Push-Pull of Feminist Art

Is feminism still alive and well in the art world? Or did it fizzle after its explosion in the 1970s? Has feminism made a difference in the visual arts? Does anybody care? These questions come to mind with the reassembling of Judy Chicago’s groundbreaking feminist collaborative sculpture, “Dinner Party.”

The work, designed by Chicago and executed in 1974-79 by a volunteer labor force, celebrates 1,038 women in Western history. Thirty-nine honorees are represented by symbols of sexual imagery on ceramic plates, set on a monumental triangular table; names of the remaining 999 appear on white porcelain floor tiles. When the piece was first shown, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1979, it drew record attendance and became a flash point for criticism of feminist art. Supporters hailed the work as a breakthrough for women, while detractors objected to its formal character, sexual focus and cult-like status.

“Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party in Feminist Art History” brings the work to Los Angeles for the first time, in a major exhibition opening Wednesday at UCLA at the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center. The show places Chicago’s massive project in a context with works by about 50 other women, inviting new evaluations of feminist art. In anticipation of the discussions that certainly will follow the show’s opening, Times art writer Suzanne Muchnic assembled a round-table gathering of four women who have strong opinions about and diverse experiences in feminist art, both the new and the established.

Judy Fiskin, 50, is an artist who is represented by the Patricia Faure Gallery and teaches photography at CalArts. In 1973 she was co-director of Womanspace Gallery, a pioneering feminist showcase at the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles. Amelia Jones, 34, is curator of “Sexual Politics” and associate professor of art history and theory at UC Riverside. Libby Lumpkin, 44, is an art historian, critic and contributing editor to Art issues. magazine and teaches at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her book “Little Histories” will be published next year. Rachel Rosenthal, 69, is an interdisciplinary solo performer who founded L.A.’s experimental Instant Theater in 1955 and was a leading figure in Los Angeles’ women’s movement in the 1970s. Since 1989 she has been director of the Rachel Rosenthal Company, a nonprofit performance group.

All of the participants preferred to look at the big picture, not just at the topical “Dinner Party.” In an animated and frequently heated session, they talked about the evolution of feminist art, its influence and its current status.

QUESTION: During the course of this discussion we’ll take a long view of feminist art, looking both backward and forward as we size up its status and impact. But let’s begin in the present. Where does the feminist art movement stand right now?

Libby Lumpkin: I think it’s dead. It’s had tremendous successes; post-modernism is feminist, so we’re living in a feminist time. But in terms of art, it has become prescriptive. I think the current reigning feminist discourse is yanking artists in rather than pushing them forward.

Amelia Jones: I strongly disagree. Calling it a feminist art movement is no longer an accurate way of dealing with it, but I would say that feminism is an incredibly central, if often hidden, component of much contemporary practice. So in that sense it’s a really lively, important aspect of a lot of the work that’s being done now. What I disagree with the most is this idea that there’s a kind of monolithic feminism that is prescribing what artists are supposed to be doing. Various groups of people have articulated specific ideas that have then become rather frozen.

Looking back to the ‘80s, we can now see that the “male gaze” rhetoric--the idea of getting away from representing the female body at all, to completely erase the possibility of men engaging pleasurably in representations of the female body--became a very prescriptive kind of dialogue. But one can also look at the incredible diversity within feminism, which now I would say is largely characterized precisely through its multiplicity. It never was a singular discourse, but even less now than ever.

Lumpkin: I don’t even know an artist in this generation who isn’t feminist. My problem is that the discourse tends to look at certain art that has feminist themes and call that feminist art. I’m much more interested in art that has feminist effects rather than feminist themes. I understand that there are a lot of diverse theories because I spend a lot of my time reading about them, but they’re all tied together by this basic kind of assumption about women--that they’re virtuous.

Rachel Rosenthal: I just feel that the whole feminist thing has been a process, that it’s about process, it’s systemic and it really doesn’t deal with aesthetics anymore. I think it was shoehorned into dealing with aesthetics. In the ‘70s, because of the influence of people like Mimi [Shapiro] and Judy [Chicago], we were given certain parameters that were formal and were supposed to represent a feminist sensibility, but all of that seems totally beside the point.

