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Vision and Difference: Genealogies of Feminism Fall 2023

Great Women series. Judy Chicago: Herstory, New Museum of Contemporary Art. 2023. Photo credits to Charlotte Nash.

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What Does it Mean to be a Feminist Artist?: Reflecting on a Retrospective
In mid-October of 2023, the New Museum produced the first major retrospective of artist Judy Chicago’s work in New York City: “Judy Chicago: Herstory,” curated by Massimiliano Gioni, well known curator and critic as well as the artistic director of the museum. My first encounter with the Judy Chicago retrospective was brief. Due to time constraints as well as my own tendency to linger in thought, I only got through the first floor. After that brief introduction, I had to rush away to some other commitment, but what I had seen piqued my interest enough that I was very excited to soon return and take in the remainder of the exhibition. I felt invigorated to finally see a fully realized multi-floor exhibition dedicated to a feminist artist. My second visit was accompanied by a colleague, a fellow arts academic with a focus on feminist theory and feminist art practices.

When the elevators opened up on the 2nd floor of the New Museum, the first of “Herstory: Judy Chicago,” I was welcomed by a lightness and vibrancy of color that surprised me. Two minimal pieces of Chicago’s, one of which I was surprised to learn was in the infamous 1966 Primary Structures exhibition (in which Chicago was only one of three women represented), took up the outer thirds of the room. I have seen plenty of minimalist sculptures as an art historian– none of which had ever been the bright rainbow pastels of “Rainbow Pickett” (1965). In the next room was another sculpture, a collection of about 10 or so large cylinders, all of varying sizes, ranging from roughly three feet tall to about 6 or 7 feet, all a delightful solid shade of apricot. While I stood there, a security guard had to keep asking visitors to not walk between the tree-like works - apparently others found them as inviting as I did. It is intriguing that even simply through the use of color, imposing shapes can take on a much more welcoming atmosphere. In addition to these sculptures were two series of paintings, focusing on the dissolving of color across a large space, on canvas and glass. It is evident that Chicago was well versed in the work of her male contemporaries, but rather than digging into the ‘rawness’ of minimalist sculpture in the form of a strict white color palette, she splashed her work in delightful hues. In contrast to such connotatively rough (and, well, male) canvases and practices, Chicago’s sculptures are warm and welcoming, a sensation I have honestly never felt in regards to minimalist sculpture. The lightness and softness provided through the pale but vibrant colors and round forms negated any sense of imposition within the gallery space, on behalf of the works and myself. I found this incredibly important: Chicago seemed to have placed a feminist gaze upon the masculine structures of minimalism.

The retrospective then took me on a journey through several of Chicago’s explorations within the 1960s and 70s. Moving room to room we were taken on a journey of artistic development and experimentation. Her Atmospheres and Smoke Bodies appeared to be a physical manifestation of the softness and fuzziness that she had explored in her earlier minimalism. A long red corridor held works that while slightly discombobulated when laid out in a row displayed a young artist trying different avenues, poking fun at the masculinity that surrounded her, and was at the end of the day always pushing to be edgy.

We were brought into a small room dedicated to the 1972 groundbreaking project “Womanhouse,” a performance space and art installation occupying an entire house constructed by Chicago and her fellow feminist artist friends during her time at the California Institute of the Arts Feminist Art Program, of which she was one of the founders. The house was a multi-authored, multi-form art space that critiqued the demanded norms of housewifery– Betty Freidan’s “The Feminine Mystique,” a book that rocked the lives of countless stereotypical (albeit mostly middle class white) housewives across the country, had come out under a decade prior. Photographs of the “Lipstick Bathroom,” the “Bridal Staircase,” and the “Menstruation Bathroom” depict the transformation of ‘womens’ spaces’ into radical feminist art. As a reflection of the anger, frustration, questioning, and critiquing of the zeitgeist through a lens of what was at the time the leading feminist theory, in my eyes, “Womanhouse” was one of the most important feminist artworks of the last century. When thinking about what a feminist artist is, Chicago was a shining example of one during her time making “Womanhouse.”

