In celebration of iconic
feminist artist
Judy Chicago’s 75th birthday this year, there will be more
than ten major exhibitions in her honor, taking up over 20,000 square feet of
exhibition space throughout the United States. Chicago is a renowned artist,
educator, author, and activist. Recently described as a “feminist visionary” by
The New
York Times, her life and work has
been dedicated to art and expanding public access to information about women
artists. We sat down in her apartment in New York City to talk about her life’s
work, technology, and the art market today.
Christine Kuan: It’s really amazing to see your early works
and The Dinner Party in person at the Brooklyn Museum, because your work
is in every textbook! How did the idea for that show come about?
Judy Chicago: Well, that was Brooklyn Museum curator Catherine
Morris’s idea. As appreciative as I was of all the attention that
The Dinner
Party brought me, it was also
frustrating. I used to say, I hope that before I die it will become evident
that
The Dinner Party was only one work in a really large body of art.
When “Pacific Standard Time”[Getty Museum’s initiative documenting and
celebrating southern California art from 1945-1980] happened, it began to wedge
open a space for people to look at other aspects of my production. I was very
prominent in “Pacific Standard Time,” in eight museum exhibitions and three
solo shows, and I remember that Catherine Morris and Mary Kershaw, director of
the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, both came to see the shows at the
same time. And they began to talk about doing tandem shows, looking at two
aspects of my career: my L.A. years and my New Mexico years. And because it
happened that that plan was going to take place in 2014, people just kind of
got on the bandwagon when they realized I was going to turn 75 this year.
Before I knew it there’s this whole thing happening all over the country, which
is great because I’m occupying somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 square feet
of exhibition space.
CK: Does this level of
national exposure signal a new level of interest for your work and for women
artists?
JC: Yes, in terms of
visibility, but at an institutional level there’s still very little change.
There’s an artist in L.A. named
Micol Hebron. She is doing this great project that has spread all over the
country. There are young male and female artists going to galleries and
counting the numbers of women and putting the data online. So they feel elated
when they go to a regional gallery or a small gallery and they discover there’s
60% women in the show. Right? But what that disguises is the fact of how little
change has been happening at an institutional level.
The three paths into art
history are major museum solo exhibitions, permanent collections, and
monographs. So in terms of monographs, in the 1970s, 1.5% of art books were
devoted to a single woman artist. In 2014, it’s 2.7%, which is a shockingly
paltry amount. In major museums, women represent only 3% to 5% of permanent
collections. In fact, when I was having my conversation with Jeffrey Deitch in
April, after he saw my
Mana
Contemporary show, he
asked, “Is there work for sale here?” and I said, “Everything’s for sale,
Jeffrey. This is a commercial show.” And I said, “In fact, after the
New York Times article, I wrote to Tim Nye, my dealer, my gallerist, and I
said, ‘Well, do you suppose you can get
Big Blue Pink,’—which is one of
the big
Flesh Gardens in the Brooklyn Museum show—‘into the Museum of
Modern Art now?’” And Jeffrey looked at me. And I said, “I’m not in the MoMA,
the Whitney, the Met, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of
Art, Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou…”
CK: Are you kidding? I’m shocked.
JC: I know, at the
Brooklyn Artists Ball, I’m telling you that several young artists got
down on their hands and knees in front of me. I’m like, “GET UP!! FOR GOD’S
SAKE!!” It was the awe factor, artists saying, “Thank you so much,” “You’ve
inspired me,” “Without you, I couldn’t be working.” Ever since, I’ve been
witnessing the fact of my impact.
CK: Can you talk a bit
about your early works in the show, such as the Dry Ice Environment and your works with
fireworks? Everyone talks about Cai Guo-Qiang’s radical use of fireworks, but you were doing
it in the 1970s. It’s very fascinating to me that these early works are large
scale, outdoor, and public, but are not recognized as important aspects of your
oeuvre. JC: Right, I started in
1968 and there’s a lot of my work that remained unknown for a long time. For
example, when “Pacific Standard Time” opened, we ran into
Ed Ruscha and
John Baldessari, whom of course I’ve known forever from L.A.,
and they said, “Oh, Judy! We were just talking to
Richard Prince, and we asked him if he knew your
Car Hoods.
