Feminist Reconfigurations of Space in Judy Chicago
Written by Charlotte Pierrel
Edited by Kennedy Randall
Introduction
In the heat of second-wave feminism and political revolution, Judy Chicago (born in 1939) played a central role in using art as an expressive tool for social change. One of the twentieth century’s most influential contemporary women artists, she is best known for her collaborative art installations and merging performance art with political activism. Chicago’s early feminist works of the 1960s and early 1970s deal explicitly with contentious politics, protesting against gender inequalities and raising public awareness regarding women’s lived experiences.(1,2) Experimenting with different modalities of space in relation to patriarchal power structures, Chicago explored spheres in which women were either denied access, confined, or erased.(3) She addresses the place women occupy in the world from a feminist perspective, creating an artistic and political agenda that seeks to subvert traditionally male-dominated landscapes through reclaiming symbolic and material places for women and their art.
Emerging from the feminist movement of the 1960s, Chicago was a leading figure of the parallel art movement which strove to challenge the mainstream contemporary art world and its predominantly androcentric bias.(4) In what American writer Lucy Lippard identifies as “gladiatorial art arenas”(5), women artists had to fight hard to advocate equal rights and visibility within art history and art practice. Chicago’s artistic practice is inspired by the first-hand discrimination she felt as an artist who had to to conceal her gender in order to “prove “[her] seriousness to the male art world.”(6) As an art teacher and founder of the first feminist art program, California State University Fresnoin the 1970s, she would realize that emerging women artists “had little conception that their isolation had anything to do with the fact that they were women.”(7) Encouraging her female students to transform women's circumstances into artistic subject matter, she believed this would enable them to “assume their rightful place.”(8,9)
How did Chicago’s early feminist work challenge traditionally gendered spaces and attempt to renegotiate spatial boundaries to include women? Focusing on the interconnectedness of gender, space and identity politics, I will analyze Chicago’s Atmospheres (1968-1974), Womanhouse (1972) and The Dinner Party (1979), which respectively seek to reclaim public, private and symbolic spheres to expand notions of space. Firstly, I will examine Atmospheres to demonstrate how Chicago, by inserting the female body into the land, challenged the ‘ideology of separate spheres’ dictating the public sphere as inherently masculine. I will then analyze how Womanhouse subverted conventional belief systems relegating women to the domestic space, bringing women’s concerns into the public sphere. Finally, I will explore The Dinner Party and how it reclaimed more symbolic space for women, placing them within the larger Western historical continuum.
Reclaiming public spaces for women: Atmospheres.
Women have historically interacted with public spaces in substantially limited ways, given patriarchal ideologies of gendered spheres which have strategically excluded them. (10) In Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity, art historian Griselda Pollock discusses the importance of the 19th-century ideology of ‘separate spheres’, dictating gendered spatial arrangements, specifically two compartments of space: the public and the private.(11) In 19th-century French visual culture, the figure of the male flaneur – an observer of modern urban life - symbolized the “privilege or freedom to move about the public arenas of the city.”(12) Women were not afforded the same opportunity because of their gender and would be relegated to domestic interiors, separate from public spaces.(13) As Pollock explains, “the public space was officially the realm of and for men; for women to enter it entailed unforeseen risks”, including losing one’s virtue, sullying one’s reputation and respectability.(14) This notion of restricted mobility is disrupted in Chicago’s open-air Atmospheres created in the late 1960s. The performance piece focuses on nude women performers who fully occupy the outdoor space and are free to move about it, prompting viewers to interrogate ideas surrounding body politics and the female body’s relation to nature and the environment.
