Betty Brown
[1]
[2] 
[3] 
[4] 
[5](1) Judy Chicago, "The Dinner Party" (detail), mixed media,
36" x 46 1/2' each side.
© 1979 Judy Chicago. Photo: Donald Woodman.
(2) Betye Saar, "Liberation of Aunt Jemima", mixed media, 11 3/4
x 8 x 2 3/4", 1972
(3) Renee Cox, "Yo Mama", gelatin silver print, 1993.
(4) Faith Wilding, "Womb", watercolor on paper, 20 x 15",
1971.
(5) Yoko Ono, "Cut Piece", photograph documenting performance
at Yamaichi Concert Hall, Kyoto, Japan, 1964. Photo: Lenono Photo Archive.
"Connecting was the function and meaning of women's traditional art,
and it is still consciously a function of feminist art today."
Harmony Hammond, "Creating Feminist Works" 1
By the time I have looked at works such as Faith Wilding's Womb ,
Millie Wilson's Wig/Cunt and Hannah Wilke's Seven Untitled Vaginal-Phallic
and Excremental Sculptures, I am squirming in discomfort [All included
in "Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago's Dinner Party in Feminist Art
History" currently at UCLA's Armand
Hammer Museum of Art--Ed.]. It is difficult for me to write --much less
say--"cunt." I realize my unease over the popular word used to
describe my own genitalia indicates how deeply ingrained is the cultural
shame about our body parts. Sex is indeed a profoundly important and deeply
political issue. I think of Sut Jhally, who reminds us [in his video on
Desire, Sex and Power in Music Videos] that each society has many,
many stories to tell about sexuality, but that our commercial culture has
concentrated primarily on telling only one such story--the story of heterosexual
male fantasy. Is that why I feel this way when I look at and write about
cunt art?, I ask myself.
Amelia Jones' catalogue essay reads, "The first part of the title of
this exhibition, Sexual Politics, alludes to Kate Millett's best-selling
book of 1970, in which she theorizes "sex" (or "sexual difference,"
as we would say today) as a site of oppression and so a locus for political
intervention. My reference to this book--with its polemical call for a politics
oriented around 'our system of sexual relationship. . .[as one] of dominance
and subordinance'--marks both my commitment to rethinking the terms of 1970s
feminist art theory and practice and my interest in examining the politics
of sexuality (especially the politics of sexuality within feminism itself).
These politics are manifest in the debates that have surrounded Judy Chicago's
Dinner Party, which I would like to position in this catalogue and
exhibition as part of the ongoing history of feminist art practice and theory
in the United states and Britain."
How does she accomplish this in the exhibition, I wonder? I turn to the
end of the catalogue, to the Checklist of the Exhibition, to survey the
manner in which the exhibition is organized. The first category is, not
surprisingly, "Judy Chicago's Dinner Party." This is followed
by several categories designed to place "The Dinner Party in Context"
and "to expand upon the popular and art historical understanding of
issues raised by the piece by showing how they have been addressed in other
feminist works." The first is "Female Imagery: The Politics
of Cunt Art" which includes, of course, most of the art I saw reproduced
at the beginning of the catalogue. "Bodily Functions: Menstruation,
Birth, Maternity" includes Chicago's Menstruation Bathroom and
examples from her Birth Project as well as parts of Mary Kelly's famed work
about birthing and nurturing her son. "Objectivity/Subjectivity"
explores how women have been conditioned by the ideals of beauty perpetuated
by male culture (I think again of Sut Jhally's compelling video documenting
the objectification of women in rock videos). "A Woman's Place Is
In the Home: Politicizing the Domestic Sphere" includes two of
my alltime favorite works of art: Betye Saar's The Liberation of Aunt
Jemima in which the smiling, apronned domestic grasps a screaming white
child in one hand and a rifle in the other; and Mierle Laderman Ukeles'
Maintenance Art in which the artist turns cleaning chores into aesthetically
rendered Zen repetitions.
The art works in "Violence, Abuse, Autobiography" use the
"personal is political" dictum of feminism to bring previously
shame-based experiences like rape and battering to public light. Collectively
they reveal that these are socio-political--not just individual--"problems."
In "Intimacy, Eroticism, Autobiography," artists explore their
own sexuality. Cheri Gaulke's This Is My Body documents a 1982 performance
in which she linked traditional Christian misogyny with the Western dominance
over and ultimate devaluing of nature.
The relationship between women and nature is also presented in "Herstory:
Women, Nature, Goddess" with works like Rachel Rosenthal's Gaia
Mon Amour (documenting a 1984 performance). Feminism has employed diverse
approaches to challenge history's exclusions. The final section, "Alternative
Histories/Alternative Authorities" highlights works such as Faith
Ringgold's French Collection series, "an antiracist, feminist refashioning
of the mythologized foundations of modernism."
Theorists tell us we are in the Post Modern period. I applaud that if it
means that this is indeed a time in which the singular aesthetic of modernism,
based on separatist individualism, is expanded to pluralism; so that art
involving a sensitivity to our connections with others, to our shared local
and planetary communities, is also valued. As Suzi Gablik writes in The
Reenchantment of Art, "The idea of self-directed professionalism
has conditioned, if not totally determined, our way of thinking about art,
to the point where we have become incredibly addicted to certain kinds of
experience at the expense of others, such as community, for examples or
ritual. . .There is a need for new forms [of art] emphasizing our essential
interconnectedness rather than our separateness, forms evoking the feeling
of belonging to a larger whole rather than expressing the isolated, alienated
self. . .The emerging new paradigm [of creativity] reflects a will to participate
socially, a central aspect of new paradigm thinking involves a significant
shift from objects to relationships. . .A new emphasis falls on community
and environment rather than on individual achievement and accomplishment.
. ." 8 I have
always understood feminist artists in general--and Judy Chicago in particular--as
being innovators of art that embodied this new paradigm, this new shift
from objects to relationships.
In a 1979 article about the Dinner Party, Thomas Albright wrote,
"The studio is usually thought of as a lonely place, but it would be
hard to imagine a scene of busier communal activity than the compact southern
California atelier presided over by Judy Chicago." In that same article,
in reference to her collaborative process, Chicago asserts, "I'm trying
to facilitate, in a nonauthoritarian way." She goes on to say, "Women
have never achieved in isolation. It is a fantasy to talk about women making
it up on their own bootstraps. Women have always had a support system of
other women. . .There is still an incredible prejudice against feminist
art--a resistance to accepting the fact that women's experience is important
enough to be the subject and basis of art making. Women are accepted in
the art world if they accept prevailing values, which means following mainstream
trends. I feel the mainstream is corrupt. . .I have had to bypass the art
world to make it as an artist. . .I have had to build an alternative audience."
9
I became a member of that audience when I saw The Dinner Party in
1979. Over the years, l have become increasingly aware of the truth of Judy
Chicago's assertions, and of the value of her feminist community building.
I am thrilled that my friends and students can now share the empowering
experience I had when I viewed The Dinner Party seventeen years ago.
