![Judy Chicago Post-Video
Intro: Negotiating the canon
§ TDP was a deliberate and strategic, and reformist attempt to canonize a collection of women of historical significance to Western culture
§ The ambition of the gesture was functionally self-canonizing
§ The canon is a contested but deeply imbricated in our understanding of Art and Art History/ it is unavoidably problematic in its exclusivity
§ It is important to note that specific disciplines or artists are canonized by collectors, museums, and art institutions such as DIA and MARFA/ the latter focus exclusively on preserving and promoting the largely masculine genre of Minimalist art since the 60s
§ There is no equivalent infrastructure designed to support the canonization of feminist art, with the recent exception of the Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art, housed in the Brooklyn Museum of Art. [more on this later]
§ Feminist Art will be canonized, or not canonized, in large part based on the availability of specifically dedicated Feminist Art spaces, and the tastes of [still predominantly male] curators at major museums.
There is a great legacy of female gallerists, from Peggy Guggenheim to Mary Boone to Rhona Hoffman in Chicago, and the gallery is the stepping stone to the museum, but gallerists’ imperative is business as much as it is aesthetics or politics, and female artists’ work rarely sells for the same prices that male artists’ work command.
§ Canonization could be read as anti-feminist to the extent that it’s so thoroughly reliant on exclusion and hierarchy, and collusion with the canon could be seen as symptom of Stockholm syndrome, but the desire for one’s work to not be silenced or erased is more than legitimate – it is about survival. The continued diminuation of Feminist art and art by women in the contemporary canon replicates so many other instances of the silencing and erasure of women that to work to make the canon generally more inclusive seems imperative.
§ Further, Chicago was innovative in creating new modes of exhibition and economic support. By acting as her own curator and organizing her own world tour, and by cultivating sponsorships, winning grants, and perhaps most importantly selling merch, she found a way to effectively circumvent [for a time] the traditional institutions that establish the canon.
§ This circumvention was being practiced in a number of ways, including by the collaborative of women artists who began the A.I.R. Gallery in New York City
Stew: How can The Dinner Party be understood?
§ The intent of TDP is abundantly clear, so I’ll focus on some critiques and responses by other scholars.
§ First, a cursory description of the term Essentialism: Most importantly, the term is terribly loaded, and not incorrectly read as a dirty word in the art world. Women were/are discriminated against as a class, this historical circumstance has led some feminist artists to make work that attempted to represent, unite, and advance women as a class. Much of that work, and especially a subset of that work which is referred to as “central core imagery” has been considered Essentialist, and problematic for the way that it reduces women to a [potentially inaccurate] stereotype or series of supposedly innate characteristics. The defining of “women” and its attendant discrimination precedes Essentialist art, and because of this, the instigating discrimination seems to me to be far more problematic than the resulting work, however flawed. Nevertheless, the insistence of plated vulvas in The Dinner Party is about as “Essentialist” as you can get, and that takes us to Hilton Kramer, writing for the New York Times in 1980, and critiquing The Dinner Party’s Essentialist aesthetic this way:
To represent women’s achievements through the ages by constructing a monument to their sex organs may not, in any case, be everyone’s idea of an appropriate act of homage.
and later:
[…] For anyone more interested in art rather than in ideology, especially when visiting an art museum – the esthetic pleasure to be derived from the Dinner Party may prove to be more elusive…..Nothing more obvious or accessible or didactic has been seen in an exhibition of contemporary art in a very long time.
TDP as essentially propaganda. Kramer goes on to say:
[…] To this male observer, it looks like an outrageous libel on the female imagination.
§ These are fair concerns, ones that I share, but TDP is not only a monument to the sex organs of historical women, it’s a monument on dinner plates. To honor that complexity, we’ll change directions for a moment, with a quote from art critic Laura Cottingham:
If the thirty-nine women invited to Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party were to come, some, such as Natalie Barney and Sappho, would arrive as self-identified lesbians; others might be silently lesbian. All would participate in a lesbian gesture as they proceeded to eat from the vulvar plates. –from the essay ”Eating from the Dinner Party plates and other myths, metaphors, and moments of lesbian enunciation in feminism and its art movement”
§ Cottingham was not the first critic to emphasize the lesbian content of the work, but she was the first I’ve been able to find in print who appreciated that content. The opposite position is taken by widely-known and respected feminist art critic, Lucy Lippard, who has disdained this lesbian connection as “ludicrous misinterpretati[on]” and illustrated the supposed ludicrousness of the claim, writing in a footnote “(vaginas on plates – get it?)” a rhetorical move that I think backfires particularly fiercely with a project as didactically certain, and as tightly wedded to symbology as this one is.
