Art: An Obsessive Feminist Pantheon

Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party turns history into agitprop

A great deal of hokey art has been made in the service of excellent causes.

So it is with The Dinner Party, an installation by Judy Chicago (formerly Gerowitz), 41, and some 400 assistants. Five years in the making, it has been shown with resounding popular success —and considerable controversy—in San Francisco, Houston and Boston, and is now packing in the crowds at the Brooklyn Museum (through Jan. 18). It is by far the most ambitious work of art yet made to carry a specifically feminist content—in this case, an emblematic “history” of women.

The format of this Chapelle aux Dames is a huge table in the form of an equilateral triangle. On each side there are 13 place settings (a reference to the Last Supper, with Christ and his twelve Disciples). The 39 settings commemorate mythic or real women, goddesses and culture heroines, from the Bona Dea of prehistory to Georgia O’Keeffe. Each consists of a porcelain goblet, porcelain cutlery and a large plate, all reposing on ornamental cloth runners. Most of the plates bear designs based on the female genital organs, though one of them, representing English Composer Ethel Smyth, is in the shape of a grand piano, and another, commemorating the black abolitionist Sojourner Truth, depicts two heads, one weeping and the other angry, drawn in a style that coarsely parodies African tribal art. The triangular ceramic floor beneath the table bears the names of an additional 999 women, resurrected—or so one is encouraged to think—from the oubliette to which a paternalistic, male-centered version of history long ago consigned them.

The choices for this pantheon are, no doubt, debatable at length. Few would question the selection of a figure like Elizabeth Blackwell (1821-1910), the first accredited woman doctor in the U.S. But the writers’ list includes quite unimportant figures like Vita Sackville-West and Agnes Smedley, while ignoring real heroines of literature like the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. What has caused the real flap, however, is Chicago’s relentless concentration on the pudenda.

Chicago announced the reason for this in her autobiography, Through the Flower, published in 1975, the year after she began The Dinner Party. “To be a woman is to be an object of contempt, and the vagina, stamp of femaleness, is despised,” she wrote. “The woman artist, seeing herself as loathed, takes the very mark of her otherness and by asserting it as the hallmark of her iconography, establishes a vehicle by which to state the beauty and truth of her identity.” The aim of this jargon-sodden Femspeak is to set up a myth of women artists as a hated underclass, which they were not in 1975 and are not today; in such a scheme, vagina hatred is imputed to men as automatically as penis envy once was to women. Questions of aesthetics then dissolve, and one is left with a lumbering clash of stereotypes in an ideological bog.

From Georgia O’Keeffe’s closeup flowers in the ’20s, through Louise Bourgeois’s sculpture in the ’50s, or Hannah Wilke’s latex wall hangings in the ’70s, there is by now a considerable array of

art made by women that draws some of its poetic content from the image of the vagina. What makes Chicago’s work unusual in this context is not the quality of her vision but the simplicity of her fixation. Perhaps one should imagine the case with the sexes reversed: a male artist decides to do a homage to macho history, from God the Father to Mahatma Gandhi and Frank Sinatra—all represented by china penises, propped up by quantities of Laurentian burblings about roots, darkness and the archetypal perceptions of the blood. Who, today, would take such an effusion seriously, and what museum would bother with it? To represent Virginia Woolf as a clump of pottery labia majora is on a par with symbolizing Mozart as a phallus. It mashes the complex truths of a great artist’s life and work into one obsessive stereotype—all in the name of “history.”

This might not be so obtrusive if Chicago’s gifts as a formal artist were less meager. In drawing and modeling, The Dinner Party is mainly cliche. Most of the shapes look clumsy, either tied down by looping dark outlines that seem as inert as Alexander Calder’s late graphics, or else gussied up, in the ceramics, with colors worthy of a Taiwanese souvenir factory. In terms of taste, The Dinner Party is no better than mass devotional art.

There is, however, one area in which it achieves real interest. The runners beneath the plates are a veritable encyclopedia of needlework techniques, studied and carried out by Chicago’s many co-workers at a high level of technical skill—pieced or appliqued quilting, trapunto, flame stitch, crewelwork, embroidery with pearls and beads, stumpwork, petit point and even the intricate and demanding form of needlework with composite materials (silk floss, gold and silver thread, jewels) known in the 13th and 14th centuries as “English work,” opus anglica-num. Each runner is fashioned from materials that are painstakingly appropriate to the woman being commemorated. For Sacagawea, Lewis and Clark’s Shoshone guide and interpreter, hand-tanned deerskins are stitched together in traditional

Indian style, with a back panel woven of nearly 40,000 beads. The labor and time entailed in all this are meant to remind us of the vast anonymous efforts expended by women through the centuries on supposedly minor, “decorative” arts, and to help rehabilitate all fiberwork as a serious medium of visual discourse. So they do—at times movingly; and it is well to keep in mind how many of the vestments, arrases and other trappings whose function was to affirm male power, from the Bayeux Tapestry to the sacerdotal wardrobes of the church, were actually made by women.

The collective skill in the runners is not reflected throughout the whole piece, and one is left wishing that the needleworkers had had better designs to work on than Chicago’s. Nevertheless, The Dinner Party will clearly acquire what is, for a static work of art, a huge audience. It is simple, didactic, portentous, gaudily evangelical and wholly free of wit or irony; it is to feminism what the big dioramas of the 19th century were to American curiosity about landscape, or war memorials to patriotism.

How, then, could it fail as agitprop? Or succeed as art?

— By Robert Hughes