Word: feminist
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Most people who remember the glory days of feminism in the 1970s think first of the consciousness-raising sessions, of Betty Friedan and Kate Millett and of Jane Fonda in a shag-helmet haircut. But if you spend much time in galleries and museums, you know that feminist ideas roared through the art world too, at a time when it was even more of a boy's club than it is today. How much more? Until 1986, H.W. Janson's History of Art, the standard college text, did not include a single woman among the 2,300 artists mentioned...
...Nudes with a woman's point of view, works that use household arts like weaving, videos and photographs that ask what gender is all about in the first place--there's plenty of that around now, some of it even made by men, all of it indebted to the feminist explosion of three decades...
Suddenly, this has become the year to look back on all that and take stock of the ways feminist ideas have entered the bloodstream of art for good. Not only are there big, boisterous exhibitions in Los Angeles and New York City, but on March 23 feminist art's most resolute artifact, The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago, goes on permanent display in a specially constructed gallery within the new Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. Say what you will about it, that it's middlebrow, elementary and literal-minded (which...
Chicago, who was born Judy Cohen in 1939, started out making big minimalist sculptures and hard-edged abstract paintings, some of them quite good. But in the early '70s, under the influence of feminist thinking about personal experience, she took a turn into work that was confessional, therapeutic and maudlin. In The Rejection Quintet from 1974, color drawings similar to the vaginal emblems she would use for The Dinner Party are combined with hand-lettered texts describing various personal humiliations. The drawing is adequate, the sentimentality nothing short of Victorian...
...baser instincts of its readership. To justify such coverage, a scant amount of moral commentary will be sprinkled throughout, as journalists hypocritically condemn the very naughty behavior that they describe in lurid, exploitative detail. Ultimately, these reports will lampoon the undergraduate body at Wellesley as part militant lesbian feminist, part promiscuous nymphet...