What has been so important in the rise of the ‘70s movement and its continuance is the fact that so much attention was paid suddenly to a whole view of the world. That is what has permeated not only art--male as well as female art--but also the processes of social interaction and all the ways people address issues. Those were the great, great contributions and they have continued ever since.

Fiskin: Having spent almost 20 years teaching in art school--and this is still a very big issue at CalArts--it seems to me that Rachel is right. It’s not a formal issue at all anymore, but there still are issues of content that are being fought over and pushed and pulled. Sometimes it seems to me that the people who think of themselves most formally as feminists overlook the ways in which feminist content can be in somebody’s work.

QUESTION: Judy and Rachel, you are both artists who were involved early on with Los Angeles’ feminist art activity. How has that experience affected you and your work?

Fiskin: I was educated in connoisseurship, which meant that I was educated in looking. In terms of my attitudes toward feminism or being a woman artist, I never had a problematic attitude, except that I knew from the beginning that it was a problem in the real world and that it should be addressed there. I was always on the side of women having power, and I think the best way for women to get power is not always inside the art work because that’s ascribing more power to what art can do by itself than it has. So I’ve been more interested in feminist action.

I think I get a skewed image from being at CalArts because in the art school there are now more women teaching than men and in the photo program we’re about 50-50. I couldn’t believe that was true of the rest of the United States, so I asked a friend who has a relationship with the Guerrilla Girls to provide me with some statistics. As of 1993, across the country in art schools the faculty was 80% male and 20% female--still. If that kind of information isn’t getting out, if the statistics on how many women are being given shows--and in which museums--aren’t being publicized, you can make all kinds of feminist art and nothing’s going to change.

Rosenthal: I have no education, I have no degrees, I have absolutely no background in universities or colleges or an academy of any sort. Whatever I know, I picked up--like a monkey--and my point of view is very, very different from many of the things I’ve heard you [other panelists] say because naturally my knowledge is not in the places that your knowledge is. I just want to set the record straight about experiencing that period and my development as an artist. When the early ‘70s came, I was still in the throes of wasting all my energy and time wondering if I could be a woman and an artist. You have no idea what I went through.

Fiskin: I didn’t even have a question about it; the answer was no.

Rosenthal: Exactly, darling.

Fiskin: Except when it started to change.

Rosenthal: In the early ‘70s, I went to a conference at CalArts and for the first time in my life I saw the antidote of the poison--which was simply that for 2 1/2 days we sat in the dark and we watched slides of women’s work. It was really like falling off a log, like a burst of consciousness, and I said to myself, “For the first time in my life, I can live my life as a woman and as an artist.” It absolutely validated me. It revolutionized everything that I was, that I believed, that I did. And I left my husband, as we all did.

But the point is that it had such an extraordinary impact. I started to read books. I started a consciousness-raising group, I began to really look at my life, who I was, my work. I mean it totally, totally opened my eyes, and it didn’t do that in a narrow way at all. It was a very big picture. All of the work that I did subsequently--and had done before but hadn’t recognized it as such--was about understanding where we are as a species, not as a gender.

QUESTION: How has the movement evolved since then?

Rosenthal: What was amazing to me over the years was how, first of all, men came to view women’s art with patronizing condescension and then with a little bit of envy. And then little by little, going over into the other camp where the images and statements and materials and all the things that had been considered female and therefore taboo began to have over-the-counter availability. It’s like a sort of a chemical process where all these things began to blend. So when I hear what you guys are saying, I think that perhaps the confrontational aspect of feminism sort of ended up being located in narrow academic circles of theory more than in the big movement and wave of art being made by everybody.

Jones: I don’t want to keep being on the defensive, but I am an academic. I just don’t see that theory or whatever you want to call it--feminists who teach in universities who are thinking about these things--are any narrower, really, than artists are who are thinking about these things.

Lumpkin: Well, what Rachel said is very interesting because what I think she’s saying is, “I was born into a patriarchal world, I was one of the early ones that came to feminism, I got over it and lived on.” In the art world, most women have dealt with their problems of subjectivity and are moving on. I get the sense that a lot of feminist artists are trying to settle issues now to establish some absolute proper image.