Atmospheres (1969-1974) was a series of site-specific performances staged in the Californian desert and referred to by Chicago as ‘firework pieces’ since they involved igniting flares which released plumes of lushly hued smoke. The Atmospheres series symbolizes women’s attempts to occupy space in an exterior world previously dominated by men.(15) As embodied acts and sites of resistance to global patriarchy, the performances protest against female oppression, which according to Lippard emphasizes women’s “need for survival.”(16) Smoke Bodies (1972, Figure 1), from the series Atmospheres, stages a 1972 site-specific outdoor performance in the Californian desert, featuring three body painted, nude women emerging from billowing clouds of coloured smoke. The eruption of colour is created by nine flares planted in the desert floor effusing brightly coloured funnels of candy floss-like smoke. Intense pigmentations of deep green, apple red, and magenta cascade into the air and are blown by the wind, dispersing to the top right of the composition. Standing in sharp contrast to the barren desert that surrounds them, their progressive expansion transforms the qualities of the space, softening the landscape. The assertively vibrant, dense shoots of colour encircle the figures, protecting them within their desert space. The figures themselves are a trio of lithe, naked, painted bodies positioned so they form a triangle within the triangle delineated by the coloured flares. Clothed in painted coats of green, orange and purple, the women stand, softly, fleshly, warmly hued against the coarse earth that surrounds them. The figures are tiny in comparison to the vastness of the backdrop behind them, but they are confidently occupying the space.
[Left to Right] Figure 1: Judy Chicago, Smoke Bodies from Atmospheres series, 1972, performance, Southern California. Figure 2: Michael Heizer, Double Negative, 1969, land art piece.
Situating the nude female body in outdoor landscapes, Atmospheres was Chicago’s blatant response to the emergence of late 1960s Land Art scene in the American West, most commonly associated with Los Angeles-based male artists such as Michael Heizer, Walter de Maria and Robert Smithson. Environmentally destructive and overly masculine, the imposing and extractive male-dominated Land Art movement was notorious for its monumental, site-specific works often consisting of earth excavations and constructions.(17) One of the most significant earthworks in the western United States was Michael Heizer Double Negative (1969, Figure 2), a massive 50-by-30-by-1500-foot trench cut into the dry terrain of the Moapa Valley in the Nevada desert. This act involved displacing 244 000 tons of desert sandstone which permanently scared the earth. The artist would himself assert that it was “a scar of a kind, an intrusion on nature, an assault of some sort.”(18) In 1998, New York-based writer and critic Jeffrey Kastner would qualify the movement as “arguably the most macho of the post-war art programmes [ … ] recasting the land with masculine disregard for the longer term.”(19) In a conversation with Swiss curator Philipp Kaiser, Chicago cites another example of ‘macho’ land art referring to American artist Richard Serra’s 1970 exhibition of Sawing at the Pasadena Art Museum. The installation was made up of a monumental pile of felled endangered Redwood trees, an invasive act on the natural world that shocked Chicago and was a trigger for her Atmospheres series. “The arrogance upset me deeply”, Chicago would say.(20)
In Atmospheres, Chicago sought to ‘feminize’ the masculine public sphere and the overtly male-dominated Southern Californian land art scene using the spectacular colour effects and vibrancy of pyrotechnics. Collectively these performances of billowing jewels of smoke and painted bodies capture the artist’s drive to redefine public space as feminine, shaping it to better accommodate women. In a video excerpt from the film of Atmospheres, the women rhythmically appear and disappear in and out of ephemeral streams of kaleidoscopic fog, transforming the simple activity of walking into an embodied and politicized gesture, in and out of darkness and erasure.(21),(22)
The invisibility of female domesticity in the private sphere: Womanhouse.
Female containment and gendered power relationships within the private sphere was another significant facet of second-wave feminism that Chicago addressed. Exploring themes of domesticity, femininity and female subordination, Womanhouse (1972, Figure 3) was a feminist art installation involving performances and the “first public exhibition of Feminist Art.”(23) After extensive renovations of a dilapidated Victorian mansion in Hollywood, Chicago and artist Miriam Schapiro worked with twenty-one female students at the CalArts Feminist Art Program in Los Angeles to address the historical conflation of women with domestic space. The project opened in early 1972 and mobilized a wide range of mediums including photography, sculpture, installation and video works that addressed feminine ideas of domesticity and sex, transforming all seventeen rooms into an “environmental art piece.”(24)
Three decades earlier, French American artist Louise Bourgeois had already tackled issues of domesticity within the home, themes which resonated strongly with the feminist art movement. Her series Femme Maison or ‘Woman House’ (1946-1947, Figure 4) depicted nude women whose heads were replaced by houses erupting in flames and whose arms desperately reached out for help. According to Deborah Wye, the series embodies a double entendre: for women, the home is both a place of refuge and a prison.(25) Mignon Nixon reads these figures as “trapped by domestic travail and maternal devoir,” longing and “daydreaming of liberation.”(26) Translations of female alienation and containment are powerfully evident in Chicago’s Womanhouse and arguably a direct descendant of Bourgeois’ work.
