Judy Chicago. Photo courtesy Donald Woodman.
When Anaïs Nin first met Judy Chicago they were mutually intimidated: Chicago by Nin’s writing and persona, Nin by Chicago’s powerful personality. But the literary figure Nin encouraged the artist Chicago, and they forged a friendship that was strengthened by their different feminist dispositions – Nin was the quiet, non-confrontational feminist, Chicago the forceful dynamo. Chicago’s latest book, Fragments From the Delta of Venus, is a mixture of imagery and text, with the latter coming from her late friend’s literary forays into pulp erotica. For the book, Chicago plucked the least schlocky passages from Nin’s gun-for-hire titillation tales, and created corresponding art works. To coincide with the book’s release, a collection of Chicago’s erotica is being shown at Toronto’s O’Connor Gallery until March 5th.
Meanwhile, Chicago’s transformative 1979 masterpiece, The Dinner Party, will be given a permanent home at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2006. The work — a stunning recreation of the Last Supper as seen by the women in history who weren’t invited the first time around — cemented Chicago’s reputation as the pre-eminent feminist artist of the day and rankled the reigning art cognoscenti of the time. Chicago enlisted the help of hundreds of female artisans and craft persons to create the elaborate tapestries and ceramic place settings designed for each woman at the table. In 20-odd years of exhibition, it has been seen by over a million people. But even as Chicago worked on these large-scale collaborative projects, she maintained her solo arts practice, one that tackled similar issues without drawing upon the aid of hundreds of needle workers. The intimate collaboration with Nin’s writing for Fragments from the Delta of Venus highlights both Chicago’s interest in text and visual interplay and her desire to champion female-centric erotica and the mutuality of desire.
The artist is surprisingly small in person, and wears a bright pink cowboy-themed shirt on the day we meet. She radiates warmth and speaks with a precision that makes one feel as if they’ve been given a concise history of Feminist Art, a term she coined, with each answer. Her husband, and frequent artistic collaborator, Donald Woodman, wanders about taking photos, and chimes in with the occasional query (“Does this art make you embarrassed?”) or axiom (“Feminism is a philosophy that is not gender-bound”).
A: I wanted to do something to honour her. And I thought this was an area I hadn’t really looked at, her erotic writing, and the Delta of Venus. The stories were written for a dollar a page, and they’re fairly contrived and kind of silly. Even Anaïs was vaguely embarrassed by them when she wrote about them in her introduction to the Delta of Venus collection. But when she re-read it she saw there were fragments that had her authentic voice in it, and I thought that was interesting. I extracted those fragments to see if I could make analogue images.
A: Have you done any research on erotica by women? Was it by women or was it images of women? It’s usually of women. It’s through images that we reinforce our sense of self. That’s what tells us that what we experience personally is something rooted in commonality, and there is still a huge absence of images of women.
A: You might not like the way I answer this. A historian named Gerda Lerner said that women live in a state of trained ignorance. You were trained into not knowing anything about our own history, and, unless you awaken that, you never even know what you’re missing. It’s not an accident that young women don’t know and don’t think about it. You’re not given the information you need to actually decipher and deconstruct some of your experiences, especially as you get older, unless you do avail yourself of the information that will help you make sense of what you’re experiencing — to realize that you have not seen work that speaks to you and to your own sense of self and sexuality.
A: No, it’s to offer alternatives.
A: We’re in the same place we’ve always been in, in a sense that we’re still in the process of recurrent erasure and we haven’t broken out of that yet. So the mistake I made was that I thought we were breaking that cycle. It never occurred to me that I would see it happening with young women again. The fact is that we have the opportunity to break it.
A: Well, I’ve been saying that this is very odd: All my dealers are men. What does that tell you?
A: You’d have to ask them! That would be really interesting actually. This man in Louisville, Kentucky bought the box suite [a heart-shaped valentine box containing intaglio prints from Fragments from the Delta of Venus] for his wife last Valentine’s Day and when she got them, she completely freaked out and sent them back.
A: Women don’t have a lot of history of seeing their sexuality expressed from another point of view. She’s an art collector. I’m sure she sees hundreds and thousands of images of the male gaze. I’m sure she just never saw something like this. In the history of art, women’s bodies are the embodiment of sexuality. They do not possess female sexual agency, because the woman is, in and of herself, meant to embody sexuality.
Q: In reading about The Dinner Party, it was kind of appalling to recall that your artwork was savagely debated on the floor of the U.S. Congress. It plays into this idea of a cycle that you mentioned. There’s kind of a bit of that cultural conservatism again now. Do you think it’s a coup that The Dinner Party now has a permanent resting home?The Dinner Party, 1979. Collecton of The Brooklyn Museum of Art, Gift of The Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation. Photo credit Donald Woodman.
A: It’s a miracle. It’s a total miracle.
A: I think the best of the art world is that there’s still a place for oppositional voices and alternative voices. The worst of the art world is that too much of it has been co-opted by the marketplace. There are still places in the art world where there is a commitment to the best in art. You know, we have no idea what will happen or what the reactions will be until The Dinner Party opens in the Sackler Center, and we have no idea what is going to happen when it’s there. It’s been over 20 years since it has been in Toronto and its memory is still present. We have no idea what’s going to happen.
A: It’s very soft. I wanted it to be soft. I worked with a young, female designer at powerHouse [Chicago's publisher] and you know we worked to make the book intimate, modest, evocative, sensual. It’s sort of my version of Corbet’s Origin of the World. I wanted Delta to be a sort of analogue, your own private place where you could go and explore these images that are not usually readily available, that I hope would speak to people about an aspect of their sexuality and their sexual experience that they don’t usually see.
A: I’m exceedingly happy because when The Dinner Party opens at the Sackler Center museum, the curators of the Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin, are mounting an international exhibition of contemporary feminist art. So everybody will get to see for themselves what young women all around the world are doing. I’m just thrilled. Because that’s what The Dinner Party was intended to be: a wedge to open up space for women’s voices.
More from this Author
Sarah Lazarovic
- Connecting the Dots
- Wading into recommender applications
- Judy Chicago
- On her new book, Fragments From the Delta of Venus