Fiskin: I can tell you experiences teaching in an art school where there still are these issues floating around. I have young women come to me and say, “I feel because I’m in this environment I have to make work about being a woman.” They’re coming to me to hear me say, “No, you don’t.” And to say, “You are a woman, you can make work about whatever you want and the likelihood is that your experience as a woman is going to be somewhere in your work anyway.”

QUESTION: Do you draw a distinction between feminist art and art made by women?

Fiskin: There are two ways you can look at it. For the most part, just being an artist and a woman since the late ‘60s in some way puts you somewhere in a large kind of feminist field. And then there is a part of it that is more overtly about being officially feminist. But I don’t really want to get involved in making the distinction. I’m more interested in finding that all over the place in women’s work there is a kind of content that just would not be in men’s work.

QUESTION: Do you feel that things had to be more black and white in the ‘70s than today? “I’m a feminist, I’m not a feminist”?

Fiskin: What I think has happened is that there are so many more women artists now--that there’s a much wider range of things going on.

Lumpkin: And important women artists.

Jones: The best thing about feminism now and the way I would characterize the ‘90s is in the incredible diversification of whatever you want to call it--women’s experience, as it was called in the ‘70s.

Lumpkin: I think that art’s way ahead of the discourse about it.

Fiskin: I have two experiences of that kind of official feminism. One is inside the academy and one is inside the art world. Inside the academy, it seems to me it matters a whole lot more than outside. What you get outside in the art world is a much more diffuse kind of experience of women’s art.

QUESTION: Do you think the goals today of women engaged in feminist art are different from what they were in the ‘70s?

Jones: I think there’s a return to something that many ‘70s feminists were interested in, which was pleasure, art-making as a pleasurable activity but also something that’s pleasurable to the spectator. That’s something that really was largely suppressed by this very specific dominant discourse in the ‘80s. I think that feminism--very reluctantly and very slowly feminism in its mainstream formulation--is being forced to recognize women of color and lesbians and all sorts of other complications to the notions of what being a woman canbe, which have been set forth since the beginning of the women’s art movement. For me, that’s probably what’s most valuable. Feminism from the very beginning was debated in those terms, so I don’t mean to suggest that ‘70s feminists were completely blind to these questions, but now they’ve been pushed insistently into the foreground.

QUESTION: So, things are better now for women artists?

Fiskin: Some of the changes have made it harder to see the discrimination [that still exists]. The trajectory was that women weren’t allowed to make art, then women were allowed to make art and then they were allowed to be good but they were not allowed to be important. And then they were allowed to be important.

Jones: But only within a certain parameter.

Fiskin: Well, only a certain percentage. So you could say two really wildly different things. You could say look how far we’ve come, and you could also say we really haven’t come very far at all. As of 1993, when women already were being allowed to be important by the institutions, the percentage of males in curated exhibitions was 84%, and females was 15% or 16%, and this is in an art world where the males were 56% and the females were 44%. And that’s still going on.

Jones: Women artists are shown in specific venues, but when you get to another level, they’re not.

Rosenthal: By no means have women achieved what our goals were in the ‘70s. Most people think women have it made. They’ve done it, they’ve achieved it, they’re where they want to be, they have the power. Well, it’s not true. It can’t even come near the truth for the simple reason that the whole issue of power and position and where we place ourselves in the universe has not been solved. On the contrary, it’s become a raging debate. So not only have we not achieved power that is in any way commensurable with that of male artists over the history of art, but we don’t even know where we want to be.

QUESTION: Do you think young people understand the contributions of early feminists?

Jones: No, they have no understanding of history at all. That’s why as a historian my major concern is in giving back the history of ‘70s feminism, for example, which was kind of shoved aside--even by a lot of the younger women who are doing work that’s similar to the stuff in the early ‘70s.

Fiskin: In the mid-’80s, I had a class in which one young woman was talking about how she was going to be in a feminist theme show and another one said, “Why do you want to do that?” And when I opened this discussion up, it turned out that the women in that class had no clue what the conditions had been in the 1970s. Not a clue.

Lumpkin: But they don’t owe anything to anybody.

Rosenthal: It’s like children don’t pay their parents; they pay their debt to the next generation.

Fiskin: But they should know--not morally, but to arm themselves because their assumption was that things are great, things are going to continue to be great, and there’s no problem. If you realize that 10 or 15 years ago you wouldn’t have had a woman teaching you art, it might just make you a little more leery of the situation, that’s all. They should know for self-protection.

