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In 1979, Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party (now on permanent display in New York) became one of the most talked about installation artworks of its era. Some of the talk was overwhelmingly positive. Some of it was overwhelmingly negative. In the work, Chicago created a triangular table with thirty-nine settings set aside for thirty-nine famous, historical, or mythical women.
Ranging from Virginia Woolf to Boadicea, from Sojourner Truth to Elizabeth I, and from Sappho to Emily Dickinson and Georgia O'Keeffe. Each setting had an elaborate china plate, ceramic cutlery, chalice, and napkin, and, in all but two cases, a brightly coloured elaborately created vulvar form. It became an iconic piece of that era's feminist art and it has, more or less, overshadowed everything that Chicago has done since (as well as before).
Rainbow Warrior (for Greenpeace) (1980)
Judy Chicago:Revelations at London's Serpentine North Gallery looks to remedy that. It's the largest solo exhibition Chicago has ever had in London and it's fascinating even if some of it is very much of its time. Second-wave feminism has been usurped and upgraded by more modern ideas (third and fourth wave feminism primarily, of course) but some of the points that Chicago was making back in the seventies which seemed controversial then are now pretty much accepted by everyone except misogynist bores like Andrew Tate, Nigel Farage, and Joey Barton.
That's the last mention any of those three tosspots will be getting here. Chicago's work attacks not just outright sexism but also tacit sexism and structural misogyny and it even looks at how toxic male violence (hey, not all men right?) affects the planet. As much as she was forward thinking when it came to gender roles, she was way ahead of the curve when it came to the climate too.
Disfigured by Power/Goo-Gaa Disfigured Heads (1983)
Born Judith Cohen, in a liberal Jewish household in Chicago, in 1939 she soon developed what would become a lifelong interest in both art and social justice. She took classes at the Art Institute of Chicago from the ridiculously early age of five and, in 1964, studied in Los Angeles. In her early thirties she took the name Judy Chicago in order to divest herself from what she saw as the confines of patriarchal tradition.
Her art looked towards women's history and towards goddess traditions (not sure that aspect has aged as well as the rest) and as you move around the Serpentine you can see drawings, paintings, and videos, and listen to audio recordings that give you some idea of the breadth of her work. You'll need a lot of time if you want to watch ALL the videos. They last for hours. I didn't have time. It was a sunny day. I wanted an ice cream.
Beginning with some of her often ignored abstract work where she was experimenting with form, material, and colour. It's good but it doesn't really stand out compared to other artists from that era and before and compared to the art she would move on. It's primarily of canonical interest, I suspect.
Dome Drawing #3 (1968)
Into the Darkness (2008)
Some of them paid homage to women who had gone before her while, at the same time, confronting the repression and subjugation of the collective experience of women. There were tributes, of sorts, to Queen Victoria and Marie Antoinette and one to the artist Jay DeFeo but you'd not necessarily know that if it wasn't for the information boards in the gallery or, in some cases, the cursive script that Chicago added to the works herself.
1974's Peeling Back is the first of Chicago's work to openly merge form and content and belongs to a series called the Rejection Quintet in which she deals with, you guessed it, rejection. Rejection from a male dealer and rejection from a male collector. She describes rejection, somewhat sexually, as "like having your flower split open" and she describes exposing her real identity through her work as "like opening your flower and no longer being afraid it will be rejected".
Peeling Back (1974)
What is Feminist Art? (1977)
Reaching/Uniting/Becoming Free (1975)
While her, ahem, flower would go on to become a continuous motif in her work, so did her commentary on the absence and erasure of women from the historical canon. She was interested in finding role models and then finding out how those role models (examples would include the authors Virginia Woolf and George Sand) dealt with their oppression. She made art that she hoped would transform these great ladies into 'butterflies' and if the art itself isn't always clear that that's what it's doing at least the titles often are.
The Dinner Party premiered at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1979 before touring to sixteen venues across six countries and reaching one million viewers. Although it can no longer travel there are some preparatory sketches and some video footage you can watch which refer to this piece.
One of the videos features an all male group from the US House of Representatives discussing, negatively, the work (general belief is that it's a complete waste of money, underlying message seems to be women should stay in the kitchen and leave art to men) and there's a test plate relating to the Ancient Egyptian pharoah Hatshepsut and some interesting drawings of many 'attendees' of The Dinner Party. I've included Virginia Woolf and Georgia O'Keeffe. Have a look and make your own mind up.
Hatshepsut Test Plate #3 from The Dinner Party (1973-79)
The Dinner Party Plate Line Drawings:Virginia Woolf (1977-78)
The Dinner Party Plate Line Drawings:Georgia O'Keeffe (1977-78)
One of the inspirations for The Dinner Party (and, perhaps, much of Chicago's career) was when she took the 'Intellectual History of Europe' course at UCLA and was told by the (male) teacher that the contribution of women would be discussed in the final class. Only for him to later proclaim "they made none".
It inspired Chicago to do her own research (and in those days that wasn't just going on the Internet) and she began foraging through old books in American libraries and seeing what she could find. She found it particularly curious that the number thirteen kept coming up (the thirty-nine in The Dinner Party is 13x3) and wondered if that was because, according to Leonardo da Vinci's painting (and - I believe - some book called the Bible), there were thirteen at the last supper.
The same number makes up a witches coven and Chicago noted that when men get together in a group of thirteen they are seen as holy (with the possible exception of Judas Iscariot) but when women get together in a group of thirteen they are seen as evil. I'm not totally sure how the series of artworks, secreted in some kind of series of opened suitcases, relate to this but they looked good.