And he said no. And we said, ‘Eat your heart out!’” And then somebody at the
Mana show said, “Gee, wouldn’t it be cool to have a show of Judy’s
Car Hoods
and Richard Prince’s
Car Hoods?” One of the reasons that
Donald [Woodman] and I spent ten years working really hard on an
estate plan and trying to figure out what to do with our work was because I
knew that other than
The Dinner Party, the rest of my body of work could
be completely erased, because it’s not in all these major collections. It was
of great concern to me.
CK: So many people today
don’t know the work of women artists, and so many kids that I’ve taught have
said they are not “feminists.” What are your thoughts about this new
anti-feminism?
JC: I talk about this in my
recent book
Institutional
Time: A Critique of Studio Art Education. When women were first allowed into university
education, no thought was given at all to the fact that they were being
introduced to an entirely male-centered curriculum. This is true of art history
classes, too. There are now add-on courses: add-on ethnic studies, women’s
studies. But there has not been a transformation of the curriculum so that
everybody—male and female—studies what men and women did, taught, thought, and
created. I’ve been hearing this from countless young women who have interviewed
me, who have consciousness but had to seek it out. The ones who went to
CalArts had to find in the archives the feminist art
program that had been excised from CalArts’ institutional memory.
Audrey Chan is a young Asian American performance artist in
Los Angeles who, in 2007, with a group of other people—you know the feminist
year when there were all those shows?—organized a conference. She really wanted
me to come. She had such a deep need to connect intergenerationally with me,
she started performing as me. And she did this fabulous video called
How I
became a feminist artist without living through the ’70s. Because
institutions are not facilitating these connections, young women are having to
do it all themselves. What I set out to do was to try and change that. That’s
why I started the feminist art programs, that’s why I did
The Dinner Party.
I set out to try and make it possible for young women not to have to invent
their own role models.
CK: What do you think of
the art world today compared to when you started out?
JC: I come from a time when
nobody thought they were going to make a lot of money being an artist. The idea
was to be taken seriously as an artist and, for me, to make a contribution as
an artist. Things have changed so much. For so many artists today, either the
original strong impulses of their work gets watered down as they get absorbed
into the arts system, or they start producing work because they have the
support of the large galleries, which are giving them lots of money, so they
start producing sort of knock-offs of earlier work in new materials, in
expensive materials. And those original impulses seem to disappear and those
new works seem to be just money-driven—they are just making another money-driven
object. I think it’s very difficult to stand up to the marketplace. I mean, in
a certain, bizarre way, because I’ve been excluded from it, I’ve benefitted
from it; it’s allowed me to pursue my own vision. For me, art has to have real
substantive meaning.
CK: Artsy is doing
something radical in some sense by combining art education and collecting on
the same platform. What are your thoughts on digital technology and education?
JC: In 2001, Karen
Keifer-Boyd, who is a professor of art education and women’s studies at Penn
State, wanted to know if I thought my teaching methods could be adapted to
online. And I said, “Absolutely not.” Live and learn. Fast-forward to 2014, my
art education archives are now at
Penn State—The Dinner Party K-12 curriculum is online there in perpetuity
and it’s being made available all over the world. Penn State is in the process
of establishing an online dialogue portal as part of my art education archive
to facilitate an international dialogue about the future of art education,
which is what I call for in
Institutional Time.
CK: What do you hope the
next generation will come to understand about your work?
JC: My goals have been to
make a contribution to art history, and to help transform the changes in
consciousness that have happened in the last 30 to 40 years around race,
gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, into real institutional change that will
allow everyone in the future to have access to the diversity of the human
spirit as it’s been expressed in art. I want to see that translated into our
institutions—our museums and universities. It’s a big challenge for the next
generation, but that is the challenge. And to not get sidetracked by
money, fame, and celebrity, and to think that that substitutes for meaning,
connection, and contributions. Because as hard as my life has been and is, I
would not have lived a different life.
Interview conducted in New York
City on April 18, 2014.
Photo: Judy Chicago at the
Brooklyn Museum, photo by Donald Woodman