Project Goals:

With this project, I am hoping to perform an exercise in how to use the "second look" as a transformative recuperation that still allows for coexistence with the "first look." I am also hoping to explore the form of contingency in the context of second-wave feminist histories — I take Linda Nochlin's methodology of tracing the absent cause of an absent effect to ask what histories could not have happened due to the absence of contingent conditions? What histories happened instead as a form of survival in conditions that did exist? How do we make space for radical re-imaginings of possibility while still honoring what feminist artists were, in fact, able to still make possible?

More guiding theoretical questions:

What is the power of a second look? When we take a second look that yields a radically different result than the look that has already been given, how do we reconcile these two views?

I.

It’s 1965 in Pasadena, California. Judy Chicago is 26 years old and working out of a studio she shares with Lloyd Hamrol, her husband and fellow artist. Other male artists visit, but not for her — they make it clear they’re there to see Hamrol. More art world people come and go, and Chicago receives the occasional comment on her work, which is always either “inappropriate or patronizing”[1]. One encounter, though, stands above the rest as particularly awful.

Walter Hopps, the curator and director of the Pasadena Art Museum, visits the studio almost every month. But, of course, he isn’t there for Chicago. On one occasion, Hamrol suggests they see Chicago’s new work. It’s very large, and it leans against one of the walls in their shared studio space. Hopps enters the room and becomes suddenly captivated by one of Hamrol’s sculptures he has seen many times, asking if the color is new. Hamrol says it isn’t, and asks him why he doesn’t look at Chicago’s piece. Hopps continues to inspect the sculpture before him, ignoring Chicago and her work, until Hamrol literally blocks Hopps’s view and demands that he turn around. Hopps finally gives in and looks, “[mumbling] something about it being very beautiful.” At this point, Chicago is devastated. She can’t bear to respond, and runs out of the studio crying.

A year later, Chicago’s work, titled Rainbow Pickett, is exhibited at Primary Structures, a monumental and movement-defining show of Minimalist sculpture at the Jewish Museum in New York City. Rainbow Pickett receives critical acclaim, with Clement Greenberg naming it among the most effective pieces in the exhibition. In the next few months, Hopps brags that he used to visit Chicago “all the time”. Yet, despite Rainbow Pickett’s success, when the show ends and the dust settles, the piece doesn’t sell and Chicago can’t afford to store it. She decides to destroy the work. For years later, Chicago will maintain that Rainbow Pickett “broke her heart.”[2]

II.

In the decades since Hopps’s refusal to look at Rainbow Pickett, Chicago has not only become one of the foremost conceptual artists still producing work today, but she has also served as an outspoken leader of the American feminist art movement. Although not without difficulty, she has built up a striking and sharp oeuvre of painting, sculpture, performance art, installations, video, and historiographical critique. In what may be seen as a final solidification into the contemporary art historical canon, the New Museum staged Herstory, a career culminating survey exhibition of Chicago’s work, in the fall of 2023. For this and other previous shows, Rainbow Pickett was resurrected not once, but twice, in versions made in 2004 and 2021. However, even in Chicago’s belated institutional acceptance, the wound of Hopps’s refusal to look at Rainbow Pickett not only remains, but still goes untended.

In its physically segmented but conceptually unbroken life of fifty-eight years, Rainbow Pickett has been plagued by a legacy of “under-looking”. Inaugurated by Hopps’s aversion of the gaze, this tradition has been carried on by galleries, museums, and scholars in the form of  title misspellings, medium record inaccuracies, and, perhaps most damningly, a dearth of critical attention. What secrets remain to be discovered in the generosity of a slow study? Can a close and deep looking allow the work to finally be seen? I hope to offer Rainbow Pickett this long-deserved consideration through a generous and careful second look.

In this paper, I will take a temporally layered approach to my aesthetic encounter with Rainbow Pickett in its installation at the New Museum. First, I will perform a visual analysis of the work, framing this critical look within the historical and theoretical context of Rainbow Pickett’s first “life”, from 1965 to 1967. I hope this impossible and temporally suspended account will allow for a recuperation of Hopps’s gaze, and open the door for an appreciation of Chicago’s formal innovations and conceptual rigor in the work. I will then acknowledge the self-defeat in my first task by necessarily situating Rainbow Pickett in its 2023 installation at the New Museum. I will address how the work brings its own unsolicited but unavoidable history to bear on any aesthetic encounter in the present. Even so, I argue for an unexpected conceptual mirroring of the work’s unfolding existence in the critical formal project of its first life. I hope the identification of this reflection can offer a method for inhabiting a layered and anamorphic gaze when considering Chicago’s artwork from the ‘70s.

