration when feminist theorists labeled her work “essentialist” and accused her of “degrading women through my use of vulval imagery...
...Chicago, however, did not anticipate that women might have priorities other than creating art: “We heard about angry husbands, who expressed considerable resentment that their wives wanted to stitch rather than spend time with them...
...What gives Chicago the authority to proclaim that women all share status as victims of oppression...
...Nothing...
...When The Dinner Party debuted at the San Francisco Museum of Art, it caused quite a sensation...
...would have had little tolerance for sexually explicit art, especially art that included representations of their own bodies...
...Mother Jones and Life reported the show favorably...
...So it seems the establishment is to embrace feminist art even though Chicago segregates herself from the art world and thumbs her nose at it...
...about family members who came to town and simply assumed that the women would drop everything and squire them around...
...Chicago’s choices of whom to represent in this festival of gynocentrism are nowhere near as objectionable as the way she represents them...
...The vulva can be “dark and molten,” as Chicago writes of the image for Primordial Goddess, or trimmed with pink lace, as in the case of Emily Dickinson, but whichever way she shows it, the vulva is always there...
...In doing so, however, she made it so obvious in its essential vulgarity that it leaves little to the imagination...
...What does Chicago expect feminist art to do for women...
...Funny that Chicago never considers male critics marginal...
...Does the power just fizzle away for a female art critic...
...A radical feminist might find 39 vulvas beautiful, but for art critics and museum-goers alike, they are something else entirely...
...Chicago wants not only women but women-centered art as well to receive the same recognition given to men and “male” art...
...Thus, feminist art relies on the assumption that women, regardless of their history, culture, or class, speak the same language—that of oppression—and need a collective “voice...
...There’s the revolting answer: “Rippling out from their tiny centers is the insistence that female sexuality is to be celebrated and embraced, not hidden away, purchased, excised, or despised...
...Dealers, critics, historians, and curators are not marginal participants in the art world...
...gWomen,?h Chicago writes, ?gdo not yet understand that they must financially support the art that speaks to them.?h Maybe they understand it all too well...
...Just how does the vulva define women “metaphysically...
...First and foremost, feminist art intends to give true voice to “women’s ways of being...
...Hilton Kramer, then the art critic of the New York Times, wrote a particularly biting review of the piece in 1980...
...In order to allow for the true expression of the female voice, feminist art must move out of the mainstream, or “male-stream...
...How about for Mary Boone, doyenne of the New York gallery scene, whose Soho space made dozens of reputations in the 1980s...
...The runners depict scenes from the woman’s life or “story...
...For its principal image, The Dinner Party remains fixated on the external genital organs of the female body,” he said...
...Indeed, many pages of Beyond the Flower are committed to Chicago’s frustration that critics and curators are able to decide the fate of an artist and to control opinion...
...Five thousand people flocked to the opening...
...But it wasn’t just conservatives and congressmen who were appalled by The Dinner Party...
...There’s the highfalutin answer: “The vulval image could act . . . as an entryway into an aesthetic exploration of what it has meant to be a woman—experientially, historically, and philosophically...
...Beyond the Flower has everything you could possibly want to know about her...
...Most important, feminist art will be able to speak to a broad audience: “Feminist Art was . . . not intended primarily for a sophisticated art audience, one familiar with the sometimes arcane visual language of contemporary art...
...The Dinner Party met this goal, but other feminists were apparently too obtuse to get the point: “I could not figure out how seemingly erudite women could completely miss the point—understood by so many less sophisticated viewers—that The Dinner Party entirely celebrates women’s sexuality, history, and crafts...
...The purpose of the program was to produce art “in which distinctly female subject matter would both be central and unabashedly expressed...
...In 1970, she created a Feminist Art education program, the first of its kind, at Fresno State University...
...A decade later, when Chicago planned to donate her work to the University of the District of Columbia (UDC), the explicit sexual imagery caused a tumult in Congress...
...NPR’s All Things Considered featured Chicago in an interview with Susan Stamberg...
...She thinks the homelessness of her masterpiece is an example of the way in which feminist art has been discriminated against by the art world...
...Although she produced a number of works before and after it, The Dinner Party is the work that simultaneously put her on the map and has kept her off it since...
...Its many variations of the image are not without a certain ingenuity, to be sure, but it is the kind of ingenuity we associate with kitsch...
...Later, when the piece traveled to the Brooklyn Museum, CBS News and People covered it...
...In 1990 the House voted to withhold the funds...
...The goal is contradictory and the enterprise is doomed to failure...
...This is especially true for The Dinner Party, which was, she writes, “intended to test whether a woman artist . . . could count on the art system to accept art with female content...
...Chicago complains not only about men who want their wives to spend time with them, but also about the art world...
...gSince the UDC debacle,?h she writes, ?gthere have been no other offers for permanent housing, the simple explanation for which is that there is apparently an absence of institutional will regarding women and women?fs art.?h And here she blames women as well for not embracing her and her cause: ?gWhat will it take for women to turn their attention to the honoring of our own history and achievements??h Honor...
...It included over 50 women across the country who stitched Chicago’s designs and then turned the work over to her to be displayed at various locations...
...Dana Rohrabacher dismissed the work as “weird sexual art...
...Enlightened classicists will recognize her as the queen of the Land Before Patriarchy...
...In Beyond the Flower, Chicago explores the central question of her career: why The Dinner Party remains without a permanent site even though nearly one million people have seen it...
...It must be free of “male” rules for art, such as attention to form over content, a concept which hampers creativity...
...In the attempt to elevate content over form, Chicago has left aesthetics behind...
...equal to Emily Dickinson...
...But not all the attention she received was congratulatory...
...But what exactly is Chicago’s goal in celebrating these feminine wonders...
...Chicago (n?e Cohen) is best known for The Dinner Party, an “installation” that made headlines when she first displayed it in 1979...
...Chicago was invited to the Today show and the Bill Moyers Show...
...The women represented at The Dinner Party.the real ones, that is...
...Chicago designed The Dinner Party so that average viewers, outside the art community, could understand it...
...The school needed a $1.6 million grant from Congress to renovate the building in which The Dinner Party would be housed...
...There’s the robot-feminist answer: The vulval image “was just one way of demonstrating that the oppression experienced by the women represented at the table was a result of their gender...
...Women participate only marginally,” she writes...
...about calls from school-board members and PTA officials insisting that the women help with one or another seemingly pressing crisis...
...Art informed by feminist values must focus on personal empowerment and thereby provide “an alternative to the prevailing paradigm of power, which is power over others...
...Chicago gives several answers in Beyond the Flower...
Vol. 2 • October 1996 • No. 5