§ Cottingham’s essay isn’t concerned with constructing an analysis of TDP as a whole, nor does it seem to matter whether the lesbian content of the project was unintentional. The significance of the lesbian presence in the work is visibility, at a time when invisibility was yet more common than it currently is and when lavender was menacing.
Let’s add one more complication to consider:
§ Let’s assume for a moment [if assumption is necessary] that we’re satisfied with the representation of historical female figures by abstracted vulvas
§ What does it mean if some, three or four maybe, of the 33 women represented at the dinner table aren’t treated to such representation?
§ Sojourner Truth is represented by three African masks
§ Sacajawea is represented by a A beaded cradleboard and hood These are two of the very few women of color in TDP Kali, Ishtar Hatshepsut, and the fact that neither is represented in a way consistent with the overall vulvar imagery of work seems suspect: Are women of color not to be considered women, or would such a consideration somehow
Related heritage floor tiles seem entirely engaged with grouping Truth and Sacajawea by race, while other groups of women seemed to be organized around discipline or career
Writing in Ms. Magazine in 1979 Alice Walker
Responding to those concerns, ucy Lippard wrote that was not an issue
Additionally, while Sappho, Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson’s plates seem to fit the overall aesthetic of the project, two other women whose sexuality was or may have been
§ Piano Lady Smyth [composer] who is represented on her runner by the masculine clothing that she wore and on her plate by the instrument she played; the aesthetic enforces an erasure, and suggests a closeting
§ Natalie Barney [poet and lesbian] is represented by a star shape that might pass as vulvar, but it has a sideways slit. Her plate is oriented differently than the others.
This
§ Feminist project, but not financially or organizationally feminist – in the time of consciousness-raising and consensus building
TDP, created between 1974-1979 must be read as a historical document; one that was created with a charge to respond to a period of incredible gender iniquity that is to me almost unimaginable.
Popular impact
The face on the left, with a single tear running down her cheek, weeps for the suffering of her fellow slaves. The highly stylized face on the right, in an open-mouthed expression of outrage, represents the anger of black women in their enslavement. The central face, a mask decorated with black-and-white patterns of triangles, suggests the extent to which both black and white women were required to conceal their true selves. Finally, the raised fist on the far right of the plate commemorates Sojourner Truth’s speech and powerful gesture at the Women’s Rights Convention in 1851 (Chicago, The Dinner Party, 87–8). How does a historical reading of The Dinner Party compare with a contemporary reading of it? What is the legacy of The Dinner Party?
Reconsidering the impact of the work, the framing of future work
As a critique and expansion of 19th-century and Modernist-derivative assumptions, the Feminist Art Movement encouraged collaborative art practices; sought new recognition for craft and for sculptural materials associated with domesticity; championed autobiography as a vital artistic foundation; engaged directly with the political implications of the work of art; encouraged the emergence of new media, especially video and performance; called for a prioritization of female subjectivity; and opposed the purely formalist basis according to which American art has categorized and judged itself since the end of World War II. – Laura Cottingham, Shifting Signs: On the Art of Mary Beth Edelson
Role of craft: reclamation of low media – a huge innovation
Project as social practice – a fraught innovation, in this case because of the strange hybridity of Chicago’s ownership over the project despite its vastly communal construction
Connie Butler
All about the architecture
Architecture, curatorial strategy
Bullies other work
Asserts itself at the origin of a lineage future feminist art
Cannot engage/compete
I’d like offer another interpretation of the Dinner Party, one that to me justifies the bawdiness, the earnestness, the spectacle, the hyperbole, and that is to consider TDP as camp. Camp as Susan Sontag defines it
5. […] Camp is often decorative art
18. One must distinguish between naïve and deliberate Camp. Pure Camp is always naïve. Camp which knows itself to be Camp (‘camping’) is usually less satisfying.