Broken Butterflies/Shattered Dreams #3, Pas the Pain and Dying to Fly (1976)
Broken Butterflies/Shattered Dreams #5, Full of Hope and Starting to Fly (1976)
Broken Butterflies/Shattered Dreams #6, Nearly Free and Almost Flying (1976)
Pressing Himself Against Her, The Shadow's Invasion Drowned Her Very Soul (1982)
Other, often later, work was far more literal and focused on childbirth and the environment - often both together at the same time. For Chicago, the violence men played out on women was echoed in the violence that a male dominated society doled out on the planet. An eighties series of works, PowerPlay, looked to interrogate notions of power, social conditioning, and how masculinity is constructed. Chicago subverted, contorted, and exaggerated Renaissance ideals of female and male bodies and in doing so often made them both more and less realistic.
Overtly, she drew men driving the world to destruction and pissing on nature as well as a series of fairly grotesque male faces. If an artist was to make these works now they would, to me, appear trite but at the time they must have been groundbreaking. On a purely aesthetic level, some of them are great too. As political art, I'd suspect something either more subtle (or, conversely, far less subtle) would be needed these days but none of that is to say that the points being made are no longer relevant.
Study for Driving the World to Destruction #2 (1983)
Pissing on Nature (1982)
Really Sad/Power Mad (1986)
Malehead #5 (1983)
While working on a series called Birth Project (1980-85), Chicago visited a library and on looking up the word 'gender' she discovered that all books about gender were about women. At the point, being male was hardly even seen to be a gender. That led her to an interest in the way men were represented and how masculinity was instilled in them. She overwhelmingly came to believe that violence and toxicity came from young men, or boys, feeling they have to disconnect from their emotions to succeed in society. The idea that boys don't cry, the idea that men don't cry. Many still don't and, in many ways, I don't blame them. Society sees a grown man crying as a weak thing. Many women see a grown man crying as a weak thing. That's something Judy Chicago doesn't seem to have addressed.
She can't do everything though! Not least because as she was trying to save women from men and men from themselves she was also trying to save the planet, save the trees, and save the polar bear. Some of the works from this era look very tree-huggy and very 'aren't animals cute, don't kill them' but animals are cute and we shouldn't kill them (even the non-cute ones) and trees, even if they don't need hugging, do need saving. Chicago recounts thinking about the beauty of trees, marvelling at how they purify the air of carbon dioxide and make it easier for us to breathe. She mourned over their cut up stumps and made work that saw the death of a tree much like the death of a family member.
Orphaned Tree (1983)
Study #2 for Doomed (Title Panel #3) (2014)
Study #2 for Doomed (Title Panel #3) (2014)
The image of a polar bear stranded on an iceberg is a common one these days - but it's still a powerful one and it's still a relevant one. Stranded was a work that saw Chicago, Jane Fonda, the artist Swoon, and the environmental group Fire Drill Friday come together to try and raise awareness of the precarious plight of not just the planet's more photogenic animals but the planet itself.
You, yes you, can still contribute to the global campaign by submitting art and messages to #CreateArtforEarth (though it looks like you'd have to use Elon Musk's hate factory to do it so probably best leave it). Apocalyptic though some of these works, and ideas, may be it, of course, brought Chicago back to the start of life. Thinking about the end of (all) life tends to do that.
The final section of the exhibition looks at works from Chicago's Birth Project and includes lots of splayed legs, lots of 'crowning', lots of juxtapositions between environment and birth mothers, and a large woven quilt that was made in collaboration with Pussy Riot's Nadya Tolokonnikova (as well as lots of other less famous women). You can see (some of) this section as Chicago's answer to Gustave Courbet's infamous L'origine du Monde.
Birth Project Study (c.1982)
The Crowning (1983)
Creation of the World (1984)
Studies for Illuminations - Visions of the Apocalypse (1977)
Woman with Orange Flares (1972)
Studies for Illuminations - Visions of the Apocalypse (1977)
What if Women Ruled the World? Participatory Quilt featuring Nadya Tolokonnikova (2023)
What if Women Ruled the World? Participatory Quilt featuring Nadya Tolokonnikova (2023)
What if Women Ruled the World? Participatory Quilt featuring Nadya Tolokonnikova (2023)
It, almost, rounds off a surprisingly exhaustive and inclusive exhibition though there is time for one last work and it's a good one to end it on. Last year's And God Created Life is Chicago's challenge to the concept of a male God - as is found in many religions and cultures. She believed the idea of a male god made women secondary from the onset and wanted to see divinity as both male and female.
Hasn't she heard there's more than two genders!? ;-) Chicago's god has breasts, a vulva, and a penis so if nothing else that's a one person party going on right there. More seriously however, Judy Chicago was a pioneering artist back in the 1970s, she's continued to make good stuff ever since and if she's no longer as cutting edge as she once was that's because other people, other artists, are standing on the shoulders of the giant she was - and still is. Judy Chicago loves women and thinks they deserve respect but I don't get the impressions she hates men, at least not all men! I get the impression that, more than anything, she loves life, sees how precious it is, and wishes to preserve it.
So in keeping with that mindset, I left the Serpentine and headed out into Kensington Gardens to check out the geese, swans, ducks, coots, moorhens, gulls, and pigeons. Oh - and the people too. I checked them out as well. I even had an ice cream (a 99) though it did make me wonder, bearing in mind the main courses, what was served as dessert at Judy Chicago's Dinner Party.
And God Created Life (2023)
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