Judy Chicago. Her-story of Art
On view at ICA Miami from December 4, 2018, “Judy Chicago: A Reckoning” looks at three decades of the artist’s work, spanning her early minimal sculptures from the 1960s, paintings and installations produced from the 1970s to the 1990s, and a new “smoke” piece specifically devised for Miami. In conversation with Stephanie Seidel, the pioneering feminist artist (b. 1939, Chicago) reflects on her work and the development of her career in the American male-centered art scene.
“JUDY CHICAGO: A RECKONING,” ICA, MIAMI. DECEMBER 4, 2018APRIL 21, 2019.
STEPHANIE SEIDEL: Your exhibition “Judy Chicago: A Reckoning” on show at ICA Miami is looking at works from three decades of your career, spanning early minimal sculptures from the 1960s, semi-abstract paintings featuring the “central core” imagery from the early 1970s, test plates for The Dinner Party (1974-79) as well as works from the Birth Project (1980-85), Powerplay (1982-87) and Autobiography of a Year (1993-94). Looking at these diverse groups of works, the transition from minimalist abstraction to figuration becomes apparent. Could you talk a little about this transition and how this evolved?
JUDY CHICAGO: Because of the thesis of this show, I thought a lot about this question and realized that I started out as a figurative artist. I started attending the Chicago Art Institute when I was five years old, where I worked from the figure, did still lifes and studied anatomy at the Field Museum of Natural History. When I went to UCLA for college (receiving both a BA and an MA, as there were no MFAs then), the dominant aesthetic came out of a figurative artist named Rico Lebrun, so most of the students worked figuratively. In 1959-1960 I took a year off from school and went to New York where I encountered Abstract Expressionism, which really interested me. I have a sketchbook from 1960-1961 in which you can see how I moved back and forth from abstraction to figuration. When I returned to UCLA, I collided with my painting teachers who disliked both my interest in abstraction and my color sense, which was very different from the earth tone range favored at the school, as my palette was heavy on pink, turquoise, ivory and chartreuse.
“I HAVE SPENT MY CAREER ADDRESSING THE ABSENCE OF IMAGES RELATED TO WOMEN’S EXPERIENCES AND PERSPECTIVE; I WANT TO CHANGE THIS SO THAT WOMEN BECOME A CENTRAL PART OF THE CULTURAL DISCOURSE.”
At that point I was already exploring how to fuse abstraction and figuration, which is apparent in my early, biomorphic semiabstract work. By the time I graduated, I had moved into sculpture because Oliver Andrews, the young sculpture teacher at UCLA, was sympathetic to my interests. He was also supportive of me as a woman at a time when that was very rare; I received a teaching assistantship in sculpture, probably one of the first ever given to a woman, though I didn’t realize that at the time.
When I moved into professional practice I quickly discovered that in order to be taken seriously in the male-dominated art scene of LA in the 1960s I would have to suppress any indication of my gender in my work. As a result, I began to do more minimal work which is embodied in sculptures like Trinity (1965) and Sunset Squares (1965-2018). But even then my feminine impulses emerged, particularly in the color. In fact, when “Pacific Standard Time” opened (the 2011-2012 Getty-funded initiative documenting and celebrating art in Southern California from 1960 to 1985), one of the curators told me that one of my male peers objected to my inclusion in the Getty show, claiming that my work was “too emotive and had too much color.” So apparently, even when I was doing my best to be “one of the guys” I wasn’t succeeding.
The exhibition at ICA Miami also features a new smoke piece, A Purple Poem for Miami. In 1967, you did your first Dry Ice Environment (#1) in a parking lot in Los Angeles. Pieces with colored smoke, like Purple Atmosphere (1969) on the beach in Santa Barbara and Smoke Bodies (1972, this time including female performers) in the California desert followed shortly after. What was your interest in turning towards these ephemeral and environmental formats that were time-based and deployed the human body?
Perhaps it was precisely the fact that the LA art scene was so inhospitable to women that led me to installations and performances in which I tried to “soften” or feminize the environment with the Feather Room (1965), Dry Ice (1967) and colored smoke, or Atmospheres (1968-1974). It was very interesting to note – when I reimagined the Feather Room for a recent exhibition curated by Géraldine Gourbe at Villa Arson in Nice, France – that many cis men became uncomfortable in the installation. In fact, one journalist stated that he felt smothered by an environment that I meant to be comforting. My early smoke pieces involved people only in order to help ignite the flares, but then, after I started the Feminist Art program at Fresno State (now Cal-State Fresno) in 1970-1971, I began to involve my students by painting their bodies to match the colored smokes. Throughout my early work, I had tried to fuse color and surface in paintings and sculptures. In the “Women and Smoke” series, that same impulse was at play but it was manifested as an interest in the idea of women and nature. I guess that today, that idea appears somewhat essentialist, but I never intended to suggest that women were “naturally” connected to nature; rather that historically, women have been associated with nature as a way to emphasize our “lesser” status.
In fact, my intention was to challenge that idea and to suggest alternatives to patriarchal history; for instance, that women created fire, that women were powerful – in contrast to the prevailing attitudes towards women. The “Women and Smoke” images reflect how I was aware of the way history and myth evidence a male bias that keeps women imprisoned in confining roles.