19. The pure examples of Camp are unintentional; they are dead serious.
23. In naïve, or pure Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails. Of course, not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve. […]
26. Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriousy because it is ‘too much’ […]
glamor, theatricality, vulgarity](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l1x04pxaUi1qzbhq9o1_500.jpg)
Judy Chicago Post-Video
Intro: Negotiating the canon
§ TDP was a deliberate and strategic, and reformist attempt to canonize a collection of women of historical significance to Western culture
§ The ambition of the gesture was functionally self-canonizing
§ The canon is a contested but deeply imbricated in our understanding of Art and Art History/ it is unavoidably problematic in its exclusivity
§ It is important to note that specific disciplines or artists are canonized by collectors, museums, and art institutions such as DIA and MARFA/ the latter focus exclusively on preserving and promoting the largely masculine genre of Minimalist art since the 60s
§ There is no equivalent infrastructure designed to support the canonization of feminist art, with the recent exception of the Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art, housed in the Brooklyn Museum of Art. [more on this later]
§ Feminist Art will be canonized, or not canonized, in large part based on the availability of specifically dedicated Feminist Art spaces, and the tastes of [still predominantly male] curators at major museums.
There is a great legacy of female gallerists, from Peggy Guggenheim to Mary Boone to Rhona Hoffman in Chicago, and the gallery is the stepping stone to the museum, but gallerists’ imperative is business as much as it is aesthetics or politics, and female artists’ work rarely sells for the same prices that male artists’ work command.
§ Canonization could be read as anti-feminist to the extent that it’s so thoroughly reliant on exclusion and hierarchy, and collusion with the canon could be seen as symptom of Stockholm syndrome, but the desire for one’s work to not be silenced or erased is more than legitimate – it is about survival. The continued diminuation of Feminist art and art by women in the contemporary canon replicates so many other instances of the silencing and erasure of women that to work to make the canon generally more inclusive seems imperative.
§ Further, Chicago was innovative in creating new modes of exhibition and economic support. By acting as her own curator and organizing her own world tour, and by cultivating sponsorships, winning grants, and perhaps most importantly selling merch, she found a way to effectively circumvent [for a time] the traditional institutions that establish the canon.
§ This circumvention was being practiced in a number of ways, including by the collaborative of women artists who began the A.I.R. Gallery in New York City
Stew: How can The Dinner Party be understood?
§ The intent of TDP is abundantly clear, so I’ll focus on some critiques and responses by other scholars.
§ First, a cursory description of the term Essentialism: Most importantly, the term is terribly loaded, and not incorrectly read as a dirty word in the art world. Women were/are discriminated against as a class, this historical circumstance has led some feminist artists to make work that attempted to represent, unite, and advance women as a class. Much of that work, and especially a subset of that work which is referred to as “central core imagery” has been considered Essentialist, and problematic for the way that it reduces women to a [potentially inaccurate] stereotype or series of supposedly innate characteristics. The defining of “women” and its attendant discrimination precedes Essentialist art, and because of this, the instigating discrimination seems to me to be far more problematic than the resulting work, however flawed. Nevertheless, the insistence of plated vulvas in The Dinner Party is about as “Essentialist” as you can get, and that takes us to Hilton Kramer, writing for the New York Times in 1980, and critiquing The Dinner Party’s Essentialist aesthetic this way:
To represent women’s achievements through the ages by constructing a monument to their sex organs may not, in any case, be everyone’s idea of an appropriate act of homage.
and later:
[…] For anyone more interested in art rather than in ideology, especially when visiting an art museum – the esthetic pleasure to be derived from the Dinner Party may prove to be more elusive…..Nothing more obvious or accessible or didactic has been seen in an exhibition of contemporary art in a very long time.
TDP as essentially propaganda. Kramer goes on to say:
[…] To this male observer, it looks like an outrageous libel on the female imagination.
§ These are fair concerns, ones that I share, but TDP is not only a monument to the sex organs of historical women, it’s a monument on dinner plates. To honor that complexity, we’ll change directions for a moment, with a quote from art critic Laura Cottingham:
If the thirty-nine women invited to Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party were to come, some, such as Natalie Barney and Sappho, would arrive as self-identified lesbians; others might be silently lesbian. All would participate in a lesbian gesture as they proceeded to eat from the vulvar plates. –from the essay ”Eating from the Dinner Party plates and other myths, metaphors, and moments of lesbian enunciation in feminism and its art movement”
§ Cottingham was not the first critic to emphasize the lesbian content of the work, but she was the first I’ve been able to find in print who appreciated that content. The opposite position is taken by widely-known and respected feminist art critic, Lucy Lippard, who has disdained this lesbian connection as “ludicrous misinterpretati[on]” and illustrated the supposed ludicrousness of the claim, writing in a footnote “(vaginas on plates – get it?)” a rhetorical move that I think backfires particularly fiercely with a project as didactically certain, and as tightly wedded to symbology as this one is.
§ Cottingham’s essay isn’t concerned with constructing an analysis of TDP as a whole, nor does it seem to matter whether the lesbian content of the project was unintentional. The significance of the lesbian presence in the work is visibility, at a time when invisibility was yet more common than it currently is and when lavender was menacing.
Let’s add one more complication to consider:
§ Let’s assume for a moment [if assumption is necessary] that we’re satisfied with the representation of historical female figures by abstracted vulvas
§ What does it mean if some, three or four maybe, of the 33 women represented at the dinner table aren’t treated to such representation?
§ Sojourner Truth is represented by three African masks
§ Sacajawea is represented by a A beaded cradleboard and hood These are two of the very few women of color in TDP Kali, Ishtar Hatshepsut, and the fact that neither is represented in a way consistent with the overall vulvar imagery of work seems suspect: Are women of color not to be considered women, or would such a consideration somehow
Related heritage floor tiles seem entirely engaged with grouping Truth and Sacajawea by race, while other groups of women seemed to be organized around discipline or career
Writing in Ms. Magazine in 1979 Alice Walker
Responding to those concerns, ucy Lippard wrote that was not an issue
Additionally, while Sappho, Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson’s plates seem to fit the overall aesthetic of the project, two other women whose sexuality was or may have been
§ Piano Lady Smyth [composer] who is represented on her runner by the masculine clothing that she wore and on her plate by the instrument she played; the aesthetic enforces an erasure, and suggests a closeting
§ Natalie Barney [poet and lesbian] is represented by a star shape that might pass as vulvar, but it has a sideways slit. Her plate is oriented differently than the others.
This
§ Feminist project, but not financially or organizationally feminist – in the time of consciousness-raising and consensus building
TDP, created between 1974-1979 must be read as a historical document; one that was created with a charge to respond to a period of incredible gender iniquity that is to me almost unimaginable.
Popular impact
The face on the left, with a single tear running down her cheek, weeps for the suffering of her fellow slaves. The highly stylized face on the right, in an open-mouthed expression of outrage, represents the anger of black women in their enslavement. The central face, a mask decorated with black-and-white patterns of triangles, suggests the extent to which both black and white women were required to conceal their true selves. Finally, the raised fist on the far right of the plate commemorates Sojourner Truth’s speech and powerful gesture at the Women’s Rights Convention in 1851 (Chicago, The Dinner Party, 87–8).
How does a historical reading of The Dinner Party compare with a contemporary reading of it? What is the legacy of The Dinner Party?
Reconsidering the impact of the work, the framing of future work
As a critique and expansion of 19th-century and Modernist-derivative assumptions, the Feminist Art Movement encouraged collaborative art practices; sought new recognition for craft and for sculptural materials associated with domesticity; championed autobiography as a vital artistic foundation; engaged directly with the political implications of the work of art; encouraged the emergence of new media, especially video and performance; called for a prioritization of female subjectivity; and opposed the purely formalist basis according to which American art has categorized and judged itself since the end of World War II. – Laura Cottingham, Shifting Signs: On the Art of Mary Beth Edelson
Role of craft: reclamation of low media – a huge innovation
Project as social practice – a fraught innovation, in this case because of the strange hybridity of Chicago’s ownership over the project despite its vastly communal construction
Connie Butler
All about the architecture
Architecture, curatorial strategy
Bullies other work
Asserts itself at the origin of a lineage future feminist art
Cannot engage/compete
I’d like offer another interpretation of the Dinner Party, one that to me justifies the bawdiness, the earnestness, the spectacle, the hyperbole, and that is to consider TDP as camp. Camp as Susan Sontag defines it
5. […] Camp is often decorative art
18. One must distinguish between naïve and deliberate Camp. Pure Camp is always naïve. Camp which knows itself to be Camp (‘camping’) is usually less satisfying.
19. The pure examples of Camp are unintentional; they are dead serious.
23. In naïve, or pure Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails. Of course, not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve. […]
26. Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriousy because it is ‘too much’ […]
glamor, theatricality, vulgarity