Jones: But for accuracy too. One of the things that has inspired me to make the kind of critiques that I’ve made of the ‘80s was this constant, very facile dismissal of thousands of women who had done these complex things.

Lumpkin: I think what contributed to that was the kind of art that was dominating, that was called feminist art but was simply not interesting, didn’t work--I mean failed. To restore that as if it was victimized by a culture with bad values is misleading.

QUESTION: In a way, feminism was defined to the public by bra burning. And feminist art became very defined by the “Dinner Party.” That was the pivotal image for people. But what does it mean to bring back the “Dinner Party”?

Jones: I’m bringing it back because I wanted to reopen the questions that became reified precisely through that piece--the way a lot of arguments after that moment looked back and used that piece as if it was paradigmatic of all ‘70s feminism, which it was not. It’s very hard to make that point because people have preconceptions about that piece. It remains to be seen [if one can] reopen this debate and show the “Dinner Party” without people assuming that you’re celebrating it. I’m hoping from the bottom of my heart that people will walk into the show and understand that this is not just a celebration of the “Dinner Party.” It’s certainly respectful toward that piece as far as it’s held this position, but it’s also a very careful--and I hope somewhat explosive--reopening of our understanding of the last 30 years.

Rosenthal: Also, people have to understand that the piece was about two things, imagery and process. The way it was made was very revolutionary. It was very radical; it had a real strong statement with all these different people working on it in so many different ways.

QUESTION: So, considering all that’s been said here, do you think this a good or a bad moment for feminism?

Lumpkin: Feminism has a function and since it’s been working and the world has changed, I think feminism as a movement can be very proud about that. But it definitely has a long way to go, and feminism in art needs radical reassessment.

Jones: I have written about the popular press version of feminism which I find extremely distressing, this kind of anti-feminists rhetoric that’s gone on in Time and Newsweek. But on another level, there’s a lot of really brilliant writing which is feminist, anti-racist and gay/lesbian-oriented. The best of it really helps us try to understand the complexity of being a person in this culture at this time. So for me, in terms of that kind of work, it’s a really exciting, dynamic moment. In terms of the art that’s being made by women that I would consider feminist, there’s a lot of really fabulous stuff out there.

Fiskin: I don’t want to answer the question for feminism but about women artists. James Joyce said to be an Irish artist you needed silence, cunning and exile. I think to be an artist of any kind, that’s not bad advice for making your art. But for being a woman artist in this culture, I think you need the opposite as well. We need to keep making noise about our position in the culture and in the art world.

Maybe more than younger people, I have a greater sense of the fragility of any position that we’ve reached at all. These statistics that I brought in surprise me in a certain way, but not at all in another way. We have to keep that kind of thing in front of us. Women who are artists need to try to work on that in some way, but not necessarily through our art.

Rosenthal: I want to cry, frankly, when people--particularly women--say, “Oh don’t call me a feminist, I’m not really a feminist.” Where do they think they would be today if it weren’t for feminism and for what went on before them?

As for me, I’ve sort of bloated out from the center of pure feminism into a field where I feel that everything is interconnected, un-hierarchic and interwoven. I think for the first time in my life I am living an art form that is truly feminist, even though the content might not be directly related to women’s issues or feminism. [My company] creates works that are totally improvised but come out of absolutely rigorous discipline, yet explode in the moment of creation.

This is the kind of feminist dynamics we hoped for in a world where indeed every power and every talent and every true wave of creativity has to find its place and weave into the whole. I’m 69 but hey, I’m starting on a whole new life with such enthusiasm and such belief in what my company is doing with young people of all different colors and backgrounds. It feels as if I’ve finally come home, so I just feel a tremendous amount of gratitude to the whole historic process that has happened to women, to the pain that I went through trying to understand and find my way.

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“Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago’s ‘Dinner Party’ in Feminist Art History” opens Wednesday and continues through Aug. 18 at UCLA at the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles. Hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 11 a.m.-7 p.m.; Thursdays, 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; Sundays, 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Closed July 4. Admission: $4.50; free on Thursdays from 6 to 9 p.m. Information: [310] 443-7000.