[Left to Right] Figure 3: Judy Chicago, Womanhouse exhibition catalogue cover from Womanhouse, 1972, designed by Sheila de Bretteville, Through the Flower archives, Penn State University Archives. Figure 4: Louise Bourgeois, Femme Maison series, 1946-1947, oil and ink on linen. Collection, Louise Bourgeois Trust, New York.
Emphasizing the plurality of women’s views about the home and their assigned roles within it, Womanhouse sought to transform the domestic space into an exhibition space, making women’s daily realities palpably visible to the public. Indeed, Lippard argues that Chicago makes “a truly private art truly public.”(27) Focusing on traditional stereotypes regarding the house space as inherently feminine, Womanhouse sought to free women from the constraints of the domestic space for women who, in the socio-political climate of the 1960s, still felt subjugated by it. At a time when women were clearly “pigeonholed as either housewives or mothers”, the installation highlighted the fears, dreams and fantasies of women as they “cook, sew, wash and iron their lives away.”(28) Examining the specific interconnections of geography and gender, feminist geographer Doreen Massey argues that historical attempts to confine women to the domestic sphere constituted both “spatial control” and a “social control on identity.” (29) Focusing on domestic imagery as a springboard for discussing the implications of inferiority, performances entailed acting out housework and domestic duties in public to highlight contemporary gendered labour force, which according to Paula Harper, aimed to “revise women’s position in society by bringing attention to their oppression.”(30) These daily realities – consisting of domestic work – brought to light the particularly alienating and tedious nature of women’s oppression which Lippard perceives as “ghostly reminders of the isolation in which so many women, even those who are artists, frequently find themselves trapped.”(31)
Womanhouse rendered honourable that which was considered to be inconsequential. Cosmetics, tampons, linens, shower caps and underwear suddenly became valued artistic materials at the very heart of feminist art. Set against strikingly white bathroom walls, Chicago’s Menstruation Bathroom (1972, Figure 5) features a wastepaper basket filled with used, blood-soaked tampons and hanging bloody knickers. One of the most famous and memorable performances was The Cock and Cunt Play (Figure 6), in which two women call upon the performative nature of feminine and masculine roles in costumes featuring oversized pink vinyl genitalia. In a series of skits, the dialogue centres around the balance of power over housework and sex: “A cock means you don’t wash dishes” and “Your cunt was made to receive.”(32) This farcical battle of the sexes ends tragically with the woman being beaten to death by the phallus. In Nurturant Kitchen (Figure 7), latex molds of fried egg forms resembling breasts were stuck on the walls of a pink kitchen space. Artist Vicki Hodgetts recalls how the women viewed the kitchen as “fulsome, warm and nurturing” but also “dangerous.”(33) Schapiro argues that the kitchen became a metaphor for nurturance, mere extensions of mothers. (34)
[Left to Right] Figure 5: Judy Chicago, Menstruation Bathroom from Womanhouse, 1972, mixed media. Photograph from Through the Flowers Archives, housed at the Penn State University Archives. Figure 6: Faith Wilding and Janice Lester, The Cock and Cunt Play, performance, Womanhouse, 1972. Photogram for the documentary Womanhouse by Johanna Demetrakas (1974). Figure 7: Vickie Hodgetts, Robin Weltsch and Susan Frazier. Nurturant Kitchen from Womanhouse, 1972.
It is certainly clear that Womanhouse was an unprecedented leap towards shedding light on women’s gendered experiences within the home. According to Paula Harper, it “proved that women’s art could publicly express ideas and feelings special to women’s private experience.”(35) Womanhouse was a ground-breaking and iconic project, but the inherent challenges of deconstructing patriarchal ideologies was emotionally traumatic for some of the women artists who participated, some of whom were forced to leave the collaboration prematurely.
