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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