So then why is it that today you would never hear Chicago’s name in a conversation with feminist art scholars, curators, or other art-people? I wondered this as I continued. I posed this question to my friend, who accompanied me on my second visit, where the answer soon became clearer. The last room of the first floor featured some of Chicago’s “Great Ladies” series– a series of very similar looking paintings depicting fuzzed out pinwheels in varying colors. Each named after a famous female figure, the works were dizzying in their likeness. From my twenty-first century eyes, they all blurred together. My friend agreed with me that apart from the wall labels, we would have no idea which was Sylvia Plath and which was Queen Victoria. Chicago’s sketches from her infamous “The Dinner Party” drove this assimilation home: in our eyes, in 2023, these works mushed and molded ‘strong women’ into a sea of monotonous meaningless symbology. My friend pointed out that because these works were all made in the 1970s, a period in which the leading notion in the feminist movement was the finding of what some called the “essential goddess,” a feminine presence and natural force innate to women, we should give Chicago a pass. It was a retrospective, after all. These works have a time and place in their history. But the question still nagged at me: could the works be considered feminist now? Or has the alluding to female figures in monotonous abstraction gotten to a point where it conceals these women rather than highlighting them? What is the point of a retrospective if we do not also think about how artwork resonates now?

On the next floor, unfortunately, my friend and I were unable to focus much on the works present; our curation-brains had turned on and we found ourselves confused and muddled. There seemed to be no real semblance of a curatorial through-line; each of the galleries housed a single topic of Chicago’s exploration and yet they seemed like stand-alone, individual processes. My friend phrased it best: it is as if they forgot about this floor and just threw work in rooms because the dates lined up. There were too many works on the walls, making the space feel cramped. It was as if they could not choose which works to show and which to cut - and my friend and I certainly agreed some of the spaces could use some cuts. In PowerPlay (1982-1987), for example: Do we really need nine gargantuan canvases of cartoonishly muscular men to understand Chicago’s thesis that often male violence controls the world? We did not think so.

Tragically, in a small room behind the large masculine canvases, was a room with a series of small embroidered and needlepoint posters depicting happy, smiling, multiracial groups of people. Each work was labeled with slogans like “A Chicken in Every Pot,” “We’re all in the same boat,” and “Bury the Hatchet,” depicting a white family eating a chicken, a brown family welcoming a homeless person, and a priest, a rabbi, and an imam bury an ax, respectively. Having just come from such a jarring room, my friend turned to me and asked: Is this supposed to be ironic? These look like elementary school posters. The series, titled “Resolutions: A Stitch In Time,” was made between 1994 and 2000, and unfortunately did not appear to have the intention of irony. We were both puzzled. How was this useful? Why was this series based on craft art, a traditionally ‘female’ art form, hidden behind the PowerPlay room? A room that you then had to return through to continue to the rest of the exhibition? In the context of today, with multiple wars and violence seeming around every corner, my friend and I were uncertain if the seeming message of global peace and compassion, albeit through a corny modality, should be emphasized more or would be considered in bad taste… Unsure of intention, the works were lost as an afterthought.

That is not to say it was all bad. Chicago’s Birth Project series continued her trend of working within a collective, a central tenet of feminist practice. Apparently teams of skilled seamstresses, weavers, and other such textile workers helped her make the large tapestries depicting aggressive scenes of birth. The issue was that I had a hard time finding the names of the women who made them. Does collective action really count as collective if the majority are obscured under the ‘big name’? I found myself thinking of Ariella Azoulay’s premise of captions as a “tagging mask” and its ability to mask a piece with what is “perceived as a would-be factual description or a broad common denominator.” With my own knowledge from working behind the scenes of an exhibition, I know how many drafts of each text present in the gallery space go through, and I could not help but find the wall texts more masking than informative. Can we call it feminism today if it does not divulge and support female labor? In a series of works about birthing no less, which my friend pointed out was brimming with goddess imagery of an essentially feminized body. While it turned out that the works did apparently predate Judith Butler’s “Gender Trouble,” the discomfort I felt in it all remained. So what if the works predate the questioning of gender? What is the point of a retrospective if we do not also think about how artwork resonates now?