Resituating women in historical chronology: The Dinner Party
Equally important to Chicago was reclaiming symbolic modalities of space: ideological, historical spheres in which women’s accomplishments had been denied, forgotten or trivialized. Standing as the artist’s world-famous and epochal artwork, The Dinner Party (1974-1979, Figure 8) is a monumental sculptural installation featuring a ceremonial banquet celebrating women’s heritage. A triangular table with (39) place settings honours the lives and work of notable women throughout Western history ranging from historical female figures to mythological goddesses, with an additional 999 names inscribed in the Heritage Floor on which the table rests. The work displays a rich variety of traditional crafts and materials including elaborate porcelain plates featuring sculpted vulva and butterflies, intricately hand-embroidered runners and golden chalices.
[Left to Right] Figure 8: Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, 1974-1979, art installation, ceramic, porcelain, textile, 576 x 576 inches, Brooklyn Museum. Figure 9: Judy Chicago, Emily Dickinson plate from The Dinner Party, 1974-1979, art installation, ceramic, porcelain, textile, 576 x 576 inches, Brooklyn Museum.
According to Chicago, The Dinner Party symbolizes the female desire for "liberation and the yearning to be free", symptomatic of the historic bias that has attempted to erase and coerce women into silence and neglect.(36) Chicago would explain: “From my studies of women’s art and literature and my research into women’s lives (…) I had concluded that the general lack of knowledge of our heritage as women was pivotal in our continued oppression.”(37) Extending the notion of biased representation beyond chronological history, Chicago was already critiquing the ultimate presumed site of neutrality and truth, and nucleus of white male-dominated meaning-making: the museum space. In The Dinner Party, Chicago offers women a literal seat at the table in both the art world and history. While Chicago’s decision to use female genitalia as a central core imagery acts as a symbolically and materially expansive forces within the context of the museum, the imagery is still contained and even compressed within the edges of the plates. Indeed, Chicago recognizes that the symbolic images stand for a women’s achievement but also “embody women’s containment.”(38) For example, American poet Emily Dickinson’s place setting (Figure 9) has a “strong though delicate center imprisoned within layers of immobile lace” – visually, the suffocating layers of lace represent the Victorian gendered restrictions that Dickinson had to endure throughout her lifetime.(39) Indeed, women’s aspirations and struggles are symbolically pitted against their containment and invisibility. Because woman’s place has “always been the ahistorical private realm”, their achievements have consistently been deemed exceptional, out of the norm. “Isolated and fragmented, rather than part of an ongoing continuum”, Chicago redresses this bias by putting them in their rightful place again.(40)
When first exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1979, Chicago’s The Dinner Party received mixed reviews and drew controversy. According to Nancy McCauley, the installation’s plates with their conspicuous female sexuality were the most controversial aspect of the installation.(41) McCauley stresses that while Western art has historically praised images of female sexual attributes such as breasts, buttocks and discretely hidden pubic areas, public imagery not intended for the pleasure of the male gaze are suppressed.(42) In The Dinner Party, the degree of power and liberation in Chicago’s vagina imagery clearly breaks away from the primary way in which female anatomical features have been portrayed in Western art, that is to say “consigned by men for sexual gratification and reproduction.”(43) By doing so, Chicago reclaims historical spaces within the symbolic and institutional realms that hide female achievement, as well as previously forbidden and banned spaces of sexual and gender censorship.
Conclusion
This paper aimed to demonstrate how Chicago’s early feminist work sought to reclaim space to include women’s experiences and accomplishments. As seen in Atmospheres, Womanhouse and The Dinner Party, each of these artworks respectively attempted to negotiate spatial borders in public, private and symbolic spheres. Over the course of her prolific sixty-year career, Chicago used art as an instrument for transgressing gender boundaries and resisting women’s erasure. Today, her relentless engagement remains utterly relevant to contemporary feminism and has evolved by absorbing the emergence of new theories and currents.