III.

Rainbow Pickett consists of six incrementally larger planks leaning against the wall in a line. At around two-foot intervals apart, each rests between the floor and the wall at a 45° angle. The tallest extends around eleven feet high and the smallest around four. Each form is a different color, but all are hued in a similar bright pastel palette; in ascending order, they are painted yellow, tangerine, magenta, lavender, turquoise, and sea-foam. When I saw Rainbow Pickett for the first time, I had known these facts of form and dimension. Yet, the sculpture’s size and presence still caught me off guard. The work is huge; the tallest plank imposes into the viewer’s space on a scale greater than the human, with the smallest rising to the waist. This first jolt of Rainbow Pickett’s size served as a grounding awareness of physicality in my viewing experience, threading a line of gravity between the six vibrant forms before me and my own body.

This line went taut as I approached Rainbow Pickett, walking alongside gradually more or less protruding planks. The work exerted a strong pull, dictating my movement through space; its presence seemed to assert an aggressive demand to be “in the way”[3], like an ankle stuck out to catch in my walk. I was surprised by how far the tallest beam stretched across the floor. The width of this stance and the gaps between the beams both led to a heightened sensitivity for the space underneath. While the spine of planks announced the work’s outer bounds, its flesh, or what it was full of, consisted of the charged and sheltered emptiness within. This interplay reminded me of the negative space of sculpture, the held quality of air between carved marble or wrought iron, not unlike the open space below the sculpted horse’s belly. In the literalist tradition of Minimalism, Rainbow Pickett presents an argument for an incredible awareness of not only the emptiness it displaces through its objecthood, but the extension of this objecthood into the negative space implicated by such a formal demarcation.

With Rainbow Pickett’s subsumption of negative space into its form came a particular feeling of heaviness. The cradled underbelly of the beams prompted a feeling of strain in my viewing, as the work both relies on and resists gravity’s downward force. Because the beams rest at 45° angles, the knowledge of precipice also inhered in my apprehension, and I felt the phantom collapse of a one-degree nudge downward. Although I knew it was fiction, the work felt as if it supported more than its own weight; a side view from the tallest beam left the impression of a multi-colored row of flying buttresses, keeping the temporary gallery wall in place. This odd reversal of the work’s physical logic was enlightening. In many ways, Rainbow Pickett complicates what it means to be in a state of contingency. From the Latin roots “con-”, together, and “tangere”, to touch, to be contingent is to have a dependent existence. It is to first almost exist in some murky primordial sphere, requiring a touch from the line of reality in order to come into being. In Chicago’s calculated slope of Rainbow Pickett’s beams, her work seems in many ways to be a didactic physical illustration of contingency. Yet, the resulting viewer experience muddles the direction of causality, with confusion arising over whether the work could not exist without the wall, or the wall could not stand without the work.

For all my feelings of heavy physicality, the more time I spent with the work, the more I began to experience moments of lightness. I found myself drifting back and forth from one side of Rainbow Pickett to the other, sometimes coming closer and sometimes hanging back. This maneuver was rewarded by the corresponding shift of the work’s sum form with each shift of perspective. And, at times, this view would click into a complete destabilization of Rainbow Pickett’s being. From certain angles and distances away, the gaps between beams would disappear and the work’s insistent and seemingly essential three-dimensionality would slip  into a two-dimensional plane of multi-colored stripes. Like bringing a lens into focus, these moments of destabilization were unmistakable. Once Rainbow Pickett choreographed my body into assuming these latent viewpoints of formal fracture, my vision became a transformative force, suturing beams into flat bands of color with an optic stitch. These little pockets of dimensional transfiguration were significant, catching me off guard and always stunning me into stillness. Any time a shuffle yielded a collapsed view of the work, I would pause, staring trance-like at the resultant image. Sometimes, when the light fell the right way, the seams between pairs of colors would blend: mint-green fading into turquoise, lilac into peony, saffron into gold. As I continued to move around the work, I savored these blooms of reoriented vision that grew between steps.

With Rainbow Pickett, Chicago presents a take on Minimalist form that does not fall prey to the binarizing traps of prevailing discourse. In his seminal essay arguing against the time-based viewer interaction required by Minimalist objects, “Art and Objecthood,” Michael Fried presents the concept of instantaneous illusion as a necessary artistic device in opposition to literal objecthood; illusion takes the viewer outside of a bodily encounter with an object and elevates experience to the realm of the imagination. In this optically inspired representational sphere, there is an explosion of time that allows for an eternal present, escaping what Fried considers the degenerative effects of theater in art. He writes, as the closing sentence of his polemic, “Presentness is grace.”[4] In the union of physicality and illusion, Rainbow Pickett does not disagree with Fried’s equation of presentness and grace, but foregoes this conclusion to ask how grace necessarily emerges.

