Like all women and all art, Judy Chicago contains multitudes. This summer, the 84-year-old American artist’s lifelong interest in excavating and subverting women’s history through storytelling, activism and overtly feminine aesthetics and materials is on display in two bold and influential European retrospectives.
Across venues in Britain and France, six decades of Chicago’s distinctly feminist work presents a remarkable range. Minimalist sculptures? psychedelic spray painted car hoods. landscapes billowing with luminous clouds of smoke. and paintings of swirling, hallucinatory flowers fill Chicago’s brightly colored and wavy-lined galleries.
Many works incorporate personal texts into neat, circular texts about gendered rejection, shame, longing, and anger. And tapestries, murals and monumental drawings on black paper depict women’s bodies, including the artist’s own, in states of ecstasy, abandonment, dissolution – birth, birth, death and vanishing into the ether with rainbow sweeps and spirals. These works highlight the female nude, its life-giving qualities and its unspoken connection to the natural world.
One of the shows, “Herstory” — which ran at New York’s New Museum last fall and is on display now at the LUMA Foundation in Arles, France — is a classic chronological depiction of Chicago’s work from the early 1960s to the present. the other, “Revelations,” in the Serpentine Galleries in London, focuses on the artist’s designs. The catalog for the London exhibition also includes an illuminated manuscript of the same name from the 1970s that Chicago produced during the creation of her best-known work, “The Dinner Party” (1974-1979), an installation that imagines a ceremonial banquet for 39 pre-eminent women.
Now a mainstay of art history scholarship, “The Dinner Party” has dominated understanding of Chicago’s career despite its prolific and wide-ranging output. The massive triangular table with elaborate ceramic and embroidered parts was the product of years of collaboration with female artisans and the distillation of a decade of research in archives and libraries, where Chicago discovered figure after figure who had made groundbreaking discoveries in various disciplines but whose contributions had been erased from history. . Each setting at the banquet is dedicated to one of these women, each with their own special embroidered fabric and ceramic plate.
“The Dinner Party” appears neither in Arles nor in London, but a handful of Chicago test plates and careful pen-and-ink sketches for their designs are exhibited at both shows, with what might be called a sort of flourish vulva pattern. The artist has referred to it as the “central image of the core,” an aesthetic that privileges the circular over the horizontal or vertical, the orifice over the phallus, the diffuse and equally distributed over the singular and autonomous.
These ideas were so offensive at the time that when the University of the District of Columbia tried to acquire “The Dinner Party” in 1988, a member of parliament denounced it as “3D ceramic pornography” on the floor of the House of Representatives. (A 10-minute video clip of the two-hour discussion, which did not include women, is on view at the Serpentine.) The work went into storage until 2002, when it entered the collection of the Brooklyn Museumwhere it has been permanently exhibited since 2007.
The previously unpublished “Revelations” is an extended five-chapter narrative in vivid vignettes that recounts the eternal struggle for power between men and women, including sections on primordial matriarchs and ancient theocratic societies. The longer chapter, “Myths, Legends, and Silhouettes,” gives stories of some of the Chicago “Dinner Party” guests, including Sappho, Hildegard of Bingen, Artemisia Gentileschi, Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, and Georgia O’Keeffe .
Some of the biographies are sentimental or cartoonish in their telling of Chicago, but the stories of fortitude in the face of rejection, violence and humiliation form a litany that is infuriating and surprising, if not unheard of. By the end of the chapter, O’Keeffe emerges as a kind of 20th-century feminist patron saint, whose large paintings of tightly cut flowers, bright and bulging, defied the artistic fashions of the early 20th century. “Here is my flower, people,” O’Keefe wrote in a 1939 Chicago exhibition catalog cited in “Revelations”: “I’ll paint what I see—what the flower is to me—but I’ll paint it big and they will be surprised if they take the time to see it.”
But the manuscript does not contain what O’Keeffe said next: “You have hung all your flower associations on my flower, and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see about the flower—and I do” t.”
I like to think that this is skipped because Chicago knows that reality can be frustrating and full of rejection, but that’s no reason to stop doing. In the artist’s work, femininity is a performance, with and against expectations, performed by every woman struggling to be the author of her own destiny.
In both London and Arles, I found myself returning to works from the artist’s early and transitional periods before ‘Dinner Party’, during which she struggled to fit into the popular art movements of the time, such as Minimalism or Land Art, where women were marginalized or simply not welcome. (Curator Walter Hopps said that seeing Chicago’s work was like watching a woman pull up her skirt, and John Coplans, Artforum’s founding editor, told her, “You have to decide whether you want to be a woman or an artist .”) But these pieces are really—to use a taboo word in art criticism these days—beautiful.
At LUMA, three works from the “Pasadena Lifesavers” series (1969-70) shimmer and shine before the eyes like Op Art candy. Each consists of four donut shapes in different color combinations in acrylic, applied with a lacquer spray so thin and so delicately sloped that the flat forms seem to float, turn and shake. In the next room, a series of 1973 paintings dedicated to female rulers (Queens Elizabeth II and Victoria of Britain, Queen Christina of Sweden), conjure up like holy visions, pure visual delights in soft pinks, yellows, blues, purples and creams. In London, the prints and preparatory drawings for the series are equally ethereal and masterfully executed.
In both exhibitions, spaces are dedicated to Chicago’s smoky works, “Atmospheres” (1967-2022), which originate from the Californian desert. In the first works of the series, Chicago’s contemporaries walk through barren landscapes, their naked bodies brightly painted, puffing out canisters of colored smoke. Photos and videos of the performances are like abstract paintings in motion, the air vividly painted with billowing paths that take on a life of their own. They show the potential of a collective in motion to produce something both unpredictable and deeply moving.
By contrast, later works such as “What if Women Ruled the World,” with its embroidered gold pendants originally created for a Dior 2020 couture show, are disappointingly literal. “Would Earth be protected?” the banners ask. “Would God be a woman?” … “Would there be violence?” … Maybe — and?
One of the many burdens of being a “feminist artist” is that your work is often condemned whether you do or don’t, because no work of art, no matter how iconic, can adequately represent all womanhood or femininity. . or feminism. The most challenging art, like Chicago’s best, offers new ways of thinking and creating that you can practice on your own terms, too.