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Endnotes
1. Evgeniya Makarova, Lecture “Visual Culture of Protest and Dissent”, February 3rd, 2021.
2. Fields, Jill. Entering the Picture : Judy Chicago, the Fresno Feminist Art Program, and the Collective Visions of Women Artists. New Directions in American History. New York: Routledge, 2012: 27.
3. Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”, Women, art, and power : and other essays, 1st ed. Icon Editions. New York: Harper & Row, 1988: 145-178.
4. Fields, 30
5. Lucy Lippard, “Judy Chicago: Talking to Lucy R. Lippard” in From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art”, 1976: 249.
6. Lippard, 226.
7. Lippard, 214-215.
8. Chicago, Personal Journal, vol. 1, 24 March 1971: 54.
9. Judy Chicago, “Two Artists, Two Attitudes: Judy Chicago and Lloyd Hamrol Interview Each Other,” Criteria: A Review of the Arts 1, no. 2 (November 1974), 9.
10. Griselda Pollock, “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity,” in Vision and Difference: Femininity and the Histories of Art (London and New York: Routledge, 2010; originally published 1988), 67.
11. Griselda Pollock, 62.
12. Pollock, 67
13. Pollock, 67
14. Pollock, 69
15. Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon. Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974. Munich: Prestel, 2012: 110.
16. Lippard, 225
17. Chanelle Lalonde, Lecture “Earth/land art (1960-80s)”, February 10th, 2021.
18. Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon, 98
19. Jeffrey Kastner, “Preface,” in Land and Environmental Art, ed. Jeffrey Kastner, Phaidon Press Limited, 1998: 15.
20. “Smoke Goddess: Judy Chicago on Land Art and the Desert, in Conversation with Philipp Kaiser”, Nevada Art Museum, February 14 2019, Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3u0pl1ThpDU&ab_channel=NevadaArt
21. Evgeniya Makarova, Lecture “Walking as an Art Practice.” 27th January 2021
22. “Chicago in Ink: An Autobiography”, Studio 94, https://chicagoinink.com/ATMOSPHERES
23. Wikipedia, “Womanhouse.”
24. Johanna Demetrakas, “Womanhouse”, 1974, film documentary: 5min.
25. “Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait”, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Accessed April 1st, 2021: https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/3661.
26. Mignon Nixon, “Losing Louise,” 126.
27. Lucy Lippard, “Judy Chicago, Talking to Lucy Lippard” in From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art: 228
28. “Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro’s Epoch-Making Feminist Installation ‘Womanhouse’ Gets a Tribute in Washington, Dc”, Sarah Cascone, Artnet News, March 13, 2018. https://news.artnet.com/exhibitions/women-house-judy-chicago-national-museum-women-arts-1234649
29. Doreen Massey, “Part III: Space, Place and Gender” in Space, Place, and Gender: 177.
30. Paula Harper, “The First Feminist Program: A View from the 1980s”, Signs, Vol. 10 No. 4: 772.
31. Lucy Lippard, “Household Images in Art” in From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art: 54.
32. Johanna Demetrakas, Womanhouse, 1974, film documentary: 26min.
33. Schapiro, Miriam. "Recalling Womanhouse." Women's Studies Quarterly 15, no. 1/2 (1987): 28.
34. Schapiro, 25.
35. Paula Harper, “The First Feminist Art Program: A View from the 1980s” in Entering the Picture edited by Jill Fields, New York: Routledge (2011), 92
36. Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party: a Symbol of Our Heritage. Anchor Books ed. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1979: 56.
37. “Struggle, Process and Vision: The Development of Our Needlework” in Embroidering our heritage: the dinner party needlework, 8.
38. Chicago, The Dinner Party: a Symbol of Our Heritage: 52.
39. Chicago, 136.
40. Withers, Josephine. “Judy Chicago's Dinner Party.” In The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, edited by Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, New York, NY: IconEditions, 1992: 454-455.
41. Nancy McCauley, No Sexual Perversion in (Judy) Chicago, Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America , Winter 1992, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Winter 1992), pp. 177 The University of Chicago Press
42. Nancy McCauley, No Sexual Perversion in (Judy) Chicago, 178.
43. McCauley, 179.