In your work, you create images that are marginalized from male-dominated discourses: The Dinner Party featured female characters disregarded by history through vaginal forms rendered in porcelain. The subsequent Birth Project created images of female figures in the process of giving birth – a topic largely absent from Western art history. Could you talk a little bit about your interest in these iconographic voids?
In a strange way, this description of The Dinner Party relates to my interest in iconographic voids. Neither ubiquitous skyscrapers nor thrusting sculptures are generally described as phallic forms, primarily because they are somehow associated with the universal. In contrast, The Dinner Party plates are often viewed as vaginal even though – for example – the “Ethel Smyth” plate is a piano, and the “Caroline Herschel” plate includes an eye at its center as a reference to her work as an astronomer. But as one reporter put it when I explained this about the “Herschel” plate, “the eye has a come-hither look,” a statement more about his perceptual limits than my work.
So there is a need for a longer historical perspective on such imagery, to keep it from being perceived in such an undiscerning way?
What I mean is that the historic absence of female-centered imagery in art has led to an inability to “see” the complexity of The Dinner Party plates. Admittedly, I have been interested in fashioning images of female agency, but that does not mean that the plates ARE “vaginal forms” even though they do reference the vulva; they do that FOR AN AESTHETIC PURPOSE. The 39 women at the table are from different countries, professions, ethnicities and religions; the only thing they have in common is that they all had vaginas, which is why so many are unfamiliar to viewers. But there is no reason that the vagina cannot be as universal a form as the phallus.
How can these viewing patterns be changed?
The iconographic void in which I have worked for decades damages both women and men. Women have difficulty seeing themselves as possessing power and agency, and too many men view them the same way, which is why so many men devalue women. I believe that what is not imaged does not exist in the public sphere, and also reveals what we value and what we despise. That is one reason that I have spent my career addressing the absence of images related to women’s experiences and perspective; I want to change this so that women become a central part of the cultural discourse rather than an “add on”’ to the male-centered art dialogue. However, it also happens that I just get interested in subjects that have been left out because they are the most challenging to explore.
In recent years, many of your works have been shown internationally in numerous exhibitions, most recently in “Los Angeles, The Cool Years” at Villa Arson, which you have already mentioned. It’s hard to imagine the “Pussy Hats” and movements like “Me Too” without your work and the discussions it stirred in the 1970s. What do you think about this re-evaluation of your work that is happening today? And on a second note, since your exhibition at ICA is titled “A Reckoning,” what do you think should be reconsidered and viewed in a different light once more?
From the beginning of my career, my goal was to become part of art history. The subjects I have tackled – history, birth, the Holocaust, human values, our relationship to other species and more recently, mortality and extinction – reflect the fact that I believe deeply in the power of art to help us understand our experiences and the meaning of human life. I am quite fortunate that some of the subjects in which I have been interested have suddenly become deeply relevant. I love that. Instead of being
exceptional, vaginal references like those in The Dinner Party have become ever more present in the shape of pussy hats, projects like “Vagina China” or Instagram pages like “Club Clitoris.”
It’s hard not to see the china you mentioned as a direct
descendant of The Dinner Party…
Even though I am grateful for the attention The Dinner Party has brought me, for a very long time it blocked out the rest of my career, during which I have created a prodigious body of art. This situation began to change in 2013 with “Pacific Standard Time,” the research and program initiative of the Getty in Los Angeles, and since then, other aspects of my oeuvre have become visible. The ICA show surveys the first three decades of my career through selected works that provide a glimpse of each decade. It is thrilling to me that because of this renewed interest in what I have done, early works are being brought back; like the Feather Room at Villa Arson and Sunset Squares in this show. As a result, art historians and critics are looking at the dates of some of this work and asking a question that has never been raised before, i.e. has my work influenced other artists?
Has anyone come up with some answers to that question?
Géraldine Gourbe began this process when she was doing research for her show. But as I explained to her, in the 1960s it was difficult for people to even accept my work, because of my
gender. That was a time when critics told me with impunity that “I couldn’t be a woman and an artist too.” The influential curator Walter Hopps refused to look at Rainbow Pickett (1965), saying later that he was unable to accept the idea that my work was stronger than that of my male peers. It would have been inconceivable for anyone – myself included – to assert that my work was influencing some of the men’s. I think that the title of this show, “A Reckoning,” is Alex Gartenfeld’s and your way of acknowledging that this reassessment of my work is long overdue. My hope is that the process will continue until the entire body of my art is known and is able to realize its goal, that is, to become part of art history. I also hope that it will help achieve my other intention: to demonstrate that female-centered imagery can provide as important a pathway to understanding the universal human experience as male art has allowed. I learned from the male artists before me and then expanded my knowledge of art by researching all the women artists who had been ignored or erased. Hopefully, in the future, young artists will have available to them a larger and more diverse body of art upon which to build their careers. Certainly, there is no reason why male artists should not learn as much from the work of women artists as I have learned from theirs.
Stephanie Seidel is Associate Curator at ICA, Miami.