By the time I reached the top floor, I was hungry for a change of pace. I wanted to return to an exploration of contemporary feminist ideas– something the retrospective has promised. Thus my friend and I arrived at the “City of Ladies,” an exhibition within an exhibition that seemed to be a physicalization of Chicago’s inspiration sketchbook. The aim was to “showcase Chicago’s tremendous impact on American art and highlight her critical role as a cultural historian claiming space for women artists previously omitted from the canon,” through presenting artworks and pieces of archival material by over eighty female and gender-non-conforming artists and thinkers alongside Chicago’s work. My friend was the first to notice what became the first domino in an unraveling: the two walls on either side of the room were arranged in a way that was indicative of an altar. The large banners reading “What if Women Ruled the World?” and other such phrases reinforced this suggestively worshiping spatial arrangement. Two statues reminiscent of the Venus of Willendorf framed a small triptych of Chicago’s vagina-like paintings in the center of the room, completing the vision of a shrine. All of the other works were relegated to the walls, crammed in nine to ten works per wall, with so little space for attributions that each wall simply received two labels, listing the works and their authors. When looking at the works you had to dart from the label to the work and back again, unsure who created the work, when, why, or how. The question that sprung to mind: Was this a conversation or an insinuation of culmination?

The patriarchal narrative of linear culminating historical development is an innately harmful one, as it too often serves to conceal minority voices and hide away countless histories, cultures, traditions, and pedagogies in the name of a singular ‘truth.’ It struck my friend and I that that was the trap this final floor had fallen into: a pushing to the side of the voices the show claimed to “celebrate” and instead placing Chicago in the center of it all like some sort of culminating deity, complete with a purple carpet that had embroidered roses placed at the feet of her altar. Is this really what a retrospective is for?

As my friend and I walked away from the museum and down the street, we were silent for a time before launching into discussion about what we had just seen. Our conclusion: while the “City of Ladies” was certainly an interesting thought experiment, it ultimately seemed to lack sufficient scholarly research. Chicago is often referred to as a “white feminist” because of her lack of diverse inclusion within her work. While an artist was at one point considered ‘feminist’ does not mean they do not have to learn and change over time. Today, with the Me Too movement and the Black Lives Matter movement fresh in our minds, a new kind of feminism is now at the forefront: a feminism that is intersectional.

The International Women’s Development Agency describes “the purpose of intersectional feminism as recognizing how different aspects of a person’s identity might interact to change the way they experience the world – and the barriers they might face as a result.” It is a critical concept that can be difficult to understand, but it is an important one. “It means that different forms of discrimination don’t exist in a vacuum – for those who embody different marginalized identities, these often overlap and amplify each other to create a unique experience of discrimination that is more than just the sum of its parts.” The large banners in the “City of Ladies” were made in 2020. Today, how could you ask “What if Women Ruled the World?” without speaking to the realities of colonialism and systemic racism that white women were very much participatory in? Are women not also perfectly capable of the same cruelty and biases as men? With this in mind, we concluded that the entire endeavor of the “City of Ladies” was, disappointingly, undercut by a lack of scholarship and fell prey to an ego of outdated feminism.

Perhaps the purpose of a retrospective is to simply look back at a history of an artist’s career. Perhaps it can be looked at as a purely historical project. However, we can not deny our existence in the here and now; it is a contemporary audience to whom work by museums and galleries is presented as important, relevant, and necessary. As a subjective medium, our understanding of an art piece, may it be photography, painting, sculpture, etcetera, changes through the years; “the rendering of history itself,” Leigh Raiford reminds us, “is a site of struggle over the interpretation of the past playing out in multiple public and private domains.” It is the responsibility of a museum to be aware of what work they are supporting and displaying as it would be interpreted by the audience it presents for. With that in mind, we still have a long way to go in dismantling colonial histories that structure the way we store history; perhaps it is time for the ever-beloved structure of a retrospective to evolve along with it.

Charlotte Nash
2023

Azoulay, Ariella. (2010), “What is a photograph? What is photography?,” Philosophy of Photography 1:1, pp. 9-13, doi: 10.1386/pop.1.19/7

“Judy Chicago: Herstory.” The New Museum. Accessed November 10, 2023. https://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/view/judy-chicago-herstory.

Tucker, Jennifer. (2009), “Entwined Practices: Engagements with Photography in Historical Inquiry.” History and Theory 48, no. 4, pp. 1–8, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25621434.