As a point of contact between the divine and the mundane, grace is, in many ways, a contingency. As Fried theorizes the concept, grace is a kind of touching between two senses of time—the eternal reaching out to splinter the flow of mortal time. However, while grace becomes itself in the context of such presentness, what must it have been before? Perhaps presentness is grace, but, in Rainbow Pickett, grace was, or necessarily came out of, an embodied encounter of attendant looking. In the same way Rainbow Pickett seems to absorb the negative space of its material presence, the work encompasses moments of instantaneous wonder out-of-time that not only coexist with, but are contingent upon a deeply physical and temporally lodged experience of the work.

Rainbow Pickett’s engagement with the form of contingency can find a final resonance in its title. Chicago has stated that “Pickett” refers to Wilson Pickett, the popular ‘60s soul singer, whose songs she would listen to while in her studio.[5] Here we can see the imprints of the contingency of place in the echoes of the work’s site of making inhering in the title. Perhaps even more strikingly, though, is the resonance of “rainbow.” While this no doubt refers to the many vibrant hues of the work’s surfaces, there is a unique connection to the latent pictorial illusion of Rainbow Pickett’s adamant physicality. Rainbows are an optical phenomenon produced by the material process of light refracting through drops of water. Yet, rainbows do not actually exist in nature—the image of a rainbow only congeals into being in the eye of an observer positioned in the right place to receive the refracted rays of light. The existence of a rainbow is entirely contingent; once the physical combination of events occurs, it still requires the condition of a properly oriented and attentive observer to come into being. In the same way, Rainbow Pickett contains many nested latent moments of presentness—of illusory, two-dimensional images rich for emotive commune to the eternal—that must be activated by a generous viewer moving around the work.

Yet, in the context of a would-be rainbow with no observers, I can’t help but detect some excess. Where there are the material circumstances for a rainbow, but the condition of pointed observer has not been met, it does not feel truthful to say there is no rainbow there. There is the feeling of a phantom presence, a ghostly shade of the conditional tense that feels close enough to touch. What is this latency strong enough to almost engender its own becoming? What is the nature of a contingent existence outside its conditions of possibility? When I consider the foundational wound of Rainbow Pickett in the context of these questions, the work begins to present as a rainbow outside the possibility for its existence. Rainbow Pickett can only reach its formal and conceptual potential with viewers who are willing to look, to spend time, to pace around its aggressive stance in the gallery, and to look for flashes of grace. In 1965, Chicago’s work was contingent upon an unlikely and perhaps almost impossible viewer. And because Rainbow Pickett couldn’t exist the way it was meant to, it had to become something else.

IV.

When I visited Herstory, I knew the story of Rainbow Pickett and Walter Hopps’s original sin. I have long been a follower of Chicago’s work, and an admirer of her activism. I arrived at Rainbow Pickett with the intention to look and, hopefully, see what Hopps could not. Although I indeed experienced Rainbow Pickett as documented in the preceding paragraphs, I have left out a crucial detail. Let me start again.

I came to Rainbow Pickett with a certain kind of love made manifest in a clinging to knowledge, in the repetition of neat facts in my mind. I knew the work was from 1965. I knew it was between four and eleven feet high. I knew the order of the colors. And I knew it was made of latex paint on canvas covered plywood. The materials, though, were a bit slippery; the only descriptions I could find were muddled, leaving generous room for interpretation. In a letter to Janice Johnson and Louis Lunetta, Chicago wrote a hurried report: “first big piece…11 feet long & about 7 feet high—Canvas stretcher [sic] across a wooden frame.”[6] Although I held onto this kernel of certainty, Chicago’s letter only raised more questions: was the plywood a skeletal outline over which the canvas was stretched taut, somewhat like the face of a drum? Would that make the piece hollow, then, perhaps liftable with one arm? Would the surface warp inwards at the weight of a touch, something like skin? In archival photographs of Rainbow Pickett’s 1966 installation at Primary Structures, it is impossible to divine any certain answers from the black and white prints. Yet, I felt a certain softness for the work in its corner perch. Among so much cold steel, Rainbow Pickett’s wood and canvas were rich with the genealogy of painting and the warmth of human touch. Much of my excitement to see Rainbow Pickett in person stemmed from the promise of finding out what its material presence truly was.

