Armed with power tools, paintbrushes and lifetimes of female experience, 26 women artists transformed an old Los Angeles mansion into a bad-dream house and opened it last month to the public. Before it was dismantled to make way for an apartment building, some 4,000 people traipsed through the 17-room creation; many more toured it via television, and will eventually do so again through film. From the outside, "Womanhouse" looked like a home. Inside, however, the feminist art program of the California Institute of the Arts had arranged an exhibit that proved to be a mausoleum, in which the images and illusions of generations of women were embalmed along with their old nylons and spike-heeled shoes.
Womanhouse interiors were not designed to please. "These are very clear images of woman's situation expressed as works of art," said Judy Chicago, the program's cofounder. "In essence you walk into female reality and are forced to identify with women." Thus the linen closet showed a manikin housewife trapped amidst the laundry, and the "Womb Room" consisted of a thicket of fibers that drooped, in Chicago's words, "like an exhausted uterus." In the flesh-colored kitchen, fried eggs made from sponge were stuck to the walls and ceiling, and some of them were transmuted into human breasts—all demonstrating what their creator called "the imprisonment of the female in a nurturing role."
Chicago's partner, Abstract Painter Miriam Schapiro, explained that they were trying to dramatize women in real life, "not as the object of male art." Accordingly, the makers of the dream house dressed the front half of a manikin bride in white satin and posed her triumphantly at the head of the staircase. Their tableau extended to the bottom of the stairs, where the rear half of the bride disappeared into the gray woodwork, carrying her dashed dreams with her into oblivion.
The feminist art program, the first in the country, offers courses in female art history taught by women for women only. But the first step in creating an audience for feminist art is to attract people to see it, and Womanhouse performed that function. "People who don't go to art galleries feel comfortable about coming to a house, and a lot of them went away very moved," says Chicago. They were particularly struck by a tableau in which a real woman sat in a heavily perfumed bedroom, methodically applying and removing makeup, over and over again. Said one of the contributing artists: "Old ladies just stood here and wept while they watched her."