Still food for thought
Drake restages famous feminist work, The Dinner Party
If there’s something Alexandra Feswick has little trouble with, it’s dinner for dozens. The executive chef of the Drake Hotel, Feswick’s culinary chops have been honed by years of high-pressure kitchens and the expectation to perform. But when is dinner not just dinner? That question is bound up in Judy Chicago’s The
Dinner Party, the 1979 installation work that remains one of the best-known icons of the feminist art movement of its day.
It’s also what Feswick and Mia Nielsen, the Drake’s curator and head of cultural programming, mean to take on this Sunday when, as part of their contribution to Art Toronto, they’ll restage the legendary work in their own way.
Feswick has done her own version at least twice in the past, unsanctioned as art affairs.
She brought it to Nielsen earlier this year and together they schemed to bring it under the art world umbrella, in time for the country’s biggest art fair. Timing, as they say, is everything. As they’ve tumbled headlong into its celebratory nature, they’ve also run smack into its unintended timeliness.
Though it’s been criticized and occasionally dismissed over its near-40-year history — by male critics, mostly — The Dinner Party found longevity with a sadly long-standing relevance. Conceived as a work critical of history’s wilful ignorance toward women’s achievements, it has held on, sadly, to its malignant currency.
As Art Toronto opens this week, the cultural world is aflame with allegations of sexual impropriety — again — by some of its most powerful men: Harvey Weinstein, the Miramax executive, now faces dozens of allegations of harassment and abuse, while Gilbert Rozon, the director of Montreal’s Just for Laughs, stepped down amid similar allegations. This week, the director James Toback is at the centre of a maelstrom of accusations of sexual harassment, around the same time it was revealed that Bill O’Reilly, the former Fox TV host, had paid out a $32-million (U.S.) sexual harassment settlement, just months before being fired from the network amid a long list of similar cases.
For Nielsen, all the news amounts to little more than business as usual.
“It’s something that affects every woman directly,” she shrugs. “Really, it’s our whole lives. But to be honest, Alex and I are a little sick of talking about it in a negative way. We want to rise above. What we really wanted to do with this is create a collaborative space that celebrates creativity.”
Which, of course, was Chicago’s intention all along. In 1979, when the work was installed at the Brooklyn Museum, it entered a world of increasingly intense gender and identity politics.
But Chicago’s piece was less strident than celebratory: her table, a triangle, was set for 39 women throughout history, most of them unheralded, who had defied the oppressions their gender, unprovoked, had induced: the painter Georgia O’Keeffe, who defied early American Modernism’s boys’ club to tower above them all; Anna Maria van Schurman, a Dutch scholar who was the first woman to attend university; Sojourner Truth, the legendary women’s rights activist; Hypatia of Alexandria, a mathematician in ancient Greece.
If you’re wondering “who?” about any of those, that’s part of the point. The Dinner Party, as much as anything, both celebrated women’s accomplishments while putting a very fine point on their relative obscurity in the historical record.
Her format itself — a finely laid table, with embroidered napkins, handwritten place cards, handmade table runners and swooping individualized ceramic crockery in an array of colours that suggested the female anatomy — contained its critique. Domesticity — meal-making, decorating, women’s work — had no value, as millennia of male-led society had defined it; Chicago elevated it to the realm of the priceless, as art.
It took time, but the cultural firmament eventually agreed. Acquired by the Brooklyn Museum in 2002, the original installation, having toured dozens of countries and been seen by 15 million people, has been permanently installed in the museum since 2007. Cementing its legacy, and its maddening currency, a new exhibition surrounding it opened at the Brooklyn Museum this month.
But for generations of people touched by the work, The Dinner Party may reside in Brooklyn, but it doesn’t live there. At the Drake Commissary on Sunday, Nielsen and Feswick have repurposed it as the evolving thing, perhaps, Chicago imagined it to be.
Absent Chicago’s table treatment, Nielsen commissioned her own, from Toronto-based women artists: Diane Borsato will contribute Ikebana (Japanese flower arrangement); Ness Lee hand-painted table runners; Sandra Brewster candlesticks and napkins in homage to Sojourner Truth. The evening ends with a handmade silk collage for each guest, by Jennifer Murphy.
Nielsen sought out Chicago’s blessing for the affair. She’ll also have her scrutiny, as the artist herself, in town for Art Toronto, will be at the 5 p.m. seating Sunday.
Feswick, meanwhile, will focus on the meal: seven courses, all prepared by accomplished Toronto women chefs (their male counterparts will do the serving).
It’s a statement, of course, that gender divides exist in nearly every arena of power, haute cuisine being a notably challenging one. It’s a subtle gesture, but one that dovetails nicely with Chicago’s intentions, all those years ago: that history is still unfolding, with its ending yet to be written.
“It goes along with that mentality: ‘Women have come so far.’ Well, what does that mean?” Feswick says. “If we’re not all the way, who cares how far we’ve come? We still have to keep going.” Art Toronto opens at noon Friday at the Metro Convention Centre. See arttoronto.ca for tickets. The Dinner Party takes place at the Drake Commissary, 128a Sterling Rd., Sunday at 5 and 9 p.m. See drakecommissary.ca for information.