As expected, in my first viewing of Rainbow Pickett, the materials were indeed the slippery bit. Unexpected, though, was just how much they had eluded my grasp. Because Chicago destroyed the very first making of Rainbow Pickett in 1967, it was recreated in 2004 for “A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958-1968” at the MOCA Los Angeles. This version has been exhibited many times since, and has been documented each time with the same list of materials as the original: latex paint on canvas covered plywood. I assumed the New Museum had acquired one of the three recreations from 2004, and was prepared to find forms of wood and canvas before me in the gallery. To my surprise, the Rainbow Pickett I found at the New Museum was a recent recreation from 2021, made of stainless steel and polyurethane paint. There was no mention of the change in the wall text, and I wondered, for a second, if I had missed something.

The story Rainbow Pickett tells in its 2023 installation is quite simple; it’s digestible, didactic, barely even requiring a look to accomplish its mission. It goes something like: Judy Chicago, as a young woman, was one of the first to make Minimalism art. See, there, in the huge scale! And the stainless steel! And in the car paint, the car paint she learned to use at auto-body school, where she was the only woman in her class! Not unlike the feminist re-telling of Hilma af Klint in the history of abstraction, this recreation of Rainbow Pickett recreates Chicago as an underdog pioneer who not only kept up with her male Minimalist peers, but beat them to the punch. And, if the stainless steel and polyurethane paint weren’t quite enough, the work has been installed at the very beginning of Herstory. When the elevator doors open onto the fourth floor (the first floor of the exhibition), Rainbow Pickett’s bright form fills the immediate gallery view; it is impossible to refuse to look.

What does Rainbow Pickett’s hyper-visibility do? While the piece’s founding wound sprung from the withholding of a look, the spotlight of its legacy has cast a similarly occluding shadow. Chicago maintains that the piece “broke her heart.” Rainbow Pickett has come to represent a perfectly circular narrative arc of the artist’s struggle with the patriarchy. The piece reassures contemporary viewers that her departure from a conquered Minimalism was an impassioned and courageous choice with a happy ending. But in the haze of this triumphant restitution, are viewers actually seeing Rainbow Pickett?

V.

The beauty of Rainbow Pickett lies in its surrender to contingency. In the hiddenness of a modernist aesthetic sublime within the slow steps of time-based physical confrontation, the piece weaves together two ideals that, at the time of the work’s making, seemed theoretically incompatible. However, the very contingency that grounds the work’s aesthetic force also ensured it could never quite become itself. Rainbow Pickett was dependent upon a viewer who would engage with the work on a bodily level with a careful eye. Because this viewer simply did not exist in 1965—how could it when Chicago could barely get friends to look at her work?—Rainbow Pickett’s first life never really even began. Now, the work comes to the 2023 viewer having lived its second life as part emblem of Chicago’s pioneering involvement in Minimalism and part evidence of her struggle for visibility as a woman artist.

In this study, I have tried to become a viewer that fulfills the conditions for Rainbow Pickett’s contingent existence to come into being. I recognize, though, that this contingent existence now must cohabit with what Rainbow Pickett has become in the face of an unfulfilled dependency. But its second life is no less meaningful—it is an impressive mark of survival that Chicago, not without effort, evolved the work into something that could exist in the conditions she was given. How, then, can a viewer hold these two together? Here, the piece itself can offer some guidance. Viewers of Rainbow Pickett must be nimble, willing to move and to look, adjusting the gaze with each step; in this piece, two lines of time can be true at once. The Rainbow Pickett that could have been, that received not only Walter Hopps’s careful gaze but countless others, can exist in loving overlap with the Rainbow Pickett that was, that broke Chicago’s heart and became hardened into steel. Both these lines of counter and factual historical past can offer glimmers of possibility in the continued remaking of Rainbow Pickett’s present.


Footnotes:
[1] Judy Chicago, Through the Flower (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1975), 38-39.
[2] Michael Slenske, "At 80, Judy Chicago Is Claiming Her Rightful Place in L.A. Art History,” Los Angeles Magazine, September 10, 2019, https://www.lamag.com/culturefiles/judy-chicago-los-angeles/
[3] Michael Fried, "Art and Objecthood," in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 273.
[4] Ib id., 46.
[5] The Jewish Museum, “Judy Chicago: The Saga of Rainbow Pickett,” YouTube, August 15, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkLb6me5Mhs
[6] Gail Levin, Becoming Judy Chicago (New York: Harmony Books, 2007), 121.