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