Who's Afraid of Vagina Wolf?
by John Perreault
What is it like to look again at a work you once extravagantly praised 22 long years ago? Judy Chicago's "Dinner Party" has not been seen for so long that it nearly legendary. It has lived in books. This is no different from artworks in foreign museums that somehow you never get around to visit or perhaps have only seen once. "The Dinner Party" had a ghost life and knowing what I know, appreciating that pictures of art are only that, one wonders after awhile. Perhaps I was dreaming.
So it was with some trepidation that I got on the #2 and detrained at the very familiar Brooklyn Museum stop. "The Dinner Party" is now on display at BMA until February 9 thanks to the Elizabeth Sackler Foundation which has also supported the permanent installation of the work that will open in the fall of 2004. "The Dinner Party", which was first shown at BMA in 1980, now has a permanent home.
In 1980, I wrote in the Soho News: "It is an important work; it is a key work. Certain conservative journalistic critics may call it kitsch to their dying day, may puritanically rage against its sexual imagery, may imply over and over again that it can’t be good art because it is too popular; but I know it’s great. I was profoundly moved."
And that was just my lead. I took a great deal of abuse for my praise.
By the phrase "conservative journalistic critics" I must have been referring to the then N.Y. Times lead critic, who shall be nameless, since he is now parked somewhere else where he still rages, clearly and I suppose consistently off-base and irrelevant.
There were other objections to "The Dinner Party", some of them I am afraid caused by envy. "She has reduced us to vaginas just like the men," I remember one feminist artist declaiming at a more private dinner party. And then, of course, feminism did get a bit more complicated and Chicago had to take the heat for essentialism. The theory of the social construction of gender became the official art world position. Has the argument now come full-circle? I doubt it. But I myself am always suspicious of either/or propositions.
Then there was the even sillier craft world objections that she had ripped-off some suddenly sacrosanct traditions: namely needlework and ceramics. Yes, both are major components of "The Dinner Party", but Chicago was in the forefront of what we now see as a breaking down of the fine-art anti-craft bias.
I myself had an objection to the then popular feminist notion that there was something innately womanly, even feminist about central imagery in art and, even more curiously, the grid. Men had used and continued to use both. I remember also challenging fresh college art student to identify the sex of the unidentified and to them unknown artists whose slides I showed as an introduction to gender issues and sexism in art. They were usually wrong.
After once hosting Chicago"s "Birth Project" (which I liked a great deal) as Visual Arts Director at Snug Harbor on Staten Island, after her "Powerplay Series", her "Holocaust Project", and the most recent effort ("Resolutions: A Stitch in Time"), how would "The Dinner Party" hold up? One tends to see an artwork not only by what came before and by what came after. in terms of both the general art context and the artist's ouevre.
Now of course it looks like Chicago's early work lead step by step to "The Dinner Party." At first she was firmly in the art world’s minimalist camp, or at least the West Coat version. You can check this out in the new book on her work called simply Judy Chicago (edited by Elizabeth Sackler and published by Watson-Guptill) and then the centralized imagery slowly becomes more and more butterflyish then---vaginal. You can also read Chicago's autobiographical "Through the Flower" to see how her growing consciousness as a woman artist and the development of her art fed one another, leading up to "The Dinner Party", which was so large in scope that it pushed her beyond the lonely-artist-in-her studio mode to working more collectively. "The Dinner Party" required hundreds of hands beyond her own; and probably some additional brainwork too. Minimalism had already confirmed that the artist did not have to be the only maker of his or her artwork or even the maker at all. Chicago, to this day, still gives credit where credit is do to the women who worked on the project. In the minimalist camp only Sol LeWitt does the same, at least in terms of his wall drawings and paintings.
In retrospect it now seems that "The Dinner Party" came out of a social, feminist context as well as an art world one. That for the time was daring, to say the least. Whether you like "The Dinner Party" or not, it changed art. It was an event as much as an artwork. Chicago may not have done it all alone, but she certainly did not have a big New York gallery behind her. Furthermore, her art since "The Dinner Party" confirms that beginning with that work Chicago was after the really big subjects, something even now most artists shy away from for fear of embarrassment, making a mistake, or merely because the commercial art world can't handle other than formal topics or adolescent self-indulgence.
So on the elevator up to the 4th floor I was still wondering about how the actual "Dinner Party" would look and work. There were the now-familiar banners: "And She Gathered All before Her", etc. I turned the corner and there it was. A huge triangular banquet table with 39 place-settings, each one honoring a particular woman in myth and then history. It was still breathtaking. And I, like the others in the crowd, moved counterclockwise from setting to setting from the Primordial Goddess, to Ishtar, to Hatshepsut, to Saint Bridget, through Emily Dickinson, through Virginia Woolf and ending with Georgia O'Keeffe. Every setting tells a story, through the "decorated" ceramic plate and the related needlework runner. What I hadn"t remembered was that the plates got wilder, more three-dimensional, and more vaginal as you move through time around the table.
What is there left for me to say? This time the press response is favorable indeed, certainly in The Times and in The Voice. But what I can say is that what really pleases me is that this is a really nervy, shocking artwork. It is still over-the-top. It pretends to be rational and didactic, which in many ways it is. But the vision of vagina dinner plates at a women’s banquet is exactly what makes "The Dinner Party" far out…and effective. It sometimes takes a bit of wildness to get a point across. So now we probably need a retrospective to put "The Dinner Party" in the context of Chicago's work before and after. Wouldn't it be great if a retrospective accompanied the opening of the permanent installation of "The Dinner Party" at Brooklyn?
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...the vision of vagina dinner plates at a women's banquet is exactly what makes "The Dinner Party" far out and effective. It sometimes takes a bit of wildness to